The word “shaming” in online research

For my first blog post on Shame and Shaming in the 21s Century, I would like to write about the nature of doing online research on this subject. For the past several years, I have been researching the subjects of shame and shaming. Occasionally, I put these two words (shame” and “shaming”) into the Google search engine to see what the latest is in how people are thinking about these subjects. More often than not, the first results from such a search reflect something from a phenomena that has been nicknamed “hastag activism”. Some people call this “Slacktivism” because all it involves is often clicking “like” for some idea that people are discssuing on social media.

Hashtag shaming is a subset of hashtag activism. The idea is to rally around a cause, start a movement, develop an online presence, and let everyone involved in the movement communicate through social media, typically Twitter. To get the very latest with my Google trick, I put the word “shaming” in the search field, then toggle on “Tools” and select “past 24 hours”. That way the results I know to be the absolute most current. Today, for instance, the 24-hour results for “shaming” were stories about fat shaming, mommy shaming, lunch shaming and body shaming — body shaming being somewhat synonymous with fat shaming.

Fat shaming is an excellent example of how personal resentment, expressed online and shared by others, can burgeon into a movement. Some people express strong beliefs that awareness of fat shaming, known widely as the “body positivity movement” has helped many people band together to influence how fat is regarded in popular culture. The body positivity movement also resonates widely in circles interested in personal identity and intersectionality.

“Fat acceptance” implies that we should no longer evaluate others according to their weight. Others feel differently, including many medical practitioners, who point out that fat is unhealthy, leads to heart disease, diabetes and a host of other very serious and life-threatening ailments. The body positivity movement has thereby won the distinction of being one of the very scarce social causes that flies directly in the face of widely-acknowledged medical fact – that is, that most preventable deaths in the United States and elsewhere occur due to complications arising from excess fat.

On one of my search results (third page) was a story about cultural differences in the “body positivity” movement. The story’s byline read:

––What’s the healthiest approach: making people feel comfortable about their obesity … or fat-shaming our way to more healthy lifestyles?

It is a theme oft-repeated. Opponents of the fat shaming movement are quick to point out the enormous health-consequences of obesity. Besides being unattractive in the eyes of many people — perhaps the majority, obesity precludes participating in many social activities that require physical fitness. It has been shown to effect one’s career prospects, not to mention happiness in relationships. Weighing the evidence, it seems that judging obesity negatively has a firm foundation in common sense. Does it make sense to try to change the public perception of fat to something positive?

Before I go any further in examining this question, let me clarify what is at stake from the viewpoint of a shame researcher, so for the moment, let’s put aside who should feel ashamed. Here are the parameters of the fat shaming issue, as I see them:

a. People who feel fat are angry and resentful of being made to feel ashamed about their body.

b. Body Positivity activists wish to displace that shame – that is, to make people who shame fat people feel ashamed themselves, for hurting other people’s feelings.

c. By turning the tables, and shaming the shamers, everyone can feel positive about their body by prevening anyone from thinking, feeling or speaking negatively about excess fat.

Shame today is an often complicated subject. To give you an idea, here are a few more thoughts to be weighed:

–Fat shaming is an extremely painful reality in the daily lives of millions of people.

–For someone struggling with an eating disorder, an offhanded comment can trigger a cataclysmic result. Anorexics, for instance, can suffer relapses into self-destructive behavior by simply overhearing an off-handed comment concerning wieght or appearance

–In competition with the two above realities, if we, as a society, let our weakest members determine what can be said and not said, then we are giving an enormous amount of power to set the course of social custom to our most enfeebled, and hence proceed with our priority to protect them rather than other priorities, such as public health, or freedom of speech.

I will unpack these three ideas in turn:

1. Fat shaming is very painful for some people. There are millions of people that have struggled in vain for years to lose weight but can’t. The fact that modern society is in many ways set up to make it extremely hard to lose weight has been attested to by many books. (cite).

One very obvious advantage that any shaming movement can have is strength in numbers. This is certainly one of the fat shaming movement’s strengths. There are lots of overweight people that resent being judged by their appearance. The fact that many people feel this way and have a vehicle in which they can participate collectively make for a powerful coalition, even in light of powerful arguments against fat acceptance (such as public health).

2. It is no joke that people struggling with eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia nervosa can be triggered by offhand comments. Among advocates for this line of thinking are those who believe that any talk about body type, food, or virtually anything regarding personal appearance should be seriously censured, if not outlawed. To do so, however, would mean curtailing the way we speak to each other in a manner in which would leave many people “walking on eggshells” throughout most of their daily interactions.

This discussion dovetails with the “microaggressions” movement which seeks to curtail a great deal of what people say that might be deemed offensive or unwanted to many people, mostly revolving around identity and “intersectionality”. The fact acceptance movement is, unsurprisingly, seeking inclusion as one of the recognized “intersections” that oppressed people operate in. So, for example, an overweight, African American Woman would have three intersections in which they experience oppression: their race, their gender, and their body type.

Intersectionality, so the thinking goes, suggests that those with the most intersections face the most oppression and therefore require the most deference and protection. This deference is best expressed as what can be said and not said in their presence for fear of belitting, or otherwise promoting their ongoing oppression.

3. Finally This brings us to point number three, about setting priorities.  We must acknowledge that public attitudes towards excess weight cause excruciating pain for many people, and that indeed, there are some who can experience great personal harm through offhanded comments, even where no possible offense was intended.

We must also acknowledge that with the internet, it is now possible to inspire public action to the extent that grassroots campaigning can lead not only to the curtailing of how people speak in public, but for the enacting of new laws, as well. For example, due to a new law, it is now illegal in France for a model to work professionally without a medical certificate attesting to good health from a physician.A benchmark body mass index (BMI) of less than 18.5 will be the typical boundary to suggest a model is underweight.

Perhaps this is justified. However, it brings up an important question. With the internet, it is now possible for those that speak the loudest to be the most influential. Typically, voices deemed by many to have been underrepresented in the past are often the ones who win the shouting matches. But is this the way we want to set our common practices? By listenig to whoever has the most tweets in their favor?

This question is especially relevant to a discussion of shame because shame is overwhelmingly the weapon of choice online, and increasingly in many bricks and mortar sites like our workplaces and schools.

Yes, it is true, weight issues are very painful to an increasing number of people in an increasingly overweight population. And yes, it is also true that those suffering from eating disorders can have their symptoms dangerously triggered by offhanded comments, a fact which advocates for greater public awareness about how seemingly innocuous comments involving personal appearance can effect some people. The question becomes whether it is then appropriate to alter, through legal means or public sanctions, the way people communicate? Short of laws banning what is now free speech, the only way to do this is through the self-conscious emotions – namely shame.

The irony is, most of the “hashtag shaming” movements for which fat shaming is the frontrunner do not leave off shaming: overwhelmingly what they attempt to do is to displace the shame to another recipient. In effect, what the fat acceptance lobby wants is to displace the shame that overweight people feel and place it on the shoulders of anyone who should speak or even think of fat as being a valid criteria on which to judge someone.

The result is sure to be that many people will remain silent, keeping their thoughts and opinions to themselves. It will not change the way people feel about fatness, and herein lies the problem. While such a movement aims, perhaps with the best intentions, to promote fat acceptance, all they are really achieving is silence through self-censorship.