The Prices of Shame You are looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade.Obviously, that’s changed, but only recently.
It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk at the Forbes 30 Under 30 summit: 1,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30.That meant that in 1998,the oldest among the group were only 14,and the youngest, just 4.I joked with them that some might only have heard of me from rap songs.Yes, I’m in rap songs.Almost 40 rap songs.
But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened.At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy.I know, right? He was charming and I was flattered, and I declined.You know what his unsucceful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again.I realized later that night, I’m probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again.
At the age of 22, I fell in love with my bo, and at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn’t make s mistake or do something they regretted at 22? Yep.That’s what I thought.So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your bo.Unlike me though, your bo probably wasn’t the president of the United States of America.Of course life is full of surprise.
Not a day goes by that I’m not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply.In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was the swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before.Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio, or watching television.That was it.
But that wasn’t my fate.Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution.That meant we could acce all the information we wanted.， when we want it, anytime, anywhere, and when the story broke in January 1998.It broke online.It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the internet for a major news story, a click that reverberated around the world.
What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide.I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.This rush by judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers.Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, email stories, and, of course, email cruel jokes.News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspaper, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV.
Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret? Now, I admit I made mistakes,
1 especially wearing that beret.But the attention and judgment that I received, not the story, but that I personally received, was unprecedented.I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and of course, that woman.I was seen by many but actually known by few.And I get it: it was easy to forget that woman was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken.
When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it.Now we call it cyberbullying and online harament.Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change that result in le suffering for others.
In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity.I lost almost everything, and I almost lost my life.Let me paint a picture for you.It is September of 1998; I’m sitting in a windowle office room inside the office of the independent counsel underneath humming fluorescent lights.I’m listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before.I’m here because I’ve been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation.For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head.I mean, who can remember what they said a year ago? Scared and mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; listen as I confe my love for the president, and of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worse version of myself, a self I don’t even recognize.
A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congre, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it.That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough, but a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online.The public humiliation was excruciating.Life was almost unbearable.
This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by this, I mean the stealing of people’s private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public—public without consent, public without context, and public without compaion.
Fast forward 12 year to 2010, and now social media has been born.The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine, whether or not someone actually makes a mistake, and now it’s for both public and private people.The consequences for some have become dire, very dire.I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers University named Tyler Clementi.Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man.When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited.A few days later, Tyler jumped form the George Washington Bridge to his death.He was 18.My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn’t
2 quite understand, and then eventually I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.
Today, too many parents haven’t had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones.Too many have learned of their child’s suffering and humiliation after it was too late.Tyler’s tragic, sensele death was a turning point for me.It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different.In 1998, we had no way of knowing where the brave new technology called the internet would take us.Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways, joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolution, but the darkne, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed.Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day, and some, tragically, don’t, and there’s nothing virtual about that.
ChildLine, a U.K.nonprofit that’s focused on helping young people on various iues, released a staggering statistic late last year: From 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and emails related to cyberbullying.A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying.And you know what shocked me ,although it shouldn’t have, was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happine or even anger.
Cruelty to other is nothing new, but online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained, and permanently acceible.The echo of embarrament used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community, but now it’s the online community too.Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that’s a lot of pain, and there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade.There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and growth of the Internet has jacked up that price.
For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline.Goip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame.It’s led to desensitization and a permiive environment online which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy, and cyberbullying.This shift has created what Profeor Nicolaus Mills calls a culture of humiliation.Consider a few prominent examples just from the past six months alone.Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations and claims that its meages only have the lifespan of a few seconds.You can imagine the range of content that gets.A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the lifespan of the meages were hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos, and videos were leaked online to
3 now have a lifespan of forever.
Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered acro the Internet without their permiion.One goip website had over five million hits for this one story.And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking? The document which received the most attention was private emails that had maximum public embarrament value.But in this culture humiliation, there another kind of price tag attached to public shaming.The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others, notably women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community have paid, but the price measure the profit of those who prey on them.
This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently and ruthlely mined, packaged and sold at a profit.A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a community and shame is an industry.How is the money made? Clicks.The more shame the more clicks.The more clicks the more advertising dollars.We are in a dangerous cycle.The more we click on this kind of goip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it, and the more numb we get the more we click.All the while, someone is making money off the back of someone else’s suffering.
With every click, we make a choice.The more we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking, and online harament.Why? Because they all have humiliation at their cores.This behavior is a symptom of the culture we’ve created.Just think about it.
Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs.We’ve seen that be true with racism, homophobia, and plenty of other biases, today and in the past.As we’ve changed beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equal freedoms.When we began valuing sustainability more people began to recycle.So as far as our culture of our humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution.Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it’s time for an intervention on the Internet and in our culture.The shift began with something simple, but it’s not easy.We need to return to a long-held value of compaion—compaion and empathy.
Online, we’ve got a compaion deficit, and empathy crisis.Researcher Brene Brown said, and I quote, “Shame can’t survive empathy.”
Shame can’t survive empathy.I’ve seen some very dark days in my life, it was compaion and empathy from my family, friends, profeionals, and sometimes even strangers that saved me.Even empathy from one person can make difference.
The theory of minority influence proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there’s consistency over time, change can happen, in the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders.To become a upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone
4 or report a bullying situation.
Trust me, compaionate comments help abate the negativity.We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations that deal with this kind of iues, like the Tyler Clementi Foundation from the U.S. In the U.K.there’s Anti-bullying Pro, and in Australia, there’s Project Rockit.We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expreion, but we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expreion.We all wanna be heard, but let’s acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and peaking up for attention.
The Internet is the superhighway for the id, but online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world.We need to communicate online with compaion, consume news with compaion, and click with compaion.Just imagine walking a mile in someone else’s headline,.
I’d like to end on a personal note.In the past nine months, the question I had been asked most is why, why now, why was I sticking my head above the parapet? You can read between the lines in those questions, and answer is nothing to do with the politics.The top note answer was and is because it’s time; stop tip-toeing around my past; time to stop living a life of opprobrium; and time to take back my narrative.It’s also not just about saving myself,.Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing; you can survive it.i know it’s hard.It may not be painle, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story.Have compaion to yourself.We all deserve compaion.And to live both online and off in a more compaionate world.
Thank you for listening.
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