Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question [a fifteen-year-old who was given a hard time by a convenience store clerk when she tried to buy a pregnancy test --H] making a change to her own moral philosophy, just going to enough lengths not to get caught. What the individual does in private doesn’t matter, unless the consequences of that action ever become public and identifiable. This is fine if you think the problem can be solved by the teenager using enough contraception to ensure she never has to face another check out clerk. That’s not what the clerk herself had in mind, however, given that she was keen to dictate her customer that “you shouldn’t be having sex at all”.I disagree. People have sex for all kinds of silly reasons, and people refuse sex for equally silly reasons. Not having the right lingerie on; having a test the next day; knowing that friends of yours work at the "free morning after pill" counter at the Women's Center, knowing that they could guess the guy on whose account you were there, and not wanting to be embarrassed in front of them. And these are just the ones I've heard about. I'm sure there are more, and that they are equally goofy.
The social behaviour actually enforced by the clerk was: Buying pregnancy tests is shameful. Therefore, don’t buy pregnancy tests at all.
This, of course, is no help to anyone. Whatever your views on abortion, it’s clear that the earlier a pregnancy is discovered, the better.
We now live in a society where sex has been largely divorced from its visible consequences. So to use shame culture to stop someone having extramarital sex, you have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act.
We can debate the behavior of the clerk in question, but the fundamental question is: Should a fifteen-year-old's experience of buying a pregnancy test be unpleasant for her?
I can imagine someone saying, "No; that's mean!" Kate seems to be saying, "No; it won't work." I'm sympathetic to the worry that this will just force teen sex underground and therefore make it less safe and healthy, but I, for one, am not sold on the idea that, in order for shame culture to work, we "have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act." People deciding whether or not to hook up usually have an eye on future consequences (the question of whether your social stock will go up or down when the hook-up becomes public, for instance), and I would like the humiliation of buying a pregnancy test at fifteen to be one of the future consequences in view.
To the abortion concern I would cite Kevin James: "Simply make sure they understand that an abortion is the far greater shame."
7 comments:
I'm very skeptical that the Women's Center provides the morning-after pill, given the expense and the fact that it's available even after hours at DUH. Are you sure that's what you heard?
(I'm asking because I think a lot of the demonization of the Women's Center and other social services of this nature comes from exaggerating the actual scope of their services...)
Quite simply wrong, the Yale Women's Centre does not provide the morning-after pill.
For a start, it doesn't have nearly the necessary funds. Your informant may have been misinformed herself. To receive the morning after pill at Yale, you have to make the trip up to the Health Center and then be checked out by a counsellor / shrink before (s)he gives it to you. This has come up at several Women's Centre discussions I've attended.
The one thing I'd like to point out about the culture of shame is that it is much more effective at discouraging women than men. Look back to The Scarlet Letter. I wouldn't say Dimmesdale escapes unscathed, but compare Hester's transformation to Dimmesdale's fate, and I'm sure you'd agree a good, thorough shaming might have been better for him too.
So how would a culture of shame be practiced on men, when even relatively more puritanical times thought that a man's indiscretions were a biological imperative, where a woman's were original sin?
I understand why this "shame culture" is to some extent necessary to reinforce good morals in society, but if a pregnant fifteen year old girl came to me looking for any kind of help I would leave the shaming to those who have the stomach for it and instead try to offer friendship and understanding if possible. I admit I am more of a "compassionate conservative" than my usual self when it comes to things like this and this "shame culture," and why is not important here, but we should not assume continuity between the "culture of shame" of generations past and one in today's managerial state.
Do you really think that a woman who works at a Rite-Aid turning her nose up at a pregnant teenaged girl is motivated by a conservative outlook or a whig-progressive one? Is she "shaming" the girl because what she did was immoral under God, or because being pregnant at that age is something from a darker and less "advanced" age when women got married at that age, when there was no such thing as birth control? In the communities of yesterday, character could be strengthened in the girl by shame, but never in an age when strength of moral character is actively discouraged as a policy and as a creed, when applying the word "community" to a residence is often an abuse of the word.
To say that all you need to do is remind her that abortion is the far greater shame also belongs to generations past, when society itself was not so shameless. When I read Faust, it struck me that Gretchen's case was probably not all that uncommon either when Goethe was writing or when the story takes place. Even then "shame culture" produced its share of casualties, but imagine a time when infanticide is legal and encouraged by society's elite, when birth is looked down upon.
A girl in that situation should have a strong father or father figure to make her understand that what she did was wrong but not irredeemable, that it is beneath the standards she deserves. But our swinish managerial dystopia should be ashamed of itself and has no business making any mother feel ashamed, not even an unwed one.
If you're going to endorse lying, Helen, how can you expect anyone to debate you in good faith? And if you're going to walk it back like you did the paternal love thing, well, that's just hyperbolic attention-seeking on your part, not good faith either. How are we all going to get along with different religions if with some respect for the law?
A position I disagree with, but which would be better than what you've got at the moment: There are vocations in which the imposition of shame is required, and vocations in which the imposition of shame is forbidden.
The latter would I think include pregnancy-center counselors. In fact I think it has to. I don't think most of my clients come away from talking with me thinking that I am a-ok with pregnancy out of wedlock (I care less about age, although obviously in our culture age and marital status/ability to make good marriage choices are very much intertwined).
But I also really hope that no client comes away from talking with me feeling _ashamed_. This may be partly a difference in use of words, but I don't think it entirely is. I am not sure I've ever made a good choice out of shame; I know I've made many bad choices from it.
And so I want the teens I counsel to reorient themselves, _not toward their community_ (which rarely condemns them anyway--and when it does, it's ALWAYS in the direction of abortion, not abstinence), but toward God. (And, given the circumstances--girls who really do want to be Christian and have a hard time figuring out how--that's usually reorienting them toward their own integrity.)
I agree with Kate that that seems more like guilt culture than shame culture. Stand in the court of your own skull; not in the high-school hallway.
So... okay... 1) what's wrong with the above, and 2) who has the vocation of shaming others? The latter is, as we've discussed, why I don't think your position really works in contexts other than art. (Art, like religion, creates the court of one's own skull, so the rules are different there.)
I promise no more "Richard II" metaphor after this,
E
I completely agree with Eve's position. Except all that God stuff. But you knew that.
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