The Death of Embarrassment | Hacker News Reader

The Death of Embarrassment

incharacter.org

25 pointsrglovejoy29 comments

Old news is old?

The author laments that couples behave as if the public is their motel room - yet this is merely a continuation of a pattern that has been there for ages. It used to be that making out in public is scandalous and lewd; it also used to be that baring your ankles in public is similarly scandalous and lewd.

This is nothing new - we've been becoming "less embarrassed" (to put in the author's terminology) for years and years, well before the social media/reality show craze, and it will continue well after social media and reality shows have gone.

Social acceptability changes by geography and time - the author mentions the coworker who mentioned that he's shaved his whole body in preparation for a bicycling event... as a relatively young member of society, I see nothing wrong with this information. He has hair on his body that he had to remove - using means you're no doubt familiar with also - get over it?

I have to agree that "get over it" is the correct sentiment here. This guy can't justify why his opinion on what's appropriate should count for more than everyone else's.

I'm not even sure he's right His two initial examples, public grooming and public over-affection, are things that have been happening at least since I was 6 (actually I first saw someone putting makeup on in the car when I was 8 but I assume that practice existed before the first time I saw it)

I'm starting to think the whole "Facebook-Generation" clap trap is more an invention of the media than anything else.

Maybe it's just me but in my group of Facebook friends there are a few people who post everything they do and the rest remain relatively silent (generally only checking in when they think they have something funny and/or profound to say). The few people produce much more now that the tools exist to make it drop dead simple to do but it's still the same few people. It isn't like everyone just started sharing everything about themselves.

This is my anecdotal experience as well. It would be great to see a distribution of activity level for facebookers, and how much high-activity facebookers tend to associate with each other. My guess is that the low activity level of older generations is better explained by their unfamiliarity with computers than a lower threshold for embarrassment.

That could very well be a surprising revelation.

After all, the more time you spend on facebook the less time there is for other activities, including association with others.

This trajectory has been going for perhaps a few decades, but human embarrassment is thousands of years old. So you can't just say "Oh, old people always think young people are too risque. Get over it." There is some structure to the current trend, and it seems worthwhile to try to explain it (though the OP fails, IMO).

Now, that doesn't mean that the threshold for human embarrassment has been static since before the industrial revolution; looking at history, it has certainly varied dramatically across time and space. It's probably not random, so tracing it's cause would be interesting.

Further, I don't think many people are going to go to the extreme relativist standpoint and say that all thresholds for embarrassment are equally (un-)valuable. It's not hard to make arguments for why it's a good thing people are too embarrassed to have sex in public (though I'm sure there are a few extreme bullet-biters). So then the question is, can you defend what you think is an optimal threshold for embarrassment, whether or not it coincides with the current threshold? The OP doesn't seem to be able to defend his, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't/can't be done.

> " It's not hard to make arguments for why it's a good thing people are too embarrassed to have sex in public"

Why? Not that I'd do it mind you - but that's a limitations in how I've been raised. When I think about it, there's nothing really objectively wrong about having sex in public.

For a reason related to, but not the same as, the reason sexual modesty evolved (which only exists in social species): because sex is a method to emotionally bond two people together in a way which is pretty much impossible to do otherwise because of the way humans are hardwired. This aspect of sex would be seriously diminished if it was routinely done in public because the participants would have their "social guard" up (that is, they would necessarily be concerned with signaling to others in their group/tribe).

EDIT: Also, I should point out that your sexual modesty is more strongly determined by your genes than your upbringing. Sexual modesty is universal across human culture, even among people who have been raised in bizarre cults which tried to eliminate such modesty.

Saying "cuz your jeans did it~~" doesn't support your argument terribly well; you've demonstrated why things are, but not why they should be, or why we shouldn't mimic the cuckoo bird or the ant fungus, or why we shouldn't try to prevent sickle cell anemia because our genes would like it that way but they're too modest to speak up.

I said that sexual modesty is crucial to forming human partnerships and I said specifically that its moral worth is distinct from its evolutionary origin. Do I also need to justify why human partnerships are good?

I've got close bonds with friends, and I didn't need to sleep with any of them! I'm sure most startups have managed that too, even if some of them may have benefited from it.

Monogamy, too, is natural, and may be a contributing factor for domestic violence, crimes of passion, an incredible divorce rate, and patriarchal oppression.

"the author mentions the coworker who mentioned that he's shaved his whole body in preparation for a bicycling event... as a relatively young member of society, I see nothing wrong with this information."

I think that depends a little on the details provided. I wouldn't want to know whether your total body shave included your scrotum for example.

Either way, you're right. I remember listening to people talk about having shaved for racing events long before the advent of 'social media.' I don't think that a lot has changed except for the subsiding of some of the formality of the workplace and a few other things.

If the author's own conceptions of modesty prevent the accurate conveyance of the horrors (of shorn scrotums!) of immodesty, hasn't he proven his own modesty lacking in utility?

Are u`you saying modesty is useless because it prevents people from expressing immodest things? If that's the case I think you're confused. Discussing personal hygiene is considered immodest because people shouldn't have to hear about it. It's unpleasant, distracting, and completely irrelevant to most relationships. In other words, news about your scrotum is noise not signal.

What should be considered modest and when, I think is a complex issue, whether some things should be kept private at least some of the time, I don't think is up to debate.

I'm simply saying, somewhat slyly, if a modest person expresses indignation over, e.g., tales of shaving, but their modesty prevents their audience from understanding why this tale could be reasonably offensive (i.e., the difference between "I had to shave my body for my race" and "I had to shave my balls and everything. You know that bit right there? Yeah, I think blah blah blah"), their modesty is doing them a disservice in making them look even more like a fuddy-duddy.

More exaggeratedly, if a person's sense of modesty kept their ankles so well covered in warm weather to the point of heat stroke, their modesty has done them a disservice less modest people wouldn't need to deal with.

I immediately looked (in vain) for a reference to the poem "High Windows" written in 1974.

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he's fucking her and she's

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

...

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/philip-larkin/high-wind...

Thanks for the link, I love coming across great poetry.

This touches on why I have grown to think that the institution of marriage is doomed. The best excuse for its continued existence that I have heard is that family, friends, and community gather to "witness" the commitment - presumably lending it some sort of strength.

But most of the above evaporate at the other end of the relationship: everybody wants to come to the wedding; nobody wants to come to the divorce. When it dissolves, "these things happen", "water under the bridge", yadda yadda yadda.

The community that witnesses a wedding has no teeth during the relationship either. It's no longer possible to shame people into keeping their vows. The population is too dense, and it's too easy to dispose of one set of friends who may disapprove of your behavior and reinvent yourself without necessarily even needing to move to another town. One of the underlying principles of Game (as in 'pickup artistry') is that there's no reason to feel fear or embarassment on approach because you'll likely never encounter the 'target' again.

And speaking of Game, Roissy has a 2x2 matrix of shame in a post he wrote about the Tiger Woods scandal. Worth reading if the death of shame is interesting to you.

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/the-medicalization-of...

> I wondered who would be confident or crazy enough to get a cosmetic dental procedure performed in public.

Not a dental procedure! Oh NO! Have these people no shame?

>"Your slip is showing" used to be the most embarrassing sartorial faux pas a lady could commit.

The idea that a lady would have been ashamed to accidentally show their underwear is plain dumb. Good riddance of such social customs. I get that part of the message is that it's going beyond the accidental situation, but I honestly don't care. I'm sick of older people whining about their values. I can't be sure, but I'll speculate that the whiners wish they could have had done those things - or feel that they were severely punished for doing such things and feel unfair that these people are "getting away". The fact is that what they are whining about don't exist anymore. They need to learn to deal with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_tempora_o_mores!

Interesting that this is also on the HN frontpage: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323164 (Surviving the Age of Humiliation)

I’m tempted to see a decline in embarrassment as little more than an indication that the traditional, conservative worldview is losing ground. See: "On Truth and the Tyranny of Illusion", at http://www.freedomainradio.com/Books/OnTruthTheTyrannyofIllu... (click Online to read it for free).

In rememberance of Embarrassment: it tought us the shame of joy, and the joy of shame.

(with apologies to The Simpsons)

I would be interested in anybody over 40 who thinks things are much the same as they were before, and anybody under 20 who thinks the guy is on to something.

Lots of generational bias in the comments so far.

I know I've seen the drift, and I strongly suspect that shame, guilt, and embarrassment serve a greater societal function than we give them credit for. The discussion is very reminiscent to me of the free love movement back in the 1960s. Everybody wondered why you just couldn't turn on, tune in, drop out, and have all the sex you wanted. Love one another. Sounded great. Then the societal bill came due, and it wasn't pretty -- STDs, junkies, crime, rapes, lost lives, the me generation. Looked great on paper. Didn't work so well in reality. My feeling is that this TMI stuff is going to turn out the same way. But I'm as biased as the next guy.

So then by your logic, the Victorian era should have been a "societal" golden age. But:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#Notable_syphilis-infec...

Huh?

No, by my logic, traditions develop for a reason. Learn the reason and do what you like. Having a lot of tradition and social norms isn't good -- neither is having none.

You're just as idiotic throwing it all out the window as you are accepting it as the unalterable truth.

Moderation my friend. Understanding and moderation. Adapting and changing things is awesome. Let's do more of that. But let's not be idiotic about it.

EDIT: I work in hi-tech with people changing the world. I love startups. My goal in life is to change people's lives for the better. I'm always talking about the singularity and how great change for the better is on the way.

And now I'm a Victorian. Go figure.

I'm not saying you're a Victorian. I'm saying that during a culture where shame and social norming were at their height, most of the "societal" problems you attribute to the 70's were epidemic.

Perish the thought of lackabouts that arose from anything less than an entire generation's misdeeds!

If it weren't for the free love movement of the 60s, no one would have ever wasted their life in an opium den! All those poor doomed souls...

Actually, STDs, crime, rape, junkies, and lost lives have been civilization's constant companion for millennia. There was definitely a tradition of pretending it wasn't happening prior to the late 60's/early 70's, but if you think people weren't getting high, screwing around, and beating the crap out of each other before then, and in similar numbers, you truly have no grasp of the history of humanity.

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