What does a mental breakdown, marital rape and domestic assault, and vile abuse of power have in common? The famous victims of all those calamities are all punchlines to early 2000s jokes: think Britney Spears, Loretta Bobbitt and Monica Lewinsky. And although I was not a celebrity, it was possible I would potentially get a taste of that dubious honour–of becoming a punchline–with Drunk Mom in the wings.
This is why I was not surprised when my editorial team had a special meeting with me before signing off on the book–they wanted to know if I was mentally and otherwise prepared for the fallout, they wanted to be honest with me about what to expect.
I wasn’t entirely sure, said the female editorial director in a soft voice about her decision to offer me a book deal, and I panicked. I looked at the serious faces seated at the table–hers, my agent’s, my acquiring editor, and the marketing person–and I pleaded. I pleaded because I panicked, because despite getting this close to signing, something in her voice told me that were I to even falter for a moment, she’d pull the plug. She wasn’t teasing. She was worried. She was worried about me more than she cared about a potentially money-making deal and it was clear her worry was indeed personal, that this was someone who believed she had my best interest at heart. At the same time, I thought she underestimated me because I was a lot tougher than I seemed; I was not clueless as to what I was getting into. So I dug my fingernails into my wrist under the conference-room table and told her and everyone else that yes, I was absolutely sure that I would be able to handle it all.
Briefly, I had a vision of one of my recurring doom scenarios where my son’s father packs a suitcase and leaves it on the porch for me, after changing locks to our house–I haven’t shown him the manuscript and decided I wouldn’t until it was already in proofreading. I’ve made a wonky kind of peace with that one. I’ve made peace with disappointing and embarrassing my parents who were hoping for a nice daughter with a real job. And I’ve made peace with the one where I would no longer be able to run for the office… like I never planned. Fuck it, I wanted to tell my truth–and not only my truth, there were many others like me–unlikable narrators, degenerates, drunk moms, traumatized big children– and I had a way to tell this truth, I believed in my writing. From the beginning it was clear to me that the cost of getting my foot in the door of publishing this way meant that I understood any future personal or public consequences of having a memoir like no other out there in which I repeatedly admitted to being a mother who drank while taking care of an infant. I knew that there would be people who would miss nuance, who would not be sympathetic to my plight as someone dealing with mental-health issues and addiction, who would hate me because I admitted to those things without trying to sugar-coat; people who would hang onto the book’s title too (in itself a self-deprecating tongue-in-cheek choice that the sales team thought was wonderful and provoking enough to ensure even more attention, negative attention included).
I managed to convince the female editor, I convinced everyone in the room and I signed the contract, took that useless media-training class and doubled-down on AA meetings (a place that itself is built around a shaming culture but more on that another time) to mentally prepare for what was about to come.
The journalists who referred to me as “brave” were more of a surprise than the ones who shat all over my book; today I believe they were ahead of their time. The ones who didn’t worry about my character but rather the story and the writing were the most advanced of them all, like the journalist for the Toronto Star who wrote, "[Bydlowska] floated over her personal landscape like a drone and then dropped ordnance on herself”--one of the most discerning sentences regarding my intention. She wasn’t alone in “getting it” but it was the negative reception that was the most telling–and not of what I had done (drank, wrote, published), but of where I was doing it and on what timeline. A timeline that came on the heels of those media punchlines where Loretta Bobbit’s desperate act of castrating her abuser was seen as grotesque and hilarious (the husband was acquitted from charges of marital rape and went on making a name in the porn industry along with his re-attached penis), and where where famous young women getting sloppy in public (Tara Reid, Paris Hilton, Lauren Hill), shaving their heads (Britney Spears), stealing t-shirts (Winona Ryder), passing out drunk (Lindsay Lohan), sucking powerful dicks (Monica Lewinsky), or dying (Anna Nichole Smith) were getting ridiculed for their behaviour that in 2023 looks like an obvious and blatant cry for help.
I used to say in interviews that the negative reception was as useful if not more useful than the positive one (my official soundbite/ party line was the “opening dialogue about addiction” one), and 10 years later I can expand on this by saying that the media reaction was an excellent way to showcase how people in general viewed mental-health and addiction back then. I signed the book deal in 2011, the year when the singer Amy Winehouse succumbed to alcoholism after a few short brutal and painful public years of dying from it, so often mocked by the media her death felt like a relief. And if the media's reaction is a byproduct of its times, in 2013 when my book actually came out, those negative reactions were the most valuable insight as to the general attitudes we all held about the issues I talked about. A journalist by training, I joked I didn’t even have to tell but show because I had already shown (via publishing the book and letting the sharks swim close) what the problem was. My masochistic choice to use myself as the tool of that showing, again, was a sacrifice I was happy to make to make it.
Because, again, my main motivation was to be a published writer, and being a part of the media myself, I could never see myself as a victim. A graduate of a prestigious journalism school, I entered the shark-pool more consciously than not. I had a double diploma (psychology and journalism) in knowing how to “trip-up” my subjects through applying various interviewing techniques. In j-school, it was drilled into us that our job was to exploit the poor suckers who agreed to sit down for a profile. My first serious journalistic piece was writing about Frank, a satirical magazine whose bread-and-butter was ridiculing public Canadians. I applied similar techniques Frank used when writing about Frank itself starting that particular piece with a shocking conversation between its publishers who talked about making fun of people with cancer. The publishers, a well-respected former business journalist (for the same publication that later slapped my memoirst face on its front page), and a well-respected former features editor (same paper), got used to my comings-and-goings as I worked on my story, and paid no attention to me sitting there recording that particular candid, damning banter. I was given access, I did nothing wrong, I was never even told any of it was off-record either (and it wouldn’t matter; off-record protects you from nothing legally; it’s up to the journalist’s own ethics whether to honour it or not). I hundred-percent set out to trip up my subjects; I knew my professors would be pleased. Getting dirt on your subjects was the name of the game, writing about shameful behaviour guaranteed a good story.
Back then I worshiped a publication like VICE magazine that doubled and tripled in giving coverage to all freaks and illuminating the most scandalous side of human behaviour, from glorifying extreme drug use or unusual sexual practices to publishing a whole “special” issue that featured articles about people with mental disabilities. But VICE was ahead of its time as well, exposing its subjects but really exposing the audience in how they reacted to that which was diverting from the norm. They were showing us although it was often hard to differentiate which parts of VICE held up a mirror to the society, and which were just fucking with us for the price of shock value. What all of those media and the j-school lessons ensured was that we, young journalists, understood that we had to be tough and cunning in order to get interesting stories and mercy didn’t have a place in journalism. I felt zero mercy for the publishers of Frank–especially Frank who had zero mercy for its subjects–we all understood the rules and if they were sloppy enough to forget that the mic was on, that wasn’t my problem.
Ten years after my Frank piece, the journalist interviewing me for the profile applied her own true-and-tried trip-up technique–she lowered her voice, arranged her face into a mask of concern and shared that back in her day mothers didn’t reveal how much they struggled while they raised their kids. She confessed that she herself struggled as well, that things got dark. She sounded wistful, commiserating, and suddenly she seemed like a friend, not like a scary lady who wanted to write a juicy story.
I knew what she was doing. Besides journalism, I’ve also studied interviewing techniques during my psychology degree and this particular technique–using common language, practicing active listening, soft eye contact, offering reflective statements (or in this case relatable ones)–was a classic. And yet–and yet, with my media training, with my educational background and with my innate good bullshit detector and even with my willingness to swim (funnily enough, the journalist referred to herself as “wolf in sheep’s skin” when talking about tripping me up in the story), I did get fooled. But did I? After all, I knew what to expect because we–me and the journalist–were very much a product of the public-shaming years. And in 2015 I wrote and published a public rebuttal (Drunk Mom Calls Out Her Haters, The Fix magazine) after my editor asked me if I wanted to use my platform to shame back. What I didn’t know was that having a platform wouldn’t matter so much soon, at least not when it comes to using it to expose those supposedly in the wrong. I thought I had a unique opportunity with my rebuttal to clap back although I was also aware of appearing petty so as before, I told myself I was doing this for others who didn’t have a voice: the faceless, nameless other drunks, moms, freaks that couldn’t clap back; I almost convinced myself that I was noble in my intentions. But what I was really after was getting back at the media who treated me badly, I wanted my revenge–I loved the power I got back temporarily. I loved having control back. My public rebuttal was ahead of its time, but soon everyone and their dog (with the most followers) would have a chance to get attention.
It’s also crucial to point out that although I took so much of it personally, none of it was personal, me writing about Frank magazine and those who wrote about my perceived transgressions were only chasing a story. We probably can’t name the people who made the jokes about Loretta Bobbit, Monica Lewinsky or Anna Nicole Smith; it was a collective effort of the media to make sure that the stories were juicy and giving a prescriptive on how to see those people (as bad) was done intentionally in order to ensure readership–there was no offered insight as to why the subjects acted the way they did, and very little compassion. There’s nothing more exciting than a scandal and scandalizing a troubled behaviour makes for a readable copy. There were a few gossip print and online journalists (Perez Hilton stands out) who made it their job to judge and ridicule and who became famous for it, but for the most part the shaming happened not because of a personal vendetta or a journalist wanting to elevate themselves by putting their subject down. My profiler had never met me before; her getting a story out of me was harsh but it was not because she went out of her way to get me. (The one pointed jab came from a writer who didn’t like me but the jab–”The Land of Victimization” etc.–was instantly recognized as bitter and personal.)
The media landscape was thorny and it was unforgiving; there was no coddling back of drunk moms, questionable rape victims, messy or different people. If you were different, you were fucked, you were a freak. In film and tv representation your difference meant you were going to be a butt of a joke. Starting with folks with intellectual disabilities (in the 2005 comedy The Ringer the word “retard,” or “feeb” are par for the course, movies like Tropic Thunder, The Other Sister, Rain Man, even Forest Gump all rely on vast stereotypes about people with intellectual disabilities), to sexual orientation or gender dysmporphia (try to think of a comedy from 2000s where a man dressing up as a ridiculous woman is not a trope), to people with curves who were almost exclusively relegated to comedies, and people of colour who were at the most playing sidekicks to their white co-stars unless they were playing criminals (in case of the Indigenous people they weren’t even trusted to play themselves; that’s what Johnny Depp was for).
Personal or not, it was scary out there if you didn’t fit in, whether you (like me) were a sore thumb who understood you stuck out, or not.
This is not to say that public shame is a thing of the past. In fact it’s the opposite–in 2023 public shaming is the people’s most powerful social weapon. It’s a weapon that can–faster than ever before–destroy reputations in minutes, instantly end people’s careers, a weapon that can lead to total and utter ostracization. In psychology, purposeful shaming is an act known to as deliberately setting out to destroy someone’s social standing by threatening that standing within a given community through specific actions–such as exposing them, calling them out, criticizing–or “where shame is purposely induced and manifested; that is, where someone is shamed publicly by someone else,” as defined in the 2020 study, Making Public Shame Bearable and Entertaining: Ritualised Shaming in Reality Television (Martin Hájek, Daniel Frantál, Kateřina Simbartlová). In purposeful shaming two broad categories have been distinguished: degradative and situational shaming. What happened with public shaming of the yesteryears and what happens now is probably closer to degradative shaming, where, “the primary goal is to remove the person’s actual identity and replace it with a much less socially valuable one (temporarily or permanently) as a consequence of his or her alleged misconduct.”
Today it’s not just the media who are wielding this weapon. In fact, the media had to step back significantly, giving way to the people, specifically social media. These days, most purposeful shaming in the media happens in the form of commentary, op-eds, or what is colloquially known as “thinkpieces” written by various journalists and non-journalists (you no longer need any particular accreditation to do this job) trying to sway the public’s opinion by presenting well–and not-so-well–thought-through arguments. But by the time those curated pieces get published they’re mostly old “news;” the real action exists on socials where the regular people are (journalists too but on Twitter the funny gerbil with the most followers has more power than the guy who runs the newsroom). That’s also where opinions sway wildly, in real-time, and in great numbers: picture a FIFA-World Cup crowd during the penalty shots and if you’re unfamiliar with this image, picture any spectator crowd during any last-minute that will decide the final score and a winner. It is often that intense and there’s often that much at stake–and even when there isn’t, public shaming and calling each other out–rightfully or not–is a past-time anyone can engage in. And the real claws and teeth come out when there’s a contentious issue at hand, and especially when there’s an opportunity to school others, to judge and to take down a notch or two those who stepped out. What gets shamed these days might be different but the mechanism stays the same; the shamers have changed but their tactics haven’t and although they are no longer the gatekeeping media types, many of them are just as dangerous–even (and especially?) if they’re on the currently correct side of things.
The court of public opinion is a term formerly only used in the context of news media, referring to how news media had the power to influence the public opinion when it came to actual legal (court) cases. This was problematic from the beginning since there’s no such thing as objective, unbiased media and in fact most media is corrupt (this is not a conspiracy theory; even grassroot media that rely on public donation will eventually be swayed in allegiances by the majority which donates the most). What social media offers is a democratic way of shaming each other. Unless they have a large following, the former gatekeepers–the profile writers, the old-school journalists, the academics–are no longer in charge of deciding who needs to be taken down.
Do you need to be anything special to have the power to shame? Absolutely not. All you need is to have eyes on you. Whether you’re Nice or Not Nice, your power usually lies in numbers (but a Tweet from a “nobody” can get a lot of traction, go viral if it’s shocking enough). As for the content, you can try to do shaming on a large scale–for example, by putting someone on blast, complete with evidence for why they should get shamed–or you can just voice your never-ending displeasure with people who are different from you, and make bold statements about why they’re trash.
Right on, rightyon! Excellent analysis. Our one common bond on social media is that we're all employing and/or subjected to dark psychology pratices, including Shame.