In the early aughts, David Buss, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, asked 5,000 average, presumably nonhomicidal people if they’d ever vividly fantasized about murdering anyone. The test subjects overwhelmingly answered positively. When Buss went on to ask about the circumstances that had provoked the thoughts, nearly none resulted from having been physically harmed or threatened by the object of the murderous fantasy. More often, the daydreams were rooted in the scariest thing of all: humiliation. A guy whose boss had mocked him in front coworkers, for instance, dreamed of tampering with the brakes on his boss’s car.
Gwynedd Stuart: In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed you joke that you hate not knowing what’s going on on Twitter. Did the process of researching and writing the book make you more suspicious of social media than you had been?
Apologies are something that comes up a few times in the book. Like [shamed storyteller] Mike Daisey says, “It feels like they want an apology, but it’s a lie. . . . What they want is my destruction. . . . They never want to hear from me again for the rest of my life.” I was with someone—I can’t say who it was because the piece hasn’t come out yet and the Guardian always gets really annoyed if I give stuff away—but I was with a guy who did transgress on social media and kind of needed a little bit of a bruising. It’s not the sort of person I’d have put in the book, it’s someone who really did something he shouldn’t have done. It was funny, when I was with him I did that thing that I criticize in the book: I was sort of trying to get him to apologize. I noticed it in myself—like, If I say this will he apologize? It’s like, Why do I want it?
To what degree, if any, does sexism play a role in online shaming?
Personally, I think the less shaming we do the better. Somebody like [scholar and author] Brené Brown . . . she says shamings never work. They never work. Empathy works, shaming doesn’t work. I’m kind of almost as radical as she is on this, but not quite as radical because I’ve seen times on social media for instance, you have things like Black Lives Matter. The social justice movement, when it’s being fair, is amazing. It’s powerful and amazing and it changes things. There’s way less homophobia than there used to be, we’re heading toward a world where there’s less racism than there used to be. But the problem is, it’s like a fucking machine gun being held by a baby. Like so sometimes, everything goes fine, a shaming happens, a wrong is righted, and everything goes back to normal. But a lot of the time, the machine gun is being shot all over the place and everyone’s getting blown up. v
