On Shaming

Note: I wrote this for Thought Catalog. I haven't seen them post it, so I guess it didn't make it. Regardless I know it's a very personal piece and I'm very scared at the response I will get. But I wanted to put it out there. Also: I'm not trying to demonize anyone here. At all.

Thanks to Ursula and Rebecca for the editing help. 



Recent news stories have propelled me to discuss less-than-kind memories from my past. I don’t talk about them often with good reason. I don’t want to be a “victim.” I earnestly don’t want to play that role. I have, though, experienced some degree of shaming. And shaming takes many forms.

In 2009, I was the editor-in-chief of my college paper, a position I took super seriously. I had never thought I was capable of such a position. That job meant the world to me.

The incident occurred during my senior-year homecoming. I had never gone to a homecoming before because I had never cared. Now that I was a semi-celebrity on campus, I was expected to attend and participate in such events. I had to organize my colleagues to march in the parade and then lead something of an open house after the fact.

I was also 21 years old and going out was a novelty to me. Everyone in town goes out for homecoming and I wanted to be IN on that. I had a group of patchwork friends interested and we decided we’d head out after dinner. Every one of the four or five bars in town would be crowded with current students, returning alumni, and people just interested in a good time.

“This will be great!” I remember saying to one of my friends as we made a messy “cheers!” over a stained table.  He agreed with me – and the rest of the evening became a blur, lifting our drinks in the air. We bar-hopped through the small Pennsylvania town I went to school in. Each bar brought new faces from classes and even the newspaper, and even random people who had somehow made their way into town that night – and more alcohol, be it just drinks or shots that were haphazardly screamed across the bar. I tried a Manhattan; my mouth found it revolting and I spit the vermouth back into the glass.

Somehow, our slurred conversations turned to the going-ons of our respective love lives. I had little dating or romantic experience otherwise. I had a lot of crushes at times, but nothing came of my unrequited loves. It wasn’t until I lost a lot of weight earlier that year that I actually began getting attention. I was asked out several times and found people talking to me an awful lot. I had only dated one person in high school and that was it.

“Haven’t you even been kissed, Britt?” my friend Bryce asked me in disbelief. I shook my head. I never had been. He sighed and kissed me quickly. Bryce had a beard, I felt like he was my older brother, I preferred girls- It was like kissing a Chia pet (no offense to Bryce). But that was my first kiss and it happened that night.

We eventually headed back to the bar we started at. I remember it was packed with people from wall to wall as I spilled part of my Guinness on me. Shoulders covered in plaid and football jerseys, or shoulders exposed by slinky dresses and straps. About this time, I should have been cut off. I should have cut myself off, but my mind was gone. Everyone’s minds were gone, more or less, left to waste by excessive alcohol use.

I ran into a boy I vaguely knew who was always nice. He was a sweet kid and I still think he’s a good guy. I blame what happened on neither of us, but mostly the situation. And note, I’m not writing this about the incident. I’m writing it about what happened after it was over.

We talked and we talked and I’m not sure what we talked about. My best friend was there, somewhere in the bar. He said later, “He was so hitting on you and you didn’t even know it!” How would I know? I was so inexperienced.  I left the bar, not with him, but with a group of my newspaper friends. We headed to the newspaper office to regroup. I was out of my mind drunk. If I ever saw someone in the condition I was in, I would have given them water and probably directed them home. That did not happen with me. I was carried in the old school building, after having fallen in the parking lot. I remember fingers pressing into my shoulders and lots of “I’m okay, you guys! Really!”

When we arrived, we found another one of our friends already there. She was so high she had decorated the office in Christmas lights. If my memory serves me correctly, she had done an admirable job in her state.

Shortly thereafter, my friends left me in the care of high Christmas-lights-decorating friend, who had been communicating with the boy from the bar.. She said something about going to a house; she could have been talking about a spaceship at that point. I wouldn’t have recognized the difference.

I entered his darkened house later with her help, not sure where she had taken me or what was going on. There was more beer. Music. Laughing. I don’t know. We started to make out.

Enter the next morning. I was horribly hungover- my body was drained and my head was aching. Worse than that was the fact I was in his bed. He was passed out next to me, and I was sore in between my legs.

So my first kiss and sexual experience- not as how I planned, or expected, or wanted – were the same night. I couldn’t even remember the last part. I began to hyperventilate in his bed. Although we were both clothed, all I could think about was what had happened? And why I was experiencing a lot of pain in a place I never hurt before?

It was a rainy, gray, cold and gross morning. Typical for Pennsylvania in the autumn. I woke up my friend. She drove me home, where I considered my options. I felt stupid, a little used and mostly ashamed. Very ashamed. I was not the type of girl who went out and behaved like this. I hadn’t just let myself down, but I had let my friends and family and anyone with any connection to raising me down.

I called my best friend again so, for my peace of mind, I could get the morning-after pill. I wanted to be safe. He drove me to the pharmacy where I could go, hungover and wearing boxers and a pea coat, to get it. I coughed up the money and took the pill, so at least I had that assurance. As for my sore parts, they didn’t stop hurting for a few weeks. And would be a few months before I could even wash that area and not feel disgust with myself.

The shaming came next. I returned to school that Monday and tried to act like nothing had happened. However, it was not to be so. I kept the story to myself for the most part, although some of my friends were in on it. And the boy was desperate to meet me for dinner or something to talk things over. I didn’t meet with him; I found the whole thing, then, too weird and uncomfortable.

“I need to talk to you about something,” the newspaper’s graphic designer approached me one day. He looked awkward and queasy.

“Yes?” I switched my attention from the Mac to him. He shifted.

“People know what happened. At Homecoming. When you blacked out.” I felt cheated. Like I was going to throw up. It took me awhile to get up from behind my computer, then.

I trusted the girl with the Christmas lights and marijuana who had taken me to his house. She was a close friend. We had talked a lot that summer. We hung out. We liked the same music. I trusted her. And she had been a witness to what had happened. Fine.

What was not fine was her telling the details to people I worked with. What was not fine was the story boomeranging back to me as if I was totally responsible. I recognize some of it was my fault, but what she had done was unacceptable.

“And she was whimpering the whole time and I was right there –”

“Do you think you should be talking about this?”

“Whatever, it was so funny!”

It ended up clearing itself up over time. She apologized, we went back to work, and I made peace with the boy, nervously at first, before the stretch of time made it more of a bearable event. However, the event itself overshadowed my sexual life since then. Shame has been a recurring theme in that area. When I eventually lost my virginity for real, I was torn and horrified over the experience. Whenever I had sex, the next morning left me in the same terror I had experienced as a confused girl in Pennsylvania with her jeans still on. Luckily for me, I was able to make peace with my sexual preferences and have been dating a lovely girl. It’s only now I’ve been able to embrace sex more positively than I ever have in the past. Some people never get to this place.

Shaming can occur on multiple levels, but issues involving sex make it so hurtful. For it’s at times like this we become most vulnerable. We are literally letting someone in. And I can see, when reading headlines about recent suicides spurred from shaming, what would drive these teens to this dark place. Sex such an intimate thing, and when it’s misused, the results are devastating. When it’s handled like a weapon and not an act of love, it’s damaging. When combined with mocking and insults, it crosses a line to unbearable. Who would want to live with that pain?

Granted, what I experienced is slight compared to what some of these young women(and young men, I’m sure) have gone through. We have to combat shaming on the smallest levels where it builds. When we insult the choices a person makes or we divulge personal information for the sake of “fun,” we’re shaming. When we tell someone her dress makes it look like she’s asking for something- shaming.

Although I don’t expect roses and butterflies, I’d like to read less about shaming’s consequences. And I’d like fewer people to associate the most personal parts of their life with guilt and remorse.

Hopefully, that’s not an impossible wish.