Thoughts on Shame
image prompted by Efe Levent
Shame for me did not begin as an idea but as a sensation, which I believe is the most common way to experience it. It is immediate, physical, difficult to locate but easy to recognize. A hesitation before acting and a second-guessing that arrives too quickly to interrupt. I learned it before I understood it. As victims of sexual assault, I believe we all learned when to lower our voice, withdraw a question, when to recast a desire as something more acceptable. By the time I could name shame, it had already settled into how I moved through the world. It travels easily between bodies too, especially when it doesn’t belong. Still you can inherit it at lightning speed, absorb it. It shapes what you say and how you say it, what you do and how you do it. Shame is a social relation rather than a feeling.
The recent exposure of the so‑called online “rape academy” makes this pretty clear. A CNN investigation conducted by women journalists uncovered a global network centered on a porn site with around 62 million visits a month, where men shared methods, images and videos focused on drugging and sexually assaulting women. Often their own partners. There are more than 20,000 videos of unconscious or sedated women uploaded there. Chat groups with tens of thousands of members trade advice on “sleep content”, discussing which sedatives work best and even livestreaming assaults for paying viewers. This is obviously not a fringe deviation. It is and has always been an organized ecosystem of abuse. Monetized and technologized, operating in plain sight.
The numbers matter. 62 million visits a month shows how many men are at least willing to be proximate to this, curious about it, entertained by it, or indifferent enough to click to say the least. The fantasy that violence against women is exceptional and confined to “monsters” collapses against this figure. It becomes harder to say “not all men” without hearing the echo. It’s like chanting “all lives matter”.
The site markets itself as “moral‑free”, a place where men can act without shame, where the only thing to feel embarrassed about is getting caught. Shame is distributed unevenly here. It is displaced onto the unconscious bodies recorded and archived, onto the women who learn about this investigation and are then mocked for being afraid, paranoid or hating men. The platform converts women’s lack of safety into content. Capitalism transforms this into profit as it always does. Patriarchy ensures that the fear and humiliation generated by this violence remains primarily a burden for women to carry in private. I wanted to write about shame with this in mind. The scale is somewhat new, the logic and structure behind it are not.
I have been ashamed for as long as I can remember. I was ashamed to ask for help. I was also ashamed for not being able to ask for help. The contradiction was invisible then, it just felt like failure in both directions. Either I needed too much, or I was incapable of expressing need when necessary. What I later recognized is that this was never simply about me. The shame of needing is cultivated in environments where care is conditional, inconsistently available and also resented. To depend on something or someone becomes a liability and articulating that dependence becomes a greater one. Shame steps in to manage this tension, turning a structural absence into a personal inadequacy.
I was ashamed of emotions that overflowed from within me and exceeded what seemed acceptable. Not the anger or sadness that comes with it, but rather the intensity itself. To feel too much is to risk being seen as unstable, difficult. I was made to feel this repeatedly, both subtly and directly. Over time, this produces a particular kind of self-relation. You begin to anticipate judgment before it arrives. You regulate both what you express and what you allow yourself to feel in the first place. Shame is anticipatory, it doesn’t require an audience to function.
My body was the primary source of shame in terms of what I do with it, what I wanted to do with it, and what can be done to it. I was shamed when I wanted intimacy, and also when I refused it. I learned quickly that there was no fixed standard to meet, only a shifting set of expectations that could never be fully satisfied. This instability ensures that the body remains in a constant state of adjustment, slightly out of alignment at all times. Shame becomes the mechanism through which this correction is internalized.
It does not need to forbid completely, it just needs to cast a certain type of doubt.
There were also countless moments that seemed more straightforward. I was ashamed when I hurt someone, especially when it felt unnecessary. I was ashamed of not knowing, of learning and acting too late. These forms of shame appear ethical and even necessary. They signal an awareness of others and a capacity for reflection. But even here the boundary is not very clear. When does shame lead to accountability and when does it become a closed loop of self-punishment that replaces repair? When does it obscure the conditions in which harm occurs? At times I was ashamed of my dreams because they felt misaligned with what seemed realistic or deserved. To want beyond one’s assigned position, whether socially or economically or emotionally, is accompanied by a quiet but persistent form of shame. It asks: Who do you think you are?
A certain pattern emerges when I try to trace my own experiences as well as the ones I’ve been witness to. Shame attaches most effectively where expectations are present but not fully articulated and where norms are enforced without explanation. So it thrives in partial knowledge. You are expected to know how to behave, how to feel, how to desire and love. But when you fail, which is inevitable, the failure appears personal at first. While the structure that produced failure always remains intact.
This is where shame shifts from being an individual experience to a social mechanism. It disciplines without overt force. It produces subjects who monitor themselves, anticipate corrections. Meaning, you get used to adjusting yourself in advance. It is efficient precisely because it is internalized. There is no need for constant external enforcement when individuals have learned to naturally enforce limits on themselves. We are made dependent on systems that deny care, and then taught to feel shame for needing what is systematically withheld. Shame becomes a way of managing lack without questioning its source. It ensures that the body remains legible to others before it becomes livable. Shame obscures the conditions under which we come to know or fail to know where we actually are in relation to power, need, and harm.
In this patriarchal and hypercapitalist moment, this constant self-regulation is closely tied to the management of bodies and affects. To be too emotional or too distant, too needy or too self-contained, too sexual or too withholding, too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Each excess is paired with a corresponding shame. These categories are unstable and contradictory. One can be shamed for occupying either side of the same axis.
An anticapitalist feminist perspective adds another dimension by situating shame within relations of labor. Not waged labor, but the labor of care in maintaining relationships and managing your own emotions in ways that make you bearable to others. Much of this labor remains unrecognized while its failure is quickly marked. To be unable to provide care, to require too much of it, or to withdraw from its demands can all become sources of shame.
The shame of not being enough is tied to productivity too, economic or emotional. One is expected to function and contribute while remaining stable. Work was one of the main places where I noticed shame attaching itself to me. Through my body, my time and effort. Especially in circles where people introduce themselves through their jobs. Places where you’re supposed to have a clean narrative ready about your work and your path. So many conversations open with “What do you do?” or “What are you working on these days?” As if that is the most natural way to approach someone. I have answered these types of questions in different ways and almost none of them have felt neutral. I can feel myself being sorted while speaking. Into boxes of “serious” or “not serious”, “useful” or “far from us”. I can feel how far I sit from an imagined line of success that is drawn by the unquestioned habits of the capital order.
In my early twenties, I interned and worked at a magazine and various art galleries as a freelancer. They were usually small teams, less than 20 people, mostly men or at least structured around a very male way of being at work. On the surface it was all “chill” and friendly. We were supposed to be a “family”. I remember never feeling that urge to treat it as a family and how quickly that absence was turned back on me. If you don’t fully buy into the family myth, you end up feeling slightly wrong. A bit too distant in daily conversations, not available enough, and definitely not grateful enough when they assume you’re reachable at any time. Because “we’re family”. Even something as small as asking them, half joking, to stop leaving the toilet seat up was enough to trigger that dynamic. I remember them reacting as if I was attacking them, apologizing but also explaining that “this is a habit of men.” Like the habit itself was inevitable and my discomfort was the thing that needed to be managed. Moments like that which seem benign and avoidable taught me early that if you name even a minor disrespect, you risk being framed as overly sensitive or not quite a fit.
Most of us know that nobody outside the billionaire and corporate class is actually paid in proportion to what they give. That capitalism in its imperial form runs on extraction from workers, colonies, from feminized and racialized labor. I know this in theory. But still when my work was badly paid or invisible, shame still found a way in. I have read gaps in my CV as personal failure instead of the outcome of crises, borders, austerity; things far bigger than me.
When this becomes difficult, the difficulty is internalized as well. Instead of questioning the conditions that produce exhaustion or precarity, we tend to feel inadequate. And shame begins to serve to individualize systemic strain. It keeps dissatisfaction directed inward. For those moving between contexts, shame can accumulate. What is acceptable in one setting may be marked as inappropriate in another. One learns to adjust constantly, to translate language and expression. This ongoing negotiation produces a heightened awareness of oneself as visible, potentially out of place. So shame becomes a way of managing that visibility, attempting to align with expectations that are usually illegible.
I took on forms of shame that were not mine and carried them as if they were. I know no women who haven’t done that. Yet despite its collective production, shame insists on being felt alone. It isolates. Even when our experiences of feeling ashamed are widely shared, they rarely appear that way in the moment. This isolation is part of its function for sure. If shame was immediately recognizable as structural, it could quickly become a basis for solidarity. But instead it can only be experienced as a personal shortcoming; something to be concealed or overcome privately firstly.
This does not mean that all shame is meaningless or that it should be entirely rejected. Some forms of shame are tied to ethical relations, to an awareness of harm, the desire to act differently. But without distinguishing these from the shame that enforces conformity and obscures the structure, they easily collapse into each other. Everything becomes equally personal and internal. So I return to a set of questions: Where did this come from? Whose interests does it serve? What does it prevent?
It comes from the needs and limits of institutions that depend on our compliance. Families that learned to ration care because the welfare state was dismantled around them. Workplaces that demand “resilience” instead of security, relationships scripted by systems that treat women and queer bodies as resources to be accessed and consumed. It comes from living inside systems that require someone to absorb the cost of instability, unpaid labor, and male entitlement, and that “someone” is feminized most of the time. So, shame serves the interests of those who benefit from the current arrangement. Like employers who need workers to blame themselves for exhaustion instead of questioning overwork. States that need citizens to internalize fear and self-surveillance instead of organizing. Men who need women to doubt their perceptions so that abuse can remain private, negotiable, and deniable. Feeling ashamed prevents certain forms of speech and solidarity, keeping us from each other and from naming violence clearly. When I feel ashamed of being scared or overreacting, I am less willing to say what is happening out loud.
This is one way shame functions within the capitalist system. It permits male violence to be industrialized and organized while keeping women’s responses individualized. We are supposed to feel ashamed of being cautious, of distrusting, of being too angry, while the infrastructure that enables mass sexual violence remains intact, regulated by market logic. Our shame protects their freedom.
So when I ask where shame comes from, I have to look at the political economy of harm, instead of my own memories . Platforms that host and monetize abuse, pharmaceutical and tech infrastructures that make it scalable, legal systems that respond slowly or not at all, the everyday heterosexual arrangements that treat women’s consent as revocable only unless there is a serious social cost on the men and institutions involved. When I ask whose interests shame serves, it’s easy to see how it keeps men from having to confront each other, and keeps capital insulated from accountability for the violence it facilitates and sells back to us as entertainment and distraction.
And when I ask what shame prevents, I see its role in stopping us from naming the problem at the right level. It aims to prevent us from saying “this is not just about individual morality” or “bad choices”, it is about a class of people organized, explicitly or implicitly, around the right to access and control another class’s bodies. Shame prevents us from turning fear into anger and anger into action.
We all suffer under capitalism, but not in the same way and definitely not with the same permission. Abusive men and perpetrators are not exceptions standing outside of it; they move through it, suffer in it and still claim entitlement and power inside it. They can be underpaid, surveilled, made disposable by capital and still act as if access to women’s bodies is part of what they are owed in return, a kind of compensation they don’t have to name as such.
When they “revolt” against the same systems that grinds us all down, that revolt tends to be recognized louder, it’s framed as understandable anger, not necessarily instability. Their rage is read as social commentary. Victims’ is read as a problem. A man breaking things in fury becomes a sign that something is wrong with the world; a woman withdrawing or naming harm becomes the thing that is wrong. Under capitalism victims are also handed another impossible job, that is to process and “transform” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) the violence they live through so they can keep functioning. And at the same time make that violence publicly coherent and explainable. We are required to narrate it, while those who enact it are allowed to stay complex and unexamined. As just another man having a hard time.
If shame can be given and taken, then part of refusal is reassigning it. The shame belongs with the men who participate in and consume this violence, as well as those who are silent against it, the companies that profit from it, and the states that tolerate and encourage it. This reassignment does not magically undo the fear or repair the damage, but still it’s an attempt to shift the frame. It insists that what appears as an individual or collective neurosis is a rational response to a rejected material reality.