Shame, that deep burning sensation that seems to dig all the way down to the core of who we are, is a feeling that journalist Melissa Petro is well acquainted with. In 2012, when she was teaching at a New York City elementary school, she published an op-ed in which she disclosed that she was a former sex worker. Overnight, she became the unwilling cover girl of the New York Post; the tabloid’s cruel, mocking coverage continued until she resigned months later.
It would be fair to think that Petro is uniquely qualified to speak on the subject of shame. But in Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, Petro insists that she is not unique. Shame is a weapon of control that has been deployed to great effect against women and femmes for centuries. Equal parts self-help, memoir and social investigation, Petro’s triumphant debut methodically presents how shame has pervaded almost every aspect of our lives, and offers up ways to free ourselves from it.
Differentiating shame from other emotions, like guilt and humiliation, Petro argues that shame causes us to believe there is something fundamentally flawed in how we are. She interviews a diverse group of women, including trans women and gender nonconforming nonbinary people, to capture a feeling both universal and deeply personal: Shy, a queer Black woman, describes how the early pressure she felt to be “a good, clean, god-fearing, heterosexual Christian” drove her to be suicidal. Ariel, a disability activist who has a facial disfigurement, shares how being pointed at in public elicits a reaction that she later feels ashamed about. Brazen, a fat woman who has experienced a lifetime of body shaming, found empowerment through sex work and “being paid to have my body worshipped, adored, cared for.”
In Shame on You, Petro invites us to get “quiet and curious” in our efforts to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.
