An excerpt from the Shame chapter of
Beyond the Blame Game

Shame for Girls

Boys and girls, and the men and women they become, learn to become ashamed in different ways. In the groups I work with, women often report that when they were children, authority figures told them that there were things they simply couldn't do because they were girls. This caused them to feel ashamed. They weren't allowed to help Dad or Brother tinker with the car; instead, they had to do the laundry. They couldn't join in when the men in the family went hunting because it was "man's work" and "no place for girls." Having to be dainty and lady-like taught them that women are frail and helpless. Well-meant dismissals such as "Don't worry your pretty little head about it," left them feeling stupid. When they looked for powerful or successful role models of women, they saw that almost every person who had political or financial power was male. All these factors conspired to teach girls that there was something inherently wrong with females that made it impossible for them to achieve as well as men did. Not long ago, there were almost no examples of women achieving in business or politics. It is understandable how a little girl, seeing that, might wonder about female inferiority in effectiveness, and might feel ashamed of being female.

Such shame is not always immediately visible. One friend of mine related a conversation she had with her mother. They agreed that they weren't interested in spending time with women, because women were boring while men were interesting. It wasn't until much later that she realized how her negative assessment of women also applied to her, and caused her to feel shame.

This shame is something women have to fight against in themselves. For many women this shame is always present, ready to tell them, "Of course you failed. Why don't you give up? You can't do it, anyway." Years ago, before there were examples of successful women in business and politics, giving up-if they ever tried at all-is exactly what many women did, without ever knowing why.

Confronting and overcoming this shame has been one of the accomplishments of the women's movement. While only a few short decades ago there were almost no female role models of "success," this is no longer true. Now, in every walk of life, a girl can find women who are successful and powerful. From doctors and prime ministers to astronauts and Supreme Court justices, women have taken on roles that even ten years ago were closed to them, and a generation ago were unthinkable for them to pursue. New laws and programs have forced changes in the workplace that guarantee women the equal right to strive for success. While there is still sexism in the workplace and in politics that women must overcome, the progress made in the last twenty or thirty years is staggering. A little girl can now easily find female figures to inspire her about her possibilities and opportunities for the future.

While there used to be major educational and professional bias against women, times have changed. According to Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education at the U.S. Department of Education, girls have more of a future to look forward to than ever before. In 1970, 41 percent of college students were female. By 1992, 55 percent of college students were female. In 1970, women earned 14 percent of all Ph.D.s; in 1990 they earned 37 percent. In 1970, women received only 5 percent of all law degrees; in 1989, women earned 41 percent of all law degrees. In dentistry, women in 1970 earned less than one percent of the degrees awarded. In 1989, that figure had risen to 26 percent. Such an increase has occurred in medicine, as well. In 1970, women earned eight percent of medical degrees. In 1989, women earned 33 percent of all medical degrees. Notes Ravitch, "In every professional field, women have made large strides toward full equality, and in some cases-such as pharmacy and veterinary medicine-women have become the majority in what was previously a male-dominated profession."

Clearly, a women's place is no longer simply in the home. Now, as one bumper sticker says, "A women's place is in the House. And the Senate."

Shame for Boys

Boys are socialized into a different kind of shame. Girls and women have traditionally been taught to believe they are defective in their ability to do things properly, which caused them shame. Boys and men, on the other hand, learn to believe that they are defective in their morality, and in their ability to relate, love, and feel emotions properly. This causes a very different but equally devastating shame for men.

In the groups I work with, men often report that, as boys, authority figures told them that they were bad, born trouble-makers, and naturally immoral. After all, as the saying goes, "Boys will be boys!" While the girls were "sugar and spice and everything nice," boys found out they were "slugs and snails and puppy dog's tails." (I remember as a boy thinking, "Why do I have to be the slugs and snails? Why can't I be the 'everything nice'?") One 14-year old boy I know says that "In school, girls are better than boys. The teachers always believe the girls, but almost never believe the boys." Boys get in more trouble than girls do. Of all special education students, 69 percent are boys, and boys are more often held back a grade than are girls. They have a harder time sitting still, and often seem to learn better by doing, rather than by reading or listening. Instead of adapting to the different needs of boys, schools label them as trouble-makers, or hyperactive, or as having Attention Deficit Disorder. These labels teach boys what my young friend is learning: in terms of "goodness," boys are inferior. Such messages produce shame.

The men I've worked with further report that they often had to do the strenuous, dirty or dangerous work, such as changing the oil in the car, mowing the lawn, or shoveling snow, while their sisters got to stay inside. Having to be tough, uncomplaining high-achievers ultimately taught them that men are brutish and unfeeling, only caring about the ends, not about the means. And, when boys looked for powerful, happy, positive role models of men, they saw only tough, high-achieving superhero/killers, and a world in which men did most of the crime, violence, and abuse of women. All these factors conspire to teach boys that there is something inherently wrong with males that makes it impossible for them to feel, be sensitive, or relate as well as females do. It's understandable that a boy, seeing this, might wonder about male moral inferiority, and might feel an unspoken shame about being male.

Shame About Not Achieving Well Enough

Boys are subjected to massive and unrelenting pressure to perform and to divorce themselves from their feelings. A boy who is hurt is rarely told "It's okay to cry." Even if he is, so many other messages tell him that "big boys don't cry," that whatever crying he does is tinged with shame. More often, boys do as they are told: "Be a man." "Shake off the pain." "Be brave." "Pitch through your tears." "Don't be a girl." "Don't be a sissy." "What are you, scared?" Boys are rewarded for toughness, and punished for tenderness. This teaches boys to be ashamed of their feelings, and to divorce themselves from them. For boys and for the men they become, feelings get in the way.

Today there are more options for boys to feel and express their feelings than there used to be. However, our culture is still more sensitive to the messages we send about girls' feelings than we are to the messages we send about boys'. Even Sesame Street, the popular forward-thinking, anti-stereotyping children's show, treats female characters with more sensitivity than male characters. "We're immediately criticized if we make a female character the object of a joke," says former executive producer Dulcy Singer, "but we feel perfectly free to do that with our male Muppet characters." Issues affecting girls and how they feel about women are still generally treated with more sensitivity than issues affecting boys and how they feel about men.

Shame about Loving "Wrong"

Not surprisingly, boys who are taught to repress their feelings grow up to be unfeeling in relationships. The "feeling shame" that boys experience leads directly to the shame men feel later in life around their intimate relationships.

Boyhood shame is compounded by all the messages which tell men they are bad at loving, and don't feel emotions properly. There is certainly no shortage of books about what is wrong with men in relationships. Consider the popularity of the books like Men Who Can't Love; Why Men Can't Open Up; Cold Feet: Why He Won't Commit; Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them; The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up; Successful Women, Angry Men; Women Who Love Too Much; Smart Women, Foolish Choices; and Sexual Static: How Men are Confusing the Women They Love. For those who have somehow missed the books, it is a common topic on daytime television talk shows. Men just do not love right: women, the media, and a great number of men all say so. This constant assertion creates shame in men.

In spite of all the hubbub about how men do not or cannot share their feelings in relationships, men's lives pressure them to ignore their feelings. Mother, father, family, bosses, women-many people punish boys and men for feeling, and reward them for performing. It is dizzying, then, for a man to survive boyhood, having learned not to cry, to laugh at pain, to give up what he really wants in order to succeed-in essence, to destroy his own humanity-only to hear a woman tell him "Open up! Show me your feelings!" Too late! He cannot get to his feelings anymore, and he will need skilled help to find them. It is a sad fact that boys hear the message "Close up! Hide your feelings!" only to grow up to hear "Open up! Show your feelings!" Most men become emotionally immobilized by this double-bind, in which they are ashamed if they do feel and ashamed if they don't.

With this in mind, we can understand a major difficulty in relationships between men and women. Women demand that men share their feelings, and men, ashamed, have no idea how. This sometimes makes women so angry that they try to make men share their feelings by applying shame. Rock singer Madonna advises women to "make him express what he feels, and then you'll know your love is real," as if he were holding back his feelings simply to be irritating. When a woman tries to shame or coerce a man into sharing his feelings, she compounds his sense of being emotionally defective, and makes him shut down even more. The woman stays angry, and the man stays withdrawn and ashamed.

This already-serious problem is compounded by something I have seen many times: When men who have been emotionally repressed for a long time finally get in touch with their feelings, the first feeling they experience may not the kind of loving, intimate feeling most women want to see. The first emotion many men feel is anger.

When a woman says to a man, "Tell me your feelings," she probably hopes to hear a tender "I love you," not a fierce "I'm really, really angry!" or a whining "I'm feeling really ashamed." Often, anger and humiliation are all a man has to share. Whether he chooses to share nothing at all or whether he shares the "wrong" feelings, people see it as confirmation that men do not experience feelings properly. Either way, a man is left feeling ashamed of himself.

While women get the message "You can't do things right," men get the message, "You don't feel properly. There is something wrong with the way you love. Your emotions aren't right." This is a devastating, deeply shaming message for men.

Shame by Affiliation

Men also learn shame from seeing shameful acts done by other men. Just as girls looked at women's lack of leadership and political power and concluded that women were naturally powerless, boys look at the violence and abuse that men commit, and conclude that men are naturally bad. This happens because of a process called affiliation.

We all have a tendency to affiliate ourselves with groups of people who are similar to us. In sports, for instance, when our team wins we feel happy, and when it loses we feel sad. We are affiliated with them, and what they do affects how we feel. We feel affiliated with our country, or with our ethnic group, or with the people of our class or race, or who live in our geographical area. As result of these affiliations, their behavior can affect us and how we feel about ourselves. We can be proud of our country, we can feel proud of our race or class, and we can be proud of the area in which we live, taking offense if people insult the people of our state or region. We can also be ashamed of what the groups we feel affiliated with do. Many people find this out when they discover they feel ashamed of some of their government's actions. Some white people feel guilty about what whites have done to people of other races. Some wealthy people feel ashamed of the oppressive actions of the rich. Our desire to be part of something bigger draws us into identifying ourselves with the people we are similar to, for better and for worse.

We also feel a natural sense of affiliation with our gender. Many of us have seen how easy it is for men and women to become polarized into groups which struggle against one another. When conversation turns to relationships or gender issues, suddenly the women band together defending womens' point of view, and the men band together defending the mens'. We naturally and unconsciously affiliate with other members of our sex. In this way, when girls and women see how women behave, they develop feelings about themselves as women. Similarly, when boys and men see how men behave, they also develop feelings about themselves as men.

Un-Role Models

Children learn about themselves from the role models in their lives, and their identities suffer when those role models are missing. While girls and women now have role models of powerful, struggling victims, boys and men see absent or "deadbeat" fathers, destructive male "heroes," and men hurting women and damaging the world. In the United States in 1994, there were more than 7.6 million mother-headed households with no father present, compared to 1.3 million father-only households and 25 million married couples with children. This fatherless status is no small problem for millions of children, both boys and girls. Furthermore, in fatherless households, little boys are all too often told, "You have to be strong. You're the man of the house now." For a boy who needs to be "big" in such a family, feelings get in the way. Even at a young age, he will suppress his neediness and terror, and become an emotionless Little Man.

In families where the father is physically present, he is often functionally absent. He may be emotionally vacant behind the newspaper or in front of the TV, or he may be always away at work, supporting the family financially but never really with the family. Many of the men I work with say that their fathers were "there, but not really there." From this they learned that "men are absent," and "men don't give emotionally." Ultimately they may say, as a man at one of my trainings said, "I learned from my dad that the best way I could love my children was to stay away from them."

Shame about What Men Do

While girls and women see other women oppressed or overcoming oppression, boys and men see other men who are oppressors. They see corrupt men in business and government, repressing others to fulfill their own grandiose fantasies. They see emotionally absent and abusive men in relationships. They see men starting and fighting in wars. They see men committing most of the crime, violence, and atrocities. They see men raping, oppressing, and abusing women. They see men destroying the environment and poisoning "Mother Earth." Seeing what men do-and what they, by affiliation, are doing-compels men toward shame.

There are few examples of men really feeling, nurturing, having relationships they love, and being powerful men. There are few examples of men who are actually proud of being male. At the same time, there are many examples of men hurting women and damaging the environment. It's understandable that little boys, and the men they become, might wonder about male inferiority in morals and feelings. Just as it's easy for women to see women as struggling victims, it's also easy for men to see men as hurtful predators and abusers of women.

Sexual Shame

On top of all of this shame, our society and our upbringing shames sexuality in men and in women. Our culture teaches a growing boy to divorce himself from his sexuality-to desire sex, but to feel ashamed of that desire. Many girls, on the other hand, learn not to desire sex, to be ashamed of the minimal desire they allow themselves, and to be disgusted by male desires. Parents would worry if a teenage boy had no interest in "sowing his wild oats," yet at the same time they teach him to be ashamed of and to hide those very desires. When men talk about the shame they learned about their sexuality, they often say they were taught that "If you want to be lovable, you shouldn't want to do that to girls." To be good, and to stay connected with their mothers' love and approval-and, by extension, to stay connected with women's love and approval-boys often condemn the sexual part of themselves.

Sexuality embodies a wide range of desires, most of which our moralistic culture tells men they shouldn't have if they want to be "good" men. To be "good," a man shouldn't want sex without commitment, shouldn't want a variety of lovers, shouldn't want to be too experimental, shouldn't enjoy sex magazines or videos, and should "heal" (meaning get rid of) the "kinky" parts of his sexuality. All of these desires are routinely labeled by women in men's lives as "disgusting," "sick," or "perverted." To maintain their emotional connection with these women, men learn to be ashamed of themselves and to call their sexuality "bad." We will explore sexual shame and other sexual issues in more detail in Chapter 7. For now, we will simply note that our society encourages and forces men to split from themselves, and to call the sexual parts of their psyche "bad."

How Shame Has Affected Men

The Day America Told the Truth, the largest study of morality ever undertaken in the United States found that "in America, women are morally superior to men. This is true all across the country-everywhere, in every single region, on every moral issue tested. Both sexes say so emphatically." This finding is far from trivial. Almost everyone emphatically believes that women are morally superior to men. It's easy to imagine that this belief could be just as shaming to men as the belief that "women can't be leaders" has been to women. But the belief that women are poor leaders is being destroyed: the same study concludes that "the implication, of course, is that women should be looked to for leadership in this country." Men's need to unceasingly and unfeelingly achieve, the lack of good male role models and the abundance of bad ones, the stereotype that men don't feel emotions properly, and women's dissatisfaction with men-all these factors teach men to be ashamed of their moral inferiority to women.

Men haven't been nearly as successful as women have been in overcoming shame. Shame still profoundly affects men in the areas where they are most disempowered: around feelings and relationships. This shame is something that men will have to fight against in themselves, just as women fought against their achievement shame. For many men this shame is always floating in their unconscious mind, ready to tell them, "Of course you messed up this relationship. Of course women are unhappy with you. Of course you are a perpetrator: look at what men have done. Why don't you give up on being a good person? Why don't you give up on being a loving father? Just go back to making money." Sadly, many men do give up on themselves as good, feeling people, without even knowing they are giving up. While women have healed much-though certainly not all-of their shame, men have healed hardly any of theirs at all.

The Unfelt Emotion

How can it be that people feel an emotion as powerful as shame, and not know it? Actually, most people have had the experience of "discovering" a feeling they didn't know they had. Many of us have realized that we've carried anger or grief we didn't know about. Most of us have experienced realizing how much we loved or cared for someone only when they have died, left us, or moved away. We spend so much of our lives involved in external activities that our feelings sometimes remain a mystery. This is especially true for men, whom society punishes severely for being in touch with feelings, and whom society rewards for ignoring pain and "getting things done."

Shame is a feeling that even many "emotionally literate" men carry with them, yet know nothing about. I felt ashamed of being a man for years, and never knew it. Shame is an emotion that by its nature stays hidden. We have to look for evidence of it in our other feelings, our beliefs, and our behavior. Grief, joy, anger, and even fear can be shared with a sense of dignity and pride, but shame compels us to hide, to crawl under a rock, to get away-to do anything but share the feeling with others.

Shame is a difficult emotion to pin down. Many people respond to shame by withdrawing. For these people, the feeling of shame is the feeling of nothing. But just as other feelings we aren't aware of can affect our behavior and well-being, unfelt shame affects men. Men who go for years feeling little or nothing have often had their feelings extinguished by a heavy, wet blanket of shame.