Helen continues her advance on the heights of literary society by getting paid to blog ’bout ha’ obsessions. Shame culture, as ever, is on the agenda, as today Ms Rittelmeyer applauds the cashier who told a teenager trying to buy a pregnancy test that “you shouldn’t be having sex in the first place”. Helen has long championed “shame culture” over “guilt culture”, a distinction known to popular parlance ever since ER Dodds identified Homeric society as a “shame society” (even if JT Hooker’s analysis of Iliad threatened to prove him wrong). According to Helen, in a moral society, there should be no “freedom from shame”. The problem is that the example she has picked to illustrate it, on further examination, actually illustrates shame failing to police the teenage sexual activity that Helen so deplores.
According to Helen’s argument, teenagers should cease a behavioural practice simply because other people will express disapproval (which is why Benedict, in her groundbreaking study of shame culture in Japan, defined it as fundamentally collectivist social trait). Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question 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”.
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. You can’t rely on pregnancy itself being shameful. Sexual acts only take place in the presence of people who approve of them. So the only way in which a disapproving spectator can be philosophically introduced is through belief in God. It is possible to teach people to feel shame in the sight of God.
And isn’t that what we Christian cultures just call guilt?
Agreed, mostly. This wouldn’t discourage the sex, just sexual health, already no doubt a huge barrier for a 15 year old.
If we’re to agree (which, according to a conversation on the porch, Helen does) that parents shouldn’t be doing shaming, and given your analysis that it doesn’t make much sense for people selling you items necessary for your sexual health, from whence shall the shame flow? It does seem like there’s a certain amount of shame you’d feel from walking down the street at 15 with a pregnant belly - and that I’m willing to concede that you should feel. And it doesn’t seem like the shame you feel walking down the street when strangers look at you is really as a result of the thoughts of the strangers, but as a result of broader social norms. How those norms come about and are maintained is the interesting and important question, I think.