SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 1

 In the history of humankind, the reasons for cultures to impute shame to their members are as varied as snowflakes-- failure to honor dead parents, marrying outside one's clan, and so on. However, I submit that there's a universal source of shame in all cultures: an individual's inability to protect oneself, or at least to try to protect oneself.

All human cultures have some form of marriage to ensure the promulgation of their offspring. Cultures surely vary as to how long the children are protected by the elders of their communities. But since all children must become adults in time, all kids in all cultures are given some imperatives about how to deal with conflicts as they progress toward that goal.   

In current American culture, kids very likely receive more cumulative oversight than they do in primitive cultures, due to the long years that juveniles endure in public school. Thus I'll skip over the more personal imperatives that are communicated to juveniles by their older family-members, and address how both male and female children develop systems of social validation while within the educational system.

While kids are in theory still protected by adults within that system, clearly school is where kids begin sorting themselves into mini-communities, primarily based on gender. Boys hang with boys, and girls with girls, and this inevitably leads to conflicts based on gender expectations. In these mini-communities of virtual strangers, it's easy for insecure kids to boost their egos by attempting to shame potential victims. This practice is termed bullying, and whether the groups use direct violence or indirect gossip to reduce victims to a state of abjection, the motive remains identical. Those who are singled out as victims by the aggressors usually have only two options for response: "fight" or "flight."

Now obviously there are even smaller communities-- clubs, for instance-- in which males and females interact-- but these are generally under close adult supervision. Except in incidents of extreme anger, bullying activities are frequently committed "on the sly," as there's also some ego-boost to be had, not just from shaming a fellow student, but also doing so without a teacher being aware of the act. Arguably, when males bully females, or vice versa-- more often through insults than through acts of force-- the bullies must be especially circumspect, to avoid accusations of sexual impropriety.

I should add, as I wind up this prelude, that I distinguish between simple social testing-- in which members of the kid-communities seek to suss out other members-- from bullying, which is a one-way street, in which the bully imposes shame for egoistic reasons. But there's also one source of shame that transcends all cultures-- that of female-male relations-- and it's the only type of shame that can be transformed into a source of pleasure.