“I would fuck her, but you would have to put a pillow on that face!” the two boys did not notice I was about to round the corner of the school hallway when I heard them speak about me. I slowed down and listened to their fading voices. They were laughing. “if you press the pillow strong enough she passes out, it would be much easier” one said, the other laughed. “but what if I kill her?” and then their voices faded. I pressed my head against the cool wall of the hallway, it was hot that summer, maybe it was 2002. Maybe I was 13.
What is wrong with my face, I thought, looking down my body. The shame intensified. Familiar sensation.
This moment would be forgotten by me almost immediately and only remembered years later. Not because it was so violent, but because it was drowned in a sea of similar acts of violence, ignorance, objectification and sexualization that makes my upbringing a usual upbringing of a person socialized as a girl. Nothing about the incident was unusual, not even within my own experience but sure enough not in comparison to others.
The crude comments, the looks, talking about bodies disassociated with the people inhabiting them – and the burning shame of “am I not fuckable enough? Am I overreacting? Why do I feel so bad, nothing happen – and oh my god, I DID provoke it” would be the colours my life would be steeped in. And this is not a coincidence. It is systemic violence, in this case: Patriarchy.
In a 2024 report, two german scientists studied racism in schools, and, specifically, the role shame plays in it (Ruff/Petrik 2024). While the psychological functions of shame and the over-expression of it as a result of violence is well researched, sociologists have a hard time expanding the scope we understand shame in – while Pierre Bourdieu already argued that shame is a very obviously measurable phenomenon in the organization of societal injustice and difference, we just came around recently to ask what that means (if you want a nerdy paper on socialization and shame and Habitus and Marx, of course, Marx, then click here, where you find Bourdieu and shame, too)
Because shame, my little red face against the cold wall in a small city in the german summer heat, that is not a glitch in the system. It is systems working exactly as they should.
In their findings, the two scientists described shame as playing the role of a hinge between societal expectations and the persons individual psyche. The kids in the studies would react with shame when they would have a good grade. They would blame themselves when the teacher gave them a lower grade even when they were at the same level as their white classmates – a blatant act of racism. But the sting of it got internalized. The kids would internalize these acts as they themselves not being good enough, brave or strong. And if they suceeded, they felt even more shame, as they attributed their success to external forces and systems and not as theirs (an act of internal brutalization that has been described by Frantz Fanon as the internalization of colonial powers, that attribute the good of things to the colonizer).
Shame functions in three major ways: It makes sure that our desire to belong into a group, which is a biological need, is met. It corrects our behavior when we are outside of moral lines of ourselves or the group. And it upholds social systems and norms. The private emotion of having a hot face combined with a racing heart, the anxiety of trying to cope with not belonging is quietly doing a lot of the dirty work of systems of oppression.
And then there is the other problem: Avoiding shame is also playing into the hands of the powerful. Voting for the far right as an immigrant or insisting that people who are darker than you are more violent is not protecting you from racists but it will be protecting you from your shame, for the moment. Or, to stay in my own experience, slut shaming a woman that dresses in a way you think is more provocative will not change the fact that the chances of a woman getting sexually assaulted in her life is over 90%. Dressing is irrelevant. But shaming another person can temporarily relieve the thought that maybe it WAS my fault, wearing that dress. And while projecting shame is a more complicated issue than I just described, for systems of oppression it does not matter how I deal with it: They win.
Externalizing shame as blaming others or internalizing as feeling defect and small are reactions to a strong emotion. But they are also reactions to a strong system that silences the ones it hurts – and shame is the main function. It is instilled in oppressed people from childhood on. Early. Often.
5 years ago I got diagnosed with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) after domestic violence. One of the major symptoms is prolonged, intense shame. I got ashamed of all that makes me human – when I gave a grumpy answer to one of my employees, when a cup slipped out of my hand, when I did not pack the rain jacket into my kids backpack for the day. The shame would incapacitate me, sometimes for hours. I would gasp for the air of belonging, of knowing I am still worthy like a drowning person, scrambling, fighting. It was ugly.
But it was also not only my fight. One in 4 women experience domestic violence in Portugal every year. Last year, 26 women were killed and there were almost 30000 episodes of domestic violence. The fleeting joke of two boys in a hallway in 2002 are very real phantasies of men in 2026 and sometimes, they act on it. This is not my personal problem, it is systemic. But shame makes it so the hinge between my experience and the societal question is working in favour of the system. As long as I experience it as shameful, I will not speak. As long as the kids in the study think it is their fault when they fail and NOT their fault when they succeed, they will think it is their experience and not the design. Which keeps us from changing something.
Our shame when we experience systemic violence is not only a psychological reaction. Shame makes sure we do not adress the issue and cuts off our voices. Adressing shame, it seems to me, is adressing how we want to live with each other on a more sustainable level. It lifts the silence so we can see and hear what is happening, really. To all of us and not just some.
