shame

Something weird happened in school yesterday that I only thought about when I crawled into bed late last night.

In class, we were talking about a segment from Primetime Live, which I showed in the context of helping the kids understand the Milgram experiments. The series showcased a recent news story in which a McDonald's employee, a female high school student, was cruelly tricked into being strip-searched by her manager and the manager's security guard boyfriend because the girl thought a cop on the telephone was ordering her to do it by proxy.

As it turns out, it was a scam perpetuated by the security guard, who wanted to humiliate the girl and intimidate her into giving him oral sex, which she did, because she terrified and thought it might get her out of trouble. The "cop" on the phone was some kind of accomplice; the manager, who was a woman, claimed to not know it wasn't a real cop and got fired. The security guard got five years in prison.

The angle of the story was an exploration of how people are so afraid of authority, they find themselves doing all kinds of things they wouldn't "normally" do...that even the idea of a cop, not even in the room, could have a girl disrobe and do a degrading act without even questioning it. It's very disturbing.

At first, a lot of the kids dismissed the story, saying the girl was abnormally stupid, that no one of average intelligence would tolerate those outrageous orders. "It's just McDonald's. She could just say, I'm leaving, I quit," they all said. That led the discussion towards the idea that our fear of authority is so deeply ingrained it overrides those logical notions, that maybe this girl decided at one point she'd do anything to not lose her job for whatever psychological or economic reasons, etc. Typical class discussion pattern, but a few levels up in intensity.

It got interesting when one very bright girl pointed out that girls do all kinds of crazy things to keep the attention and approval of boys, and that men don't understand that women spend their whole lives in fear of them, because women can be raped by men (they have that one crucial thing to lord over us, their physical strength which can come out of nowhere and hurt us). In other words, for women, men have a kind of institutional "authority" that somehow enables them to issue orders that even the most intelligent women find themselves following.

It kind of blew everyone's minds, and everyone started talking at once. Everyone resisted her at first-- typical "I-don't-want-to-believe-the-world-is-like-that" denial. But I was pleased at the level of discussion.

So pleased, I found my tongue loosening, and confessed something to the class I never shared before with anyone, with the exception of my husband. Even with him, I hadn't really touched upon the long lasting and complicated effects of the experience.

I found myself telling the class a very general version of this story:

There was this guy I used to sometimes date; I was so enamored of the idea of having a boyfriend and keeping him as my boyfriend, that is, keeping his approval of me, that I tolerated certain behaviors there is no way in hell I would tolerate now. Not "abuse" in the very obvious, after-school special way, but the other kind of abuse, the subtle kind, the most scary kind, because they don't really know how to teach girls how to detect it, because it oddly overlaps with behaviors that don't seem, on the surface, to be abusive. He used to pinch me, for example, and when I would tell him to stop, he would keep doing it, and call me a baby, suggesting that it was my problem and not his. He used to hold me down and tickle me, which I always hated, and seemed to take pleasure in it. I look back on myself back then, and I'm ashamed that it went on too long before I broke up with him, that I wasn't self-actualized enough to understand that I don't have to be treated that way, that I own my body, and that I don't have to submit to anything that violates my own code of how I should be treated.

Like the McDonald's girl in the news story looking back on herself on the security tape--later used to convict the security guard-- I can't believe what I did (or didn't do) because I was...intimidated? Afraid? Weak? Vulnerable? I am in awe at her courage in the sense that she spoke openly to the media about her ordeal. She knew people would say, "that wouldn't be me, I would never be that dumb."

I told the class, looking back on my own experience, I wish I could go back and be stronger then, but I think all of us of capable of disappointing ourselves in that regard. The power dynamic of authority and submission is very complicated, but of course, being educated about it ensures that we can break out the pattern.

When the bell rang, I felt totally nervous. Had I gone far, gotten too personal? It just happened. Sometimes when you're teaching, you forget about the persona and become your "real" self, for better or worse. That story is something I think I sort of buried. How strange it should get unearthed in the classroom where I typically construct my identity in a very specific way: knowledgeable (hopefully), understanding, sometimes zany...but never the 'real' me.

I'm calling this posting "shame" because I think shame is what informs every source of angst I've ever had: the long and twisted history of my body, and how I usually loathe it. My stubborn refusal to believe my husband when he says I'm pretty. And always...the distrust and dismissal of men, whom I sometimes find, unfairly, to be sources of the world's injustices.

Last night, I had an allergic reaction of some kind. I got these irritating little hives and started scratching. Dan applied cortisone cream to my back with this wonderful, feather-light touch. With this tenderness so much a part of his nature, it was like his wife was made of paper.