Shame

My second post I hope to dedicate to the concept of Shame.... and exploring rather than debating the notions of this feeling. Can I call it a feeling?


I began to think of SHAME, mainly because of two separate conversations I had in the last week with some friends as well as Goggler's thought provoking posts and the article she posted about SATC. Moreover Shame, is one of my favourite Rushdie books, that I've read about 3 times justin the last academic year :$


What exactly is Shame?? I cannot provide an OED definition as my Athens username and password has now expired, please if you are still a student, can you do a search for me on http://dictionary.oed.com! It should come up with several definitions...I do have some web definitions here: shame  (shm)

n.

1.

a. A painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace.

b. Capacity for such a feeling: Have you no shame?

2. One that brings dishonor, disgrace, or condemnation.

3. A condition of disgrace or dishonor; ignominy.

4. A great disappointment.

tr.v. shamed, sham·ing, shames

1. To cause to feel shame; put to shame.

2. To bring dishonor or disgrace on.

3. To disgrace by surpassing.

4. To force by making ashamed: He was shamed into making an apology.

Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/shame

When I think of shame I think of that burning feeling of guilt which manifests itself as bright red cheeks and makes your stomach do somersaults because you know you have done something bad. Or know that you are going to get in trouble for doing something bad (often I find my conscience only kicks in when I'm about to get found out! Perhaps this is why Rushdie writes: "Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.")
Rushdie depicted Shame most memorably in the character of Sufiya Zinobia who would burn bright red from shame for all the other characters who lacked shame, were shameless:
"Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence."

Let's be specific. Rushdie when writing Shame not only referred to Pakistan and its history, but the microcosm of violence in households, towards familieis, towards women, but also towards sexuality. And it is the latter I am concerned with.

Can any good come of shame? Is there an innately built sense of shame or is it all a case of culture? Again I quote Rushdie, who believes shame has no counterpart in the English language and feels he has to speak it in his cultural voice:
"This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners' unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write and so for ever alter what is written... "Sharam, that's the word. For which this paltry 'shame' is a whole inadequate translation. Three letters, shin rè mìm (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. It is not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar Khayyam to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts."

I can't help but notice SHARAM has the word HARAM in it....meaning forbidden, and unlawful within Islam. Could it be that to do things which are HARAM perpetuates shame, sharam?
Clearly, in a diverse, polytheistic and atheist society different people have different definitions of shame. With regards specifically to sexuality, can a hippy attitude to sex (free love for all) ever perpetuate shame? Is there any purpose to shame?


One of the two conversations I recently had with a good friend, revealed to me my shortcomings. The friend stated an Arabic proverb to me which loosely translated as 'that which happens between two people behind closed doors, should stay in that room with them.' That is to say, confessionals and gossip columns and girly talk which leaves very little to the imagination (which I openly admit I engage in and initiate) is shameless, in the eyes of my friend. To have no shame, is equatable to being a loose woman, in my friend's opinion. Talk about your partner(s) and what you did/do with your partner(s) means you have lost the ability to filter out information and images that are in your brain and enter into everyday table conversation..... Perhaps?


Once again, I turn to Rushdie to give the gift of language to my thoughts, from his 'East,West' short stories he cannot choose between his Eastern cultural influences and his Western 'education' :  

"But I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose.

I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you, Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose. "

In a similar vein, I feel the tug of my Orthodox upbringing agreeing with the Arabic proverb....Yet, surely to be quiet and to not educate your friends, and children about the joys of the bedroom is to be a prude? LOL!

To not want to educate women? It must therefore be that SHAME (with referene to sex) is simply a cultural construct seeking to oppress women? NO! Or is it YES?!

When I was about 12 years old, I read a book called 'Chandra' about an Indian girl and her arranged marriage at the age of 11 to a boy of 16. Her husband dies before they have a chance to consummate the marriage and she is slandered as a devil girl by her inlaws, and the book follows the plight of the girl and the violent beatings she took before she could escape to freedom. For the first time that I can remember, I felt indignation burn inside me for this fictional character. I felt her beatings burn on my skin, and I felt that she should have been stronger, she should have felt NO SHAME. She only felt shame, because she believed she was a devil and had caused her husband's death too! Hence shame cannot be something innate, it must be a construct of culture?

Shame does not have a truth factor to it, shame is most often felt by those who have done no wrong. Most often rape victims, stay silent because they feel shame encompassing their whole body and do not wish to taint their good name, or their families'.....This type of shame is one which is not inflicted on oneself but breeds dishonour and disgrace for others or for oneself. It is this type of shame which is need of education and modification.

But the shame which one brings upon oneself....Can we really talk of shame in an epoch of decadence? The cultural stereotypes that films like SATC purport suggest that the West is free, but the East is restricted, oppressed. Yet when the East looks on the West they see a shameless people, advocating immoral behaviour.....the West see an unecessarily shame filled location. However the world is not so black and white.....But the LAW of each respective country perhaps is more binary....thus what happens when the shameless enter into a country where shame abounds? Like the sex trials of Vince Acors who had sex on a beach in Dubai, and broke the laws of "public indecency and having unmarried sex." I guess this is what SATC was directly alluding to. 

The hypocrisy associated with the UAE however is not unique to the Eastern world....And by the hypocrisy I mean the immense sex traffic that occurs in Dubai 'the middle Eastern flesh capital' but perhaps all over the world. As one writer has written:  Dubai is "a nation that is built upon the very dichotomy that is prostitution: necessary but unwanted; illegal but desired!" (but this is not a new attitude to prostitution, after all even Augustine of Hippo writing in 4th c AD stated that prostitution is necessary in a society, as there will be men that will always will request it)

http://sexual-abuse.suite101.com/article.cfm/prostitution_in_dubai

My theory is that shame and shamelessness is not something we can geographically pinpoint and slander as emancipation/education and/or illiteracy. The hypocrisy behind shame and shamelessness is something which is integral to each individual, and the battle of ropes between East and West, that Rushdie talks of ....is simply the internal moral battle which occurs on a daily basis....

Now what of men, can men feel shame? Is it not a British ideal that ‘a gentleman will never kiss and tell’ about his adventures with ms anonymous lady the night before? Or is that a unisex trope for all Brits? Or is it something that is universal for all men? They simply don’t diverge into details, where as ladies are more than comfortable to tell their friends minute details (NO PUN intended?)