Book SummarySo You've Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Journalist and author Jon Ronson first became interested in the modern resurgence of public shaming after someone used his name and photo to create a Twitter spambot. Ronson was ashamed of what the bot tweeted—it didn’t accurately represent his identity—and started a public shaming campaign to get the bot taken down. It worked.

Intrigued by the process, Ronson researched public shaming, interviewed its victims, and sought out shame-avoidance and recovery strategies.

First, we’ll look at some basics of shame. Then, we’ll look at some strategies for managing the fallout when you become a victim of a public shaming.

What Is Shame?

According to psychiatrist James Gilligan, shame isn’t a feeling, it’s an absence of feeling. Initially, shame might feel like pain, but long-term, it becomes more like numbness or deadness.

In modern times, the things people are most ashamed of tend to be personal secrets that aren’t objectively very scandalous or that would seem unimportant to others. For example, Melissa’s salary is $550,000 a year and she’s ashamed that she makes so much, and Jim is ashamed that he smokes an ounce of marijuana every three weeks. When they both revealed these secrets at an honesty workshop, none of the other participants cared.

However, there are some things that society generally labels as shameful. For men, this includes exercising white privilege, committing a professional faux pas like plagiarism, or losing their jobs and being unemployed. Women are shamed for the same things as men and additionally for sex scandals. (Sex scandals used to be shameful for men back in the 1800s and 1900s, but these days, people consider other transgressions worse.)

• For example, when the client list of Alexis Wright’s one-woman brothel was released, it contained the names of sixty-eight men and one woman. The men faced consequences—for example, pastor James Andrew Ferreira was fired and his wife left him—but didn’t experience shaming. The woman, on the other hand, did—even the men who had been involved in the scandal made jokes about her.

Uses of Shame: Punishment and Control

Because shame is so uncomfortable, it’s been used as a punishment and control mechanism throughout history and is making a comeback today.

Historical Punishment

Historical public humiliation consisted of whippings in the town square, locking people in the stocks for hours, public executions, and so on. Humiliation was used to punish criminals in the UK and the US until the 1830s when it was deemed too brutal. US founding father Benjamin Rush wrote that public shaming was worse than death, and people who were sentenced to public humiliation such as whippings found the shaming worse than the physical pain. Public shaming was so damaging because it destroyed people’s self-respect to the point that they felt they could never reform.

Today’s Punishment

Today’s public humiliation tends to take place on social media. Social media shamings differ from older forms of public punishment because they’re democratic, anonymous, and lawless. Anyone can choose a target, and unlike a formal justice system where the accused has rights, online, no one has any rights. People can be punished without evidence and there’s no time limit on the punishment.

Some people argue that online shaming is just commentary because it can’t hand down “real” punishment, but as we’ve learned, making people feel ashamed is one of the worst punishments out there.

Control

The use of shame as a control method, unlike as punishment, was never outlawed, and people still use shame to control and manipulate people:

• Example #1: Death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith comes up with an obscure question that an expert can’t possibly know the answer to. Experts can’t admit they don’t know, because being an expert by nature requires them to be respected and knowledgeable. So they try to address the question and eventually end up looking stupid and feeling ashamed. This discourages people from challenging him and helps his clients.
• Example #2: Police stops are a way of controlling a space. Being stopped and frisked by police is shameful, even when you’re innocent, because everyone else on the street who witnesses the police talking to you assumes you’ve done something wrong. This threat of shame encourages people to leave areas with high police presence and go elsewhere.

Consequences of Shame: Reform, Breakdown, and Violence

We’ve established that shame is brutal and dehumanizing—but does it work? In some cases, yes.

Reform

Public shaming can be a force for a good—the public can call out previously inaccessible people and companies for objectively despicable behavior. Shaming can force change that would be time-consuming or impossible to win through the justice system. It can also be a successful motivator for reform when used within the justice system.

• Example #1: After the death of gay singer Stephen Gately, Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote that civil partnerships could never have happily-ever-afters. The public was so angry that Nestlé and Marks & Spencer pulled their advertising from the Daily Mail’s website and the paper lost money.
• Example #2: Judge Ted Poe, who’s famous for assigning embarrassing punishments, sentenced Mike Hubacek, who’d killed two people while driving drunk, to a variety of shame-inducing punishments. These included carrying a sign that said he’d killed people driving drunk while walking in front of bars and schools. He had to do this once a month for ten years. While doing all of his punishments, Hubacek found a sense of purpose—he could warn others not to drive drunk. He now speaks at schools and owns a halfway house. He’s very grateful to Poe.

Breakdown and Violence

Public shaming can also destroy people. First, shaming is very painful, and people who are shamed online can lose their...

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Part 1: Shame Backgrounder | Chapter 1: What Is Shame?

Journalist and author Jon Ronson first became interested in the modern resurgence of public shaming after someone used his name and photo to create a Twitter spambot. Ronson was ashamed of what the bot tweeted—it didn’t accurately represent his identity—and started a public shaming campaign to get the bot taken down.

Now intrigued by the topic of shame from both the perspective of the victim and the shamer, Ronson decided to write a book about it. He spent the next three years researching public shaming, interviewing its victims, and seeking out shame-avoidance and recovery strategies.

In Part 1 of this summary, we’ll look at some basics of shame as an emotion and form of public punishment. In Part 2, we’ll look at some strategies for managing the fallout when public shaming does happen.

(Shortform note: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was originally written in fifteen chapters. We’ve reorganized the information for clarity and concision.)

Defining Shame

According to psychiatrist James Gilligan, shame isn’t a feeling, it’s an absence of feeling. Initially, shame might feel like pain, but long-term, it becomes more like numbness or deadness.

In this chapter,...

Shortform Exercise: What Do You Find Shameful?

Most people are most ashamed of personal things that the average person wouldn’t find that scandalous.

Think back to a time you felt shame. What caused it?

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Chapter 2: Employing Shame to Punish and Control

In the previous chapter, we learned that shame is a powerful, painful absence of emotion that people want to avoid—which makes it a potential technique for punishing or controlling people. In this chapter, we’ll look at how shame has been used to these ends over the last 200 years.

A History of Public Punishment

Public humiliation—whippings in the town square, locking people in the stocks for hours, public executions, and so on—was used to punish criminals in the UK and the US until the 1830s.

• Example #1: If you published “false news” (see Jonah Lehrer’s story in Chapter 4), you would be subject to one of the following: a fine, less than four hours in the stocks, or less than 40 lashings. If you were whipped, newspapers would have reported on the event, going into detail about how much you squirmed.
• Example #2: If you “defiled the marriage bed” (see Max Mosley’s story in Chapter 6), you would be subject to a public whipping with no limitation on lashes and sent to do hard labor for at least a year. A second offense would put you in prison for life.

People were terrified of the shaming element of the punishment. For example, in 1742, a woman was caught cheating...

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Chapter 3: What Motivates Public Shaming?

If public shaming is so terrible, why do people participate in it? Scientists and observers have some ideas, but they don’t really know. They do know that one of the most popular theories—that people lose their minds when part of a crowd (known as contagion, group madness, or deindividuation)—has little scientific merit.

First, we’ll look at why group madness probably isn’t the explanation. Then, we’ll look at some other thoughts on what motivates public shaming.

Why Group Madness Isn’t the Explanation

Group madness is the idea that when in a crowd, people lose their individuality and do things they never would have considered on their own, such as destroy property. It’s not a very robust theory because the inventor made it up to serve his own ends, the most famous experiment proving its existence used questionable methodology, and there’s plenty of evidence that conflicts with the theory, such as the events of recent riots.

The Inventor: Gustave LeBon

Group madness was invented in the nineteenth century by Frenchman Gustave LeBon. Crowds were of particular interest in France at the time because the elite was worried about uprisings against them....

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on the Consequences of Public Shaming

Many people aren’t aware of the consequences of public shaming.

Describe a time you shamed someone, either on social media, in real life, or through another medium.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Part 2: Responding to Shamings | Chapter 4: Withdraw and Wait

In Part 1, we learned how shame works and how it’s used for punishment. In Part 2, we’ll look at how to respond and recover from public shamings. (None of the approaches restore the victim’s life to what it was like before the shaming, and many of the solutions are fragile.)

Approach #1: Withdraw and Wait

Withdrawing includes shutting down social media accounts, refusing to give interviews, avoiding public places, and lying low until things blow over. This is a popular approach, though it doesn’t work particularly well—sometimes the shaming reincarnates when the shamee tries to return, and the shamee has to endure feelings of isolation while they’re withdrawing from public life.

Extended Example #1: Johah Lehrer

On July 30, 2012, journalist Michael C. Moynihan broke the news that bestselling author Jonah Lehrer had made up some of the Bob Dylan quotes that appeared in his most recent book, Imagine. In response, Lehrer was publicly shamed.

Ronson interviewed Moynihan and Lehrer to find out how the events affected both of them. Initially, Ronson thought this case would set a positive precedent for future public shamings—powerful, fraudulent people who did...

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Chapter 5: Approach #2—Write a New Narrative

The second approach you can take when suffering a shaming is to manipulate narratives. Before a public shaming, the victim has a rich and complex life story. During the shaming, the public reduces the victim’s identity to revolve entirely around their transgression. Instead of holding on to your life story, create a private third narrative that explains the reasoning behind the transgression to reduce personal feelings of shame.

Extended Example: Mike Daisey

Like Jonah Lehrer, monologue writer and performer Mike Daisey committed literary fraud. He invented details in a non-fiction monologue about working conditions in Apple factories that he performed on the podcast This American Life, among other venues.

Also like Lehrer, he was exposed by a journalist and publicly shamed, but instead of withdrawing, he created a new narrative.

The Transgression: Fictionalizing a Monologue

In 2010, Daisey wrote a monologue about Apple factory workers he’d met in Shenzhen, China, and their terrible working conditions. In the monologue, Daisey spoke about n-hexane, an iPhone screen cleaner that evaporates faster than alcohol but is toxic. People he met who were exposed to...

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Chapter 6: Approach #3—Become Emotionally Invulnerable to Shame

The third approach you can take when suffering a shaming is to become emotionally invulnerable to shame: In other words, refuse to let shame affect you. Ronson spoke to porn stars about how to become invulnerable to shame—naked photos and videos of porn stars in all sorts of compromising positions are all over the internet, which most people would find mortifying.

To find out how porn stars manage shame, Ronson interviewed Princess Donna Dolore of Kink.com studios. Dolore felt a lot of shame when she was growing up. At one point, she realized that if she shared the things that embarrassed her, they were no longer embarrassing or shameful. This is actually how she comes up with her porn scenarios—she brainstorms humiliating scenarios alone and then acts them out with others to rob the scenarios of their shaming power.

Dolore helps other people get over their sexual shame in a similar way. For example, she organized a public disgrace scene in a porn video for actor Jody Taylor. In the taped scene, Dolore unexpectedly dragged Taylor into a bar, stripped her, and attached live electrodes to her genitals. The bar patrons humiliated Taylor by groping her (if they washed...

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Chapter 7: Approach #4—Attend a Radical Honesty Workshop

The next approach to coping with shame is to be radically honest and tell everyone exactly what you’re thinking at all times. For example, if you want to sleep with your wife’s sister, you should tell both your wife and her sister this. You can learn how to break news like this, or spill any of your secrets, by attending a Radical Honesty workshop. Psychotherapist Brad Blanton, who runs such workshops, believes shame thrives in secret—if you’re constantly worrying about what other people or you’re worried about being exposed, that’s when you feel shame.

Ronson attended one...

So You've Been Publicly Shamed Summary Chapter 8: Approach #5—Remove Your Story From the Internet

The final approach to being publicly shamed is to remove evidence of the shaming from the internet so that it doesn’t reappear when applying for new jobs or meeting new people. Ronson covers two ways to do this:

Option #1: Apply for the Right to Be Forgotten

In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that if an online text about someone was “inadequate, irrelevant...or excessive,” people could request that Google deindex the article or blog from its European sites. This means that, in theory, you could ask Google to remove shameful information about you from its search indexes.

While this ruling did result in a lot of material being deindexed—within three months, 70,000 people made requests—it also brought some of the things that people wanted buried back into the spotlight. As Google met requests, it sent automatic notices to media outlets letting them know their articles had been deindexed, which created resistance to the ruling. People started bringing up old stories again so they couldn’t be forgotten.

Option #2: Hire a Reputation Management Company

**Reputation management companies aim to hide shameful or damaging information about people by creating...

Shortform Exercise: Respond to Being Shamed

There are five approaches to responding to being publicly shamed.

Imagine someone found one of your old social media posts, misinterpreted it, shared it widely, and you’re now the victim of a public shaming campaign. What’s your immediate response? (For example, do you apologize, withdraw, or go online and defend yourself?)