Shaming Quotes

“I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. We can lead good, ethical lives, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all - even though we know that's not how we should define our fellow humans. What's true about our fellow humans is that we are clever and stupid. We are grey areas.
And so ... when you see an unfair or an ambiguous shaming unfold, speak up on behalf of the shamed person. A babble of opposing voices - that's democracy.
The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. Let's not turn it into a world where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“Hypercritical, Shaming Parents
Hypercritical and shaming parents send the same message to their children as perfectionistic parents do - that they are never good enough. Parents often deliberately shame their children into minding them without realizing the disruptive impact shame can have on a child's sense of self. Statements such as "You should be ashamed of yourself" or "Shame on you" are obvious examples. Yet these types of overtly shaming statements are actually easier for the child to defend against than are more subtle forms of shaming, such as contempt, humiliation, and public shaming.
There are many ways that parents shame their children. These include belittling, blaming, contempt, humiliation, and disabling expectations.
-BELITTLING. Comments such as "You're too old to want to be held" or "You're just a cry-baby" are horribly humiliating to a child. When a parent makes a negative comparison between his or her child and another, such as "Why can't you act like Jenny? See how she sits quietly while her mother is talking," it is not only humiliating but teaches a child to always compare himself or herself with peers and find himself or herself deficient by comparison.
-BLAMING. When a child makes a mistake, such as breaking a vase while rough-housing, he or she needs to take responsibility. But many parents go way beyond teaching a lesson by blaming and berating the child: "You stupid idiot! Do you think money grows on trees? I don't have money to buy new vases!" The only thing this accomplishes is shaming the child to such an extent that he or she cannot find a way to walk away from the situation with his or her head held high.
-CONTEMPT. Expressions of disgust or contempt communicate absolute rejection. The look of contempt (often a sneer or a raised upper lip), especially from someone who is significant to a child, can make him or her feel disgusting or offensive. When I was a child, my mother had an extremely negative attitude toward me. Much of the time she either looked at me with the kind of expectant expression that said, "What are you up to now?" or with a look of disapproval or disgust over what I had already done. These looks were extremely shaming to me, causing me to feel that there was something terribly wrong with me.
-HUMILIATION. There are many ways a parent can humiliate a child, such as making him or her wear clothes that have become dirty. But as Gershen Kaufman stated in his book Shame: The Power of Caring, "There is no more humiliating experience than to have another person who is clearly the stronger and more powerful take advantage of that power and give us a beating." I can personally attest to this. In addition to shaming me with her contemptuous looks, my mother often punished me by hitting me with the branch of a tree, and she often did this outside, in front of the neighbors. The humiliation I felt was like a deep wound to my soul.
-DISABLING EXPECTATIONS. Parents who have an inordinate need to have their child excel at a particular activity or skill are likely to behave in ways that pressure the child to do more and more. According to Kaufman, when a child becomes aware of the real possibility of failing to meet parental expectations, he or she often experiences a binding self-consciousness. This self-consciousness - the painful watching of oneself - is very disabling. When something is expected of us in this way, attaining the goal is made harder, if not impossible.
Yet another way that parents induce shame in their children is by communicating to them that they are a disappointment to them. Such messages as "I can't believe you could do such a thing" or "I am deeply disappointed in you" accompanied by a disapproving tone of voice and facial expression can crush a child's spirit.”
― Beverly Engel, The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- And Start Standing Up for Yourself

“If wrappings of cloth can impart respectability, the most respectable persons are the Egyptian mummies, all wrapped in layers and layers of gauze”
― Kamala Suraiyya Das, Wages of Love

“Claiming to be offended is a great way to elevate yourself at the expense of others: “Look at me! I'm a much better person than you! And I judge you! I condemn you! Shame! Shame! SHAME!” These social media shamings bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval witch hunts.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Bad Choices Make Good Stories: The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers

“Some disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Let’s talk about ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers for a second. You’ve definitely seen them around. They’re those blue strips with white lettering that assemble a collection of religious icons and mystical symbols (e.g., an Islamic crescent, a Star of David, a Christian cross, a peace sign, a yin-yang) to spell out a simple message of inclusion and tolerance. Perhaps you instinctively roll your eyes at these advertisements of moral correctness. Perhaps you find the sentiment worthwhile, but you’re not a wear-your-politics-on-your-fender type of person. Or perhaps you actually have ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers affixed to both your Prius and your Beamer. Whatever floats your boat, man; far be it from us to cast stones. But we bring up these particular morality minibillboards to illustrate a bothersome dichotomy. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of (a) the people who flaunt their socially responsible “coexist” values for fellow motorists, and (b) the people who believe that, say, an evangelical Christian who owns a local flower shop ought to be sued and shamed for politely declining to provide floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding, the resulting circles would more or less overlap.
The coexist message: You people (i.e., conservatives) need to get on board and start coexisting with groups that might make you uncomfortable. It says so right here on my highly enlightened bumper sticker. But don’t you dare ask me to tolerate the ‘intolerance’ of people with whom I disagree. Because that’s different.”
― Mary Katharine Ham

“Save your shaming for the girl, Doctor. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.” He turned and started wading into the swamp. “Time is passing. I, for one, have no intention of remaining here for your betrayer to bring back the soldiers and their guns.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities

“Claiming to be offended is a great way to elevate yourself at the expense of others: “Look at me! I'm a much better person than you! And I judge you! I condemn you! Shame! Shame! SHAME!”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Why Creeps Don't Know They're Creeps - What Game of Thrones can teach us about relationships and Hollywood scandals

“It has just been discovered that women carry fetal cells from all the babies they have carried. Crossing the defensive boundaries of our immune system and mixing with our own cells, the fetal cells circulate in the mother’s bloodstream for decades after each birth. The body does not tolerate foreign cells, which trigger illness and rejection. But a mother’s body incorporates into her own the cells of her children as if they recognize each other, belong to each other. This fantastic melding of two selves, mother and child, is called human microchimerism. My three children are carried in my bloodstream still….

How did we not know this? How can this be a surprise?”
― Meredith Hall

“You can't claim to care about the welfare of children if you're shaming other parents for the choices they're making.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“Yeah, I'm a drug addict. And a prostitute. The whole world knows. Not because I robbed my own family. Not because I ended up behind bars. Not because I've been hassled by the cops when soliciting customers from a local street corner. Not because I'm shooting up in the public bathrooms at your city park. Everyone knows because I told them all. I never tried to hide any of it. I never felt the need to.”
― Ashly Lorenzana, Speed Needles

“These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear. Impugn a man's character, and everything that man does is made to seem underhanded, suspect, fraught with double motives.”
― Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium

“I don't buy into the notion of 'privilege' at all. To even attempt to brand and shame whole swathes of people based on their race or gender is, to me, obscene. It has icky echoes of totalitarian propaganda which seeks to direct the ire of a populace at certain sections of society deemed 'unworthy.' Playing the blame game gets us nowhere.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I feel the swelling energy, the inexplicable, restless hunger, rising in my own innocent life. I don't care at all about the music or the drinking or the gathering together of teenagers for fun and the thrill of belonging. But my father is gone. He has a new life, a new wife and daughter, and never calls or visits. I miss him badly. My mother is inaccessible. My older brother and sister have moved on to their own lives, leaving me alone at home and on the beach while my mother works and plays with Peter.”
― Meredith Hall, Without a Map

“I’d learned the lesson loud and clear, one that has been re-taught to me and so many other women and femmes who have been targets of harassment and abuse: The world owes you nothing. If you are so brave as to express your gender in public, you will be harassed, you will be hurt, you may even be assaulted, and no one will have to apologize for how they treated you. They will get away with it every single time. They will make you feel ashamed of feeling hurt. They will make you feel like you are just whining. And speaking up will only make it worse. Watching people who love you—who support you and want the best for you—try to take on the world and fight for you, only to lose, will only make it hurt more. So you stop talking about what you’re facing. You stop talking about how much you’re hurting. You stop telling people how shitty the world is to you because you are gender nonconforming. You end an email with a smile, take the abuse, and pretend it doesn’t hurt you. You learn you have no real power, that the only power you do have is the power not to flinch when you are punched, not to cry when you are stung, not to acknowledge that abuse leads to injury.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“A wronged person is still a wronged person even if they're an unfashionable wronged person.”
― Ron Jonson

“A wronged person is still a wronged person even if they're an unfashionable wronged person.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“Demagoguery is powerfully reduced when it stops getting people elected, and that usually happens because of in-group policing. Similarly, when it isn't profitable for a media outlet to engage in demagoguery, it won't, and that happens when its target market declines to put up with it. Individual demagogues are best stopped by in-group condemnation, and particular strains of demagoguery are generally ended by public shaming.”
― Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy

“We preach body confidence, but we live in a culture that doesn’t quite know what to do with a woman who actually likes the way she looks. It’s considered arrogant and even unfeminine. Think of the recent hit One Direction song that made the claim that a woman was beautiful precisely because she didn’t know she was beautiful. We need to question a culture that tells women they must be beautiful to be loved, but that they shouldn’t actually feel beautiful or we’ll find them conceited.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women

“This Butterfly Stings by Stewart Stafford

The gold of my eye dances on stage for me,
Her wings wafting behind her in the chorus,
Yet none glimpsed that girl's beauty as I did,
This butterfly flew solo in my mind's eye.

For two years hence, I concealed my interest,
Yet I gazed at her endlessly, so close yet apart,
Places of learning changed, but she did not,
I foolishly let fly Cupid's token to my inamorata.

Seeing my love in a looking glass reflected,
Shadow feelings illuminated St Valentine's Eve,
My butterfly became a sullen stinging bee,
Crushing my tender rose in pieces at my feet.

Nor would her wicked scorn end there,
She told her friends who joined in my shaming,
For years after, turning my last shreds of adoration,
Into contemptuous hatred of her existence.

Truly no one can take away our memories,
Where my former crush still dances on occasion,
O sweet butterfly of my youth, one last wish,
Never fly away from these fond recollections.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Come up here. Tell us your story.”
― Kien Nguyen, The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood

“Moral stains are wiped clean with the passing of the transgressor. They do not pass down to their descendants or others of the same faith or ethnicity through osmosis. Those using the very notion of inherited guilt as a stick to beat others with are revealing more about their problematic natures than anyone bearing their accusations.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on to others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light on to them, de-demonise people that might otherwise be seen as ogres.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“No one ever gets mad at being shamed by someone unless some shame is felt.”
― Shannon L. Alder, The Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Bible

“An anonymous goddess. Her phone is both a video camera and the sharpest pitchfork in the room, shoeing away the big monster.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Most of the abuse on social media is generated by narcissists.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Though we as a people pillaged this beautiful earth with acts of war, rape, terror, and molestation, He washed our sins with His blood. Instead of letting us damn ourselves unimpeded, He sowed a destiny of hope. Instead of shaming us for our many awful ways, He drown us in His love.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“ Suppression Techniques
1. Making invisible: Silencing or otherwise marginalizing people in opposition by ignoring them.
2. Ridicule: Portraying the arguments of an opponent, or the opponents themselves, in a ridiculing fashion.
3. Withholding information: Excluding a person from the decision making process, or knowingly not forwarding information so as to make the person less able to make an informed choice.
4. Double bind: Punishing or otherwise belittling the actions of an opponent, regardless of how they act.
5. Heaping blame/putting to shame: Embarrassing someone or insinuating that they themselves are to blame for their position.”
― Berit As

“Look not to the past where you were embarrassed, for the most important thing is that those moments are gone, and you are still here.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“To shame someone out of writing is a modern book burning—an abortion of ideas, killed in the womb of enlightenment.”
― Scott McCarthy