Shame

(Mitski)

What do a podcast episode, a mediocre movie musical, and a bestselling novel have in common?

I never was very good, I haven’t been so good

But right outside the door, nobody knows

They’re right outside the door and they don’t know

How it feels so good, it feels so good

I edited an episode for a client that aired yesterday: an interview with Melissa Petro. She’s the author of the memoir Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification.

I haven’t read the actual book, but Melissa’s conversation with Johanna on Eat My Words covers the basics: she was a nineteen-year-old studying abroad in Mexico when she started dancing at a strip club. She eventually moved back to the US and started also exchanging sex for money. At first, Melissa was stripping mostly to fill a desperately empty bank account, but she also liked it! She felt powerful and free.

There was just this specter looming in the background: Melissa knew that this was wrong.

“Good girls” didn’t take their clothes off for money. It was something to be ashamed of. And the fact that she liked it was even worse. It clearly meant she was a bad person. It was as straightforward as a math equation to her:

enjoying this kind of work is Bad + she enjoyed it

=

she is a Bad Person

Johanna, the host of Eat My Words, makes the point a couple times during the conversation that in the early period of Melissa’s stripping, no one was actually telling her there was anything wrong with it. (That did come later, of course.¹) But Melissa — and the rest of us — had been fed this narrative her whole life about the immorality and shamefulness of sex work and of women who behave a certain way, so she was able to supply plenty of shame for herself regardless.

The same week I was editing this episode, I happened to pick up Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 book Margo’s Got Money Troubles. It’ll be a TV adaptation starring Elle Fanning in a few weeks and I wanted to read it before watching. The themes of the book were remarkably similar to the story I was hearing from Melissa.

Margo is a nineteen-year-old college student (coincidentally, exactly the same as Melissa had been when she first started stripping in Mexico). Margo gets pregnant by her freshman year English professor and decides to keep the baby, because that’s what “good people” do.

She starts an OnlyFans account and discovers that not only does it have great financial potential, but she also really enjoys it. She likes the creative outlet it gives her, comparing her customers’ dicks to Pokemon and eventually writing and directing quirky, fun TikTok videos. Margo is enjoying herself, making money, and creating a life in which she gets to be home with her baby and spend her days the way she wants.

But for Margo, like Melissa, there’s this shadow over all of it, this cloud of shame. (Margo also has the added stakes of needing to maintain enough respectability to keep her son.)

There’s this bit I love where Margo is talking to her roommate Suzie about why something like OnlyFans is considered “slutty”:

“…if sex wasn’t shameful and being paid wasn’t shameful, then why was it shameful to have sex for money? Or sell pictures of your boobs or whatever? Where was the shame coming from? How was it entering the system?”

How, indeed!

But still, Margo is so reluctant to tell her mom. And, it turns out, rightfully so. Her mom Shyanne acts like this is the worst thing Margo could have possibly done. Margo thinks: “It almost didn’t matter if I didn’t agree with her, the shame was like an egg cracked on my head, cold and wet and dripping.”

After a custody mediation meeting where her work was brought up as a problem, the book says: “Mark had made her feel so ashamed in that meeting, and she was only now shaking it off. It was a mystery, really, why people thought sex was so dirty. You were literally genetically programmed to do it, it was necessary for the continuance of the species.”

I think those two moments in particular, Shyanne and Mark’s reactions to Margo’s work and Margo’s reactions to those reactions, are fascinating. Unlike Melissa’s shame in the beginning, Margo’s is coming from outside of her. But it doesn’t matter - it slides in and takes root anyway.

Now, okay, stay with me here: I also watched The Greatest Showman with some friends the other night. (Look, if you watch it purely as a fantasy film, rather than one based in any kind of historical fact at all, it’s a blast. The music slaps. I’ll die on this hill. Anyway…)

One of the persistent themes there is also shame.

So many of the characters are hiding at the beginning of the movie because there’s something about them that’s been deemed “wrong”. (A guy who’s too short! A guy who’s too tall! A guy who’s too fat! A lady with a beard!)

But sex comes up too (or, okay, love, but like … implied eventual sex, because that chemistry is crazy…).

Zac Efron and Zendaya are so good in this, give them an Oscar nine years later

In this case, it’s not misogyny, but racism at the root of shame. Zac Efron’s dad snaps at him “have you no shame?”, scolding him for associating with the “freaks” of the circus and also Zendaya (certainly the most beautiful woman that wrinkly crow of a man has ever laid eyes on).

Zac Efron is, of course, a woke king and tells his parents to fuck off, but there’s this pervasive idea throughout the movie of hiding shameful secrets versus stepping out into the spotlight. One of the biggest hit songs from the movie is about this idea. In This Is Me, this first verse:

I am not a stranger to the dark
"Hide away," they say
"'Cause we don't want your broken parts"
I've learned to be ashamed of all my scars
"Run away," they say
"No one'll love you as you are"

…shifts into this in the chorus:

I'm not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me

Man-of-the-people Hugh Jackman convinces them all that the haters are “laughing anyway, so you might as well get paid”. Which … is a compelling argument, to be fair. It also reminds me of Margo and Suzie’s conversation about sluttiness:

“Think about it. If a girl doesn’t know she’s hot and is innocently going about her business, and some guys spy on her naked, she’s not a slut. But if she knows guys want to see her naked and charges them money to spy on her, she’s a slut. The same physical thing is happening in both scenarios, guys see her naked body, it’s just in the second one she knows what’s going on and she’s in control.”

(^ Suzie, my smart nerdy cosplay queen.)

So, Hugh Jackman helps the “freaks” be sluts (complimentary) and make money off being stared it. He helps them shake off their shame and self-hatred from internalized bigotry. (Now, is he doing this as a manipulation tactic to get more people to come see his freak show? Yes. But look, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater or whatever.)

Melissa and Margo’s stories both offer explorations of the deeply misogynistic societal hatred of sex workers. Zendaya in The Greatest Showman is a complicated example of maybe some internalized shame, but more so not wanting external bigotry to touch another person you care about (Zac Efron). But they are all ultimately examples of individual people metabolizing societal messages and the ways those messages can wrap like vines around a person’s identity.

What especially struck me from Melissa’s story was how the things she’d heard from society bled and morphed into a belief that she herself was bad. The self-hatred wasn’t actually about the sex work. It wasn’t about the actions. It was about her as a human being.

Melissa says the difference between guilt and shame is that shame is about who you are “in a deep fundamental way, in a very unchangeable way”. She said on the podcast:

“It wasn’t like I was guilty because I did something that I believed was wrong — and I actually never thought it was wrong. I just knew that it was different and that people would look at me differently. And I did look at myself differently.”

Melissa did not feel guilty for her actions. She knew that the actual behavior itself, dancing or taking off her clothes or having sex for money, was not wrong. But she believed that what it communicated about her was bad. She did not feel guilty, but ashamed.

And I don’t know … it just doesn’t feel like such a radical idea to me that no one should have to feel that way …?

Melissa called out cancel culture in the podcast and (though one or two of the examples didn’t quite land with me), for the most part, I agree. She said: “We still live in a world where we’re just so quick to outrage when anyone does something we don’t understand and we view negatively.”

I do feel like the media and the internet has this insidious way of turning actions into permanent characteristics. I feel like I learned a term for this in my high school AP Psych class but I cannot remember it, sorry Ms. Sheppard. But like, extrapolating who a person is from one thing that they said or did — allowing things like Melissa’s sex work and Margo’s OnlyFans to define who they are as people, the way that Hugh Jackman and his circus audience define the “freaks” by the one thing about them that is visibly different.

(Of course, this is nuanced.) (Sometimes an internet/media pile-on is more warranted than others.) (For example, I feel like I can confidently say who my personal enemy Michael Rappaport is as a human being based on a limited number of videos and a general vibe and I feel totally fine about people roasting him online.)

But tabloids like the New York Post, which skewered Melissa for daring to write about her experiences with sex work, thrive on it and so does social media. I can’t help but feel like we’re only hurting ourselves when we engage with it. We’re injecting poison into the air and that air is only going to come back around again until we’re breathing it in and shame is worming its way into our lungs and our brains and our hearts.

I don’t want that! I want to rid myself of all shame! Especially the kinds that come from patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist systems! And perhaps I’m being naive, but I feel like the first step, the one thing I can do as an individual on a daily basis, is to approach the world with more grace and forgiveness and openness.

Speaking of shame and sex, I used to feel ashamed that I was having less sex than seemingly everyone else was. I don’t feel that way anymore, but it took a long time! And a big part of why I don’t feel that way is because I started talking about it more and listening to other people talk about it and realizing that actually everyone is different and everything and nothing is normal and therefore nothing is weird or shameful.

So I guess I’ll leave you there today with this bit of wisdom, such as it is: talk about the things that feel shameful! Behaviors that don’t hurt anyone are not shameful. Who you are as a person is not shameful. Sex is not shameful. Enjoying things is not shameful.

Shame thrives in darkness, so bring it into the light and let it shrivel and burn away.

<3

1. Melissa would be later forced out of her New York public school teaching job after a New York Post spread a story across their front page headlined “Bronx Teacher Admits: I’m an Ex-Hooker”.