SHame is often used as a weapon against women – see Anita Hill, Amber Heard, and Kamala “cat lady” Harris. Melissa Petro knows the experience all too well. In 2010, she was a public school art teacher in the Bronx when the New York Post published an exposé about her former sex work; she was removed from her class.
In her book Shame on You, Petro, 44, interviewed 150 subjects about their own shame spirals. She explored mothering shame, financial shame, body shame and career shame.
Petro estimates she’s been working on Shame on You for about 20 years. When she was 23, she signed up for a memoir-writing workshop. The resulting work-in-progress veered from a personal account of stripping in her teens and sex work in her early adulthood to become a stirring exploration of shame and how it affects women.
Unlike shyness, which usually has a humorous aspect, shame is tied to a particularly destructive sense of self-hatred. “Not only have you failed, but in shame you hold yourself responsible for that failure,” Petro writes.
Petro spoke to the Guardian about the impulse to share (or overshare), the shame of the dating scene and how the shame epidemic could be the new loneliness epidemic.
Your book really spoke to me. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a sense of shame floating around freely and I lie there replaying the conversations and texts from the day before, looking for something to fixate on.
I see shame as funhouse mirrors that you walk into when you are sensitive to shame. When you experience shame, you walk into that room and everything is distorted.
Considering the impact it has on so many people, it’s strange that we don’t say the word “shame” out loud very often.
It’s an emotion, and it’s not something that’s really in our lexicon. I mean, I think that’s why: because we’re ashamed of the things that we’re ashamed of. It’s so threatening to be ashamed because it implies that there’s something wrong with you, and a reason why you’ve been banished, thrown away. It threatens us at this primitive level. To say there’s something I’m ashamed of is to say there’s something so wrong with me that people are going to reject me.
When we start to peel back the onion and look at the layers of shame, there are other nuanced feelings, and when we do that, we develop our emotional granularity. When we feel humiliation instead of shame, it’s actually a little bit more liberating, because we know that we’re being wronged.
How much of the shame we feel do you think comes from external sources?
Women are questioned and criticized. And we carry that voice in our heads. I can see it in my four-year-old daughter. She knows how to act like a good girl and she knows what will provoke criticism. Those rules are implanted at a very young age and then they are only reinforced.
The backbone of the book is your own personal stairs of shame. You started dancing, then you did sex work, then you were exposed on a very public level.
I had really developed a certain resilience to shame when I was exposed by the New York Post, which was fortunate, because otherwise it would have been fatal. I had done a lot of the work because I had worked in the sex industry. But I didn’t really identify it as shame. I knew that I had a disease inside me and that my secrets were creating a dissonance, a dissonance. I had no sense of values anymore because I was so caught up in dishonesty.
You protected yourself from that inner turmoil when you stopped doing that job.
There were a few months after I stopped trading sex for money where I was just trying to date normally, and it was so demoralizing and humiliating. That was really my lowest point because now I wasn’t even getting paid for it anymore. I was just meeting these guys and feeling horrible and feeling out of control because I was behaving in ways that I had promised myself I wouldn’t do, and there I was.
You mention in your book that after you were exposed as a former sex worker, you were transferred to the New York Police Department department of the “rubber room” of educationI know it’s a purgatory for teachers who have been tested in some way, but can you describe what it’s really like?
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You’re picturing a room full of cushions, with kids throwing chairs against the walls, right? That’s not true at all. It’s just the name for this facility, which basically looks like a typical downtown Brooklyn office building, with the evicted teachers scattered inconspicuously among the actual employees. And then you just sit there. You’re not given any tasks.
I shared a cubicle with a data entry clerk, and she was amazing. She worked hard. It’s hard to come in every day and do the job, but she fucking did a great job. She was always there on time, and she left on time because she had a typical office job, and then she had to sit next to me, this idiot who had been kicked out of the classroom.
What were you doing while you were sitting there?
I listened to podcasts. I discovered the website Jezebel. I listened to This American Life. It radicalized me, really, because I had all the time in the world. It lasted for about 100 days. Everyone treated me like I was a cold sore, because I’m doing nothing, sitting there while they’re working. I kind of get it.
In your book you say, “Revelation, and writing in particular, is a powerful therapeutic tool. At the same time, becoming vulnerable makes us, well, vulnerable.” What is the balance between being open and protecting yourself in terms of the material you share with your readers when it comes to healing?
I came up in an era of the personal essay and this idea of the confessional essay. And even now, there’s still some pull toward the confessional essay. So there’s a temptation to perform your shame. I write for money, and I write to get to know myself. I look at the other personal essay writers of our time, and I think some of us have developed a certain resilience to shame. But we’re still vulnerable.
You have written many personal essays. Why did you decide to publish a cultural study?
(The book) started out more as a memoir, but my agent really encouraged me to believe that I was more than just that story. She made me hold back — until literally the eighth page of my proposal, I wasn’t allowed to say the words “stripper” or “whore.” I had always started doing that as a way to protect myself, to be exciting and interesting. But she forced me not to start with that, and that’s how I discovered that my experience was so much bigger than me.
We’ve all heard of the “loneliness epidemic” by now. But you bring up a sister disease: the health consequences of shame.
We know that stress damages our hearts – heart disease is the leading killer of women. So to think it doesn’t affect us, or to pretend it doesn’t affect us, is to create a health crisis.
Shame on You by Melissa Petro is out via GP Putnam’s Sons on September 10