I have always loved fiction books that provide a social commentary on the values and standards of the time they are set in and illustrate the ways in which these can be rebelled against. Scarlett O’Hara, Lizzie Bennet, Jo March, Cora Seaborne; these heroines fought against the restrictive bonds of their class and sex to forge their own path.
Today, we live by the assumption that women can do, say and act as they please (within certain restrictions of common decency). However, mobile phones have provided the ability for everyone to be a moral policeman and social media is the platform used to allow society to pass judgment.
Therefore, it can be argued that women’s’ freedom to act and think for themselves is being steadily eroded by social media shaming and trolling, jeopardising the gains we have made in the past 40 years.
The definition of shame
Shame can be defined as the emotion we feel when we have violated group standards. Shame is utilised by all societies to enforce or seek to enforce desired behaviors and support social hierarchies, both formal and informal. By publically criticising, ostracising and/or punishing those who flout societies code of conduct, shame provides an effective tool for keeping public order. And it is often far more effective than the legal system.
Eric Posner points out in his excellent article, A Terrible Shame :
“On the one hand, shaming is the very antithesis of the law. The basic principle of due process holds that a person has a right to contest charges or claims against him to an impartial tribunal before the government may inflict a sanction on him. By contrast, shaming occurs in the absence of due process. While it is triggered by a perceived act of wrongdoing, no one takes responsibility for establishing what happened. Instead, others react, often instinctively and harshly, and often to emphasize their own virtue through their condemnation of someone else’s vice. The upshot is a reaction that looks a lot like mob rule. That is why people can easily be shamed even though they did nothing wrong or not be shamed even though they did do something wrong. It also explains why, as Ronson documents, people are often punished in a way that does not reflect the severity of their conduct. Law displaced shaming because such a chaotic system can do as much harm as good“.
How women were publically shamed in the past
Medieval people had a gift for creating maximum pain and humiliation for lawbreakers and societal renegades. Take the infamous ‘ducking stool’. Used to teach harlots, nags, and loud-mouths some humility, it was essentially a waterside see-saw with a dangling chair. It would be loaded up with women who would be repeatedly dunked in the filthy, excrement-filled water, in front of a jeering crowd (the London Evening Post reported a crowd of 2,000-3,000 watching a ducking in Kingston, Surrey, in 1745.) Definitely, one way to discourage females from having an opinion or imploring their husbands for the fiftieth time to “please change the floor rushes”.
Another charming contraption used to keep women in their place was the Scolds Bridle. Hideously painful when fitted, it was used to punish any wife who dared to question or ‘get lippy’ to her man. According to Dr Matthew Green:
“Also known as a brank, it [the Scold’s Bridle] consists of an iron cage that fitted over the whole head, muzzling the wearer with a nasty rectangular plate that thrust into her mouth, stilling her tongue. In a particularly grizzly touch, the gag was sometimes covered in sharp spikes so it bled the tongue – or, if the victim persisted in talking, lacerated it. No wonder it served as much as an instrument of terror as a punitive device, hanging outside houses in various London marketplaces as a warning to be meek and submissive, as the Bible taught”.
Although such gruesome punishments had faded out by the 19th century, Victorians still ostracised and punished “fallen women”. Those who had sex outside of marriage or illegitimate children were portrayed negatively in art and novels, providing Victorian moralists a tool to prevent members of the “fairer sex” from striking a path separate from social convention. Take Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s, Jude the Obscure. She is introduced in the novel as free-thinking, independent and unconventional. However, she pays the ultimate price for failing to conform with Victorian values. Her children die, killed at the hand of Jude’s son, “Done because we are too menny [sic]”, in reference to his father’s explanation as to why the family was unable to find lodgings.
Following the women’s movement of the 1970s, there is an assumption that women have the freedom to act as they like; live with a man (or woman) before marriage, have many sexual partners, drink in public and wear what they like. And to an extent this was true. When I was a teenager and young women in the 1990s – early 2000s, promiscuous women were indeed called ‘sluts’ and ‘whores’, but such comments were confined to their immediate social group and community. Exceptions were rare and highly publicised, such as the case of Monica Lewinsky.
Social media and mobile technology changed this. Now any woman can become Monica and evidence of her ‘crime’ is preserved forever.
Stranger shaming, body shaming and trolling
In 2014, a Facebook page called ‘Women Who Eat On Tubes’ came to the attention of the media. Strangers photograph women eating on the tube and post it on the social media platform. The page currently has 33,000 members. The women have no idea they are being photographed. The founder of the original Facebook group defended the page, stating it was an “observational artistic study of human behaviour”. If this was the case, then surely the page would have been named “People who Eat on Tubes” and included males as well as females.
It is crucial to point out that males are not exempt from social media shaming. In 2017, artist, Hetty Douglas made the headlines and received enormous backlash when she uploaded a photo to her Instagram of tradesmen in tracksuits in a McDonald’s queue, with the caption: ‘These guys look like they got 1 GCSE’.
Body shaming is also causing concern amongst mental health experts. A majority of the targets are women and the issue affects everyone from celebrities to high school students. And last year, the BBC reported that relentless abuse from online trolls was responsible for putting some women off entering politics
The solution?
Unfortunately, using shame to control women’s behaviour has been part and parcel of society since time immemorial. Therefore, appealing to the better angels of our nature is unlikely to offer much of a solution. The only people who do have the power to bring about any real change are the social media bosses. However, their behaviour over the past 10 years has made it clear that they are reluctant to restrict the activities of users too much, lest they move onto another platform.
Therefore, the only chance we have is to educate the next generation on the importance of being kind, inclusive and having respect for everyone, regardless of their gender, appearance, personality or lifestyle preferences. And we must also teach them that what goes online lasts forever. If you criticise or shame a person on social media, your comment is never erased, and can follow a person round for the rest of their lives, affecting their personal and professional opportunities. We need to ensure our children are better at asking themselves, “how would I feel if that was me?” – before they hit upload or send.
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