by Jon Ronson
Donna handed him the remote control. He pressed the button. Nothing happened.
‘Turn it off and turn it on again,’ said Donna. He did. Then he pressed the button. Jodi Taylor screamed.
(Later, during a break from filming, a few crowd members expressed doubt that there really was electricity coursing through the pads and into Jodi Taylor’s genitals, so one of them placed the pad against her hand and pressed the button and shrieked. Later still I got an email from Jodi Taylor: ‘Obviously if something like public disgrace happened to me in real life it’d be extremely intense, horrifying and awful. But that’s the beauty of porn. You can actually do these crazy things without actually doing them. It’s all make-believe. It’s pure fantasy and a fantasy is never humiliating or scary. It’s awesome. Princess Donna is all about making the PORN GIRL’s fantasy come alive far more than the fantasy of the people viewing it. Only with her can you have a fantasy as taboo as gang bang or public disgrace and actually get to live it out, while being completely safe and comfortable.’)
Shylar Cobi had told me that the crowd was comprised of friends and friends of friends, with one exception. A hired porn actor was mingling amongst us. And now he emerged and started having sex with Jodi Taylor. At this everyone became a bit bolder, if still slightly stilted. ‘Put ice on her tooth,’ a man shouted. Someone poured beer over Jodi Taylor’s head. I tried to maintain a respectful distance but from time to time, when needing to ensure that I was accurately chronicling the minutiae of it, I think I drifted into shot. And so, if you are a Public Disgrace viewer and the erotic ambience was ruined for you by the sudden emergence of a bespectacled man peering in close and writing things in a notepad, I’m sorry.
Then they finished, cleaned up, and everyone went home. Later I spent a little time with Donna. I told her I thought she’d definitely created a more mindful working environment than most regular offices. There were no bullying bosses stalking around shaming the employees. ‘Are other corners of the porn industry more frightening and exploitative?’ I asked her. ‘And that’s why everyone here was making a special effort?’
Donna nodded but said she didn’t want to talk about other parts of the porn industry. She wanted to talk about what she was trying to achieve with Public Disgrace. ‘America is a very puritanical place,’ she said. ‘If I can help one person feel less freakish and alone because of what they like, then I’ll be a success. But I know I’ve already reached more people than that.’
*
A few weeks passed. And then I received an interesting email from Max Mosley. Like me, he’d been thinking a lot about what it was about him that had managed to stave off even the most modest public shaming. And now, he wrote, he thought he had the answer. It was simply that he had refused to feel ashamed.
‘As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,’ he said, ‘the whole thing crumbles.’
I reread Max’s email. Could that be it? Does a shaming only work if the shamee plays their part in it by feeling ashamed? There was no doubt that Jonah, and Justine too, had been having intense conversations with their shame. Whereas Max was just refusing to engage with his at all. I wondered: was unashamedness something that some people just had? Or was it something that could be taught?
And that was how I discovered a man teaching a course in how to refuse to feel ashamed.
8
THE SHAME ERADICATION WORKSHOP
Twelve Americans - strangers to one another - sat in a circle in a room in the JW Marriott hotel in Chicago. There were buttoned-down, preppy-looking businessmen and women, a young Burning Man type drifter couple, a man with a Willie Nelson ponytail and deep lines in his face. In the middle sat Brad Blanton. He was a large man. His shirt, open to his chest, was yellow-white, like his hair. With his sunburned face he looked like a red ball abandoned in dirty snow.
Now he stirred. ‘To begin,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell us something that you don’t want us to know.’
‘A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It’s like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you’re permanently concerned about what other people think of you.’
It was a few months earlier and Brad Blanton and I were talking on Skype. He was telling me about how, as a psychotherapist, he had come to understand how so many of us ‘live our lives constantly in fear of being exposed, or being judged as immoral or not good enough’.
But Brad had invented a way for us to eradicate those feelings, he told me. His method was called ‘Radical Honesty’.
Brad Blanton says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation.
- A. J. Jacobs, ‘I Think You’re Fat’, Esquire magazine, July 2007
Brad’s thinking was that shame grows when we internalize shame. Just look at the frantically evasive Jonah. Whereas look at Max Mosley. Brad’s favourite animal was a dog. A dog doesn’t lie. A dog doesn’t feel shame. A dog lives in the moment. Max Mosley was like a dog. We should be like dogs. And our first step towards being like dogs was to reveal to the group something about ourselves that we really didn’t want people to know.
By coincidence my friend - the writer and broadcaster Starlee Kine - took Brad’s course a few years ago for a book she’s writing. I met Starlee before I flew to Chicago. I told her not to tell me what to expect - I wanted to be surprised - but she did tell me the first part. She said it always begins with the participants being asked to reveal a secret.
‘With my group,’ Starlee told me, ‘the first man said that his secret was that he hadn’t paid taxes in ten years. Everyone nodded and looked disappointed that his secret wasn’t so sensational. Then the next man said that his secret was that he had once murdered a man. He was in a truck with a man and he punched him in his head and threw him out and the guy was dead and another car ran him over. And he didn’t go to jail and he never told anyone.’
‘What did Brad Blanton say?’ I asked her.
‘He said, “Next. Great.” So then it got to the next woman. She said, “Oh! My secrets are so boring! I suppose I can talk about how I have sex with my cat.” Then the murderer raised his hand and said, “Excuse me. I’d like to add something to my secret. I’d like to add that I also have sex with my cat.”’
Starlee had found Brad’s course crazy. I probably would have too had I not been seasoned in the destruction of Jonah and Justine and the salvation of Max.
‘Well …’ began a woman called Melissa, sitting opposite me in the circle. Melissa was a successful lawyer. But her passion was sadomasochistic sex: ‘Humiliation is my biggest turn-on,’ she said. She has even built herself her own private dungeon. But Melissa’s sex-dungeon wasn’t her secret. Her secret was that she earned more than $550,000 last year and felt ashamed to have earned so much.
Later, when I recounted this to Starlee, she explained to me that Melissa is actually a regular at Brad’s workshops. She’s Brad’s protegee.
‘Melissa tells everyone about her dungeon,’ Starlee said. ‘How you respond to it is her way of judging how enlightened you are.’
Vincent sat next to Melissa. His secret was that he was beginning to regret signing up for Brad’s course. ‘It was a snap decision and $500 is lot of money for me,’ he said. ‘I was going to spend it on visiting my girlfriend in Thailand.’
‘Has he paid in full?’ Brad asked Melissa.
‘Only the $150 deposit,’ Melissa replied.
‘Get his money,’ Brad said to Melissa.
Brad was making the radically honest statement that he was more concerned about getting the $350 Vincent owed him than assuring Vincent that he’d made
a good decision signing up for the course.
‘Can I pay you what I owe you in the break?’ Vincent asked.
Brad shot Vincent a suspicious glance.
Emily spoke next. Her secret was that she sells marijuana for a living.
‘Like by the ounce?’ someone asked her.
‘By the pound,’ she replied. ‘I charge about $3,400 a pound.’
‘Are you worried about being caught?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said.
‘We’re very discreet,’ Emily’s boyfriend Mario told the room.
Mario’s secret was that he sometimes tells Emily he thinks she’s fat.
‘You’re not fat,’ I said to Emily.
Mario’s other secret was, ‘I use my lucid dreams as opportunities to rape women. I find the first girl that’s around and I do whatever I want. I have my way with her.’
‘Can I be the star of your next dream?’ said Melissa.
I had a headache. ‘Does anyone have any headache tablets?’ I asked the room. Melissa reached into her pocket and pulled out a little baggie filled with loose pills of different shapes and colours. She picked out two and handed them to me. I swallowed them.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I have no idea what kind of pills you just gave me. It actually crossed my mind that you might have just given me a date-rape drug.’
‘Wow, what a good feeling!’ I thought. ‘I thought it so I said it, with no possibility of negative consequences!’
Melissa glanced inscrutably at me.
Jim was an engineer for an oil company.
‘I don’t want you guys to know …’ Jim’s voice cracked, ‘… that I am a drug addict.’
He made this declaration with such quiet power it took the room aback.
‘They don’t drug-test you at your oil company?’ someone asked Jim.
‘Yes, they do,’ Jim replied.
‘You don’t flunk it?’ asked Brad.
‘No,’ said Jim. ‘I haven’t flunked it yet.’
‘How do you get around it?’ asked Brad’s friend Thelma, whose secret was that she watches gay male porn.
‘I … don’t know,’ Jim said.
‘What drugs are you addicted to?’ Brad asked Jim.
‘I like … marijuana,’ Jim said.
There was a short silence. ‘How much do you smoke?’ I asked him.
‘In three weeks I’ll smoke an ounce of marijuana,’ said Jim.
‘Is that it?’ screeched Emily.
‘I was once very attracted to a man I thought was a woman and ended up spending time with him and paying for that time,’ Jim said.
Everyone looked a little less underwhelmed at Jim’s new secret.
Mary’s secret was how badly she’s taking being rejected by her partner, Amanda. ‘I’m fifty and I’m alone,’ Mary said. She looked at the floor. ‘I’ve lost myself.’
Mary wasn’t just sitting around moping at home. It was worse than that. She was repeatedly telephoning Amanda. There was a time when Amanda would say to Mary, ‘One day I’ll marry you.’ Now all Amanda was telling her was, ‘Stop calling me.’
Brad told Mary to take the Hot Seat. He pointed to an empty chair.
‘What would you say to Amanda if she was sitting opposite you right now?’ Brad asked her.
‘I’d tell her that I resent her for saying don’t contact me.’
‘Say it to her,’ said Brad.
‘I resent you for saying, “Don’t call me,”’ Mary said quietly into space.
‘See what it feels like to use an angry voice,’ Brad said.
‘FUCK YOU,’ Mary yelled at the empty chair. ‘I resent you for saying “One day I’m going to marry you,” and then you didn’t. So FUCK YOU. I resent you because you’re such a fucking bitch sometimes. I resent you for treating me like … I resent you for saying all those beautiful things and you took them all back …’ Mary was sobbing.
‘Good,’ Brad said. ‘When are you going to say this to her face?’
Mary swallowed. ‘I’m wondering at what location …’
‘Call her up,’ Brad told her. ‘Say, “It’s not a request. We’re either going to do this alone or in front of your whole goddamned office and you’ve got one day to make up your fucking mind.”’
‘OK,’ said Mary, quietly.
‘So, when?’ Brad said.
‘By next weekend?’ Mary said.
‘Good,’ Brad said.
Jack, a veterinarian sex addict, looked uneasy. ‘How do you put this approach in the context of people not calling the police?’ he asked Brad.
‘You’re asking people to leave this session,’ I agreed, ‘and do something to people who aren’t part of this. People must get hurt. The police must get called sometimes.’
‘People call the police sometimes,’ Brad shrugged. ‘It takes twenty minutes for the police to get there. So you’ve got twenty minutes to complete all your anger.’
‘I can’t imagine this always works out well,’ I said.
‘That’s because you’ve been brainwashed your entire life about all the terrible things that are going to happen,’ Brad said. ‘Yeah, people get mad. People get upset. But people get over stuff. People worry about what happens in the first five seconds. But I’m concerned about the next five minutes. I’m committed to people staying with each other until they get over this.’
This last part, Brad said, was critical. You remain with the person you’ve just been yelling at until the resentments fizzle. That’s how wounds heal.
Vincent - the man who was regretting signing up for the course - suddenly announced, ‘I’m sorry. I’m leaving. This isn’t for me. I’m sorry.’
‘I resent you for saying you’re leaving,’ said Melissa.
‘OK,’ said Vincent.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever get over this resentment,’ said Melissa.
Wow, I thought. Give the man a break. She’s only just met him. ‘I resent you telling him that you’ll never get over the resentment of him leaving,’ I told Melissa.
‘I appreciate you for sitting there listening to me,’ Melissa said to Vincent.
‘Thank you,’ Vincent said.
‘Shit or get off the pot, man,’ said Jack the veterinarian sex addict. ‘I resent you for saying you’re leaving and I resent that you’re still here.’
Vincent left.
The day’s session ended. I said I hoped nobody minded but I was tired and so I wasn’t going to have dinner with the group. I was just going to watch TV and send some emails instead.
‘I feel slighted,’ said Brad.
‘Ach, no you don’t,’ I said. Although I knew that he did.
*
There was a reason I needed to go to my room that I hadn’t explained to anyone. I had a work crisis. A story I’d been working on had turned chaotic and my editor and I were at loggerheads, sending each other tense emails.
It had sounded like an intriguing story at the beginning. There has been a tradition over the years of journalists wearing disguise to experience injustice first-hand. The pioneer was John Howard Griffin, who in 1959 stained his skin dark and spent six weeks hitch-hiking as a black man through the segregated Deep South - a journey chronicled in his 1961 book Black Like Me. From time to time editors have asked me to undertake similar journeys. After 9/11 a TV producer suggested I stain my own skin and move into a Muslim area of London. But it seemed to me like she basically wanted me to spy on Muslims, so I said no. This time, however, I’d been asked to disguise myself to experience a different injustice.
‘We want you to be a woman,’ the editor had said. ‘We’ll work with a prosthetics artist to make you unrecognizable. We’ll get a movement coach to teach you how to walk like a woman.’
‘Women and men walk differently?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I never knew that,’ I said. ‘This could be really interesting. As a man I’m rarely stared at lasciviously. But as a woman I might get stared at lascivio
usly a lot. How would that make me feel? And do women behave differently when there are no men around - like at women-only gyms and women-only saunas? I’m intrigued. I’ll do it.’
And so I met with a prosthetics artist at a college in west London. She encased my face in alginate and took a cast. A prosthetic mask was made. She spent a couple of weeks manipulating it into womanly features. I slipped it over my face. I looked like a woman with a gigantic head. The editor called me in for a meeting.
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. We won’t use the prosthetic head. We can still make you look exactly like a woman.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
‘You’ll be amazed what a few hours with the movement coach will do,’ she said.
‘You don’t think we’re in danger of relying too much on the movement coach?’ I asked. ‘It had been the prosthetics that had rather sold me on the idea.’
‘I promise you that we won’t let you out of this building unless you absolutely pass as a woman,’ she said.
And so, in an empty conference room in a quiet corner of the magazine’s offices, I dressed as a woman. Make-up was applied. I put on a wig and a dress and a padded bra. I spent hours under the tutelage of the movement coach. Test photographs were taken. Finally I left the conference room and walked in the manner that the movement coach had instructed towards the editor’s desk.
She swallowed slightly when she saw me.
‘They’ve done an incredible job,’ she said. She turned to the deputy editor. ‘Haven’t they done an amazing job?’
The deputy editor swallowed slightly. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You look exactly like a woman,’ said the editor. ‘Now go outside and experience life as a woman.’
‘I don’t think I look like a woman,’ I said.
‘What are you talking about?’ said the editor. ‘You look exactly like a woman.’
‘I don’t think I look anything like a woman,’ I said.
She peered at my tormented facial expression. I hesitated for a moment. Then I walked towards the exit. Sweat smudged my foundation. I glanced back over my shoulder at the editors. They were giving me encouraging looks and indicating the door. I felt sick, short of breath. My stomach muscles clenched.