Like many women, I once dated a guy who punched a hole in my headboard. He wasn’t a violent man whatsoever, but he had certain sexual impulses that he didn’t like. In the heat of the moment, rather than act on them, he would hit something – the headboard, the wall, himself. It was sad, not least because they were impulses that dovetailed with my own, so I would sometimes find myself in the humiliating position of feeling jealous of a wall. Still, there was nothing to be done about it. Shame had already taken root.
Shame is an emotion of mass destruction. It arises when what you really want isn’t aligned with what you think you should want. Instinct colliding with morality. The gnawing sense that something about you is deeply and irreversibly wrong. It’s all encompassing but difficult to recognise, because it lurks beneath the surface of more obvious feelings, like worthlessness and inadequacy. It compels you to withdraw and self-destruct. It gives the jarring sensation that you are living ‘out of sync,’ because it prevents you from acting in line with your natural tendencies. That’s where it differs from guilt, which occurs after you’ve done something you shouldn’t have. Embarrassment is a similar but fleeting response to a more trivial indiscretion. I don’t want to get bogged down in definitions. I hate semantics and there will always be exceptions, but the difference is broadly this:
Shame: I want to get spitroasted (the confluence of circumstances unique to your upbringing and the environment in which you live have led you to believe that spitroasting is “bad”).
Guilt: I got spitroasted when I should have been at my aunt’s funeral.
Embarrassment: Why did I say “oh boy!” in the middle of getting spitroasted?
Guilt and embarrassment are reactions to things that have happened, whereas shame is a reaction to the impulse itself. You don’t even need to do anything in order to feel it, which is brutal. Shame is hard to put your finger on and even harder to alleviate, so it tends to come out in strange and contradictory ways, like being violently homophobic (you are gay) or a communist podcaster (your parents are rich). Shame can also lead us to do things that cause guilt or embarrassment, like destroying someone’s headboard, or cheating to end a relationship. In crossing a real boundary, something psychologically uncomfortable is transferred onto an action with a more obvious shape.
It’s good to have some shame. Certainly, in our mortifying cringescape of reaction vlogs, millionaire shitposters, and 40-year-old men in Beetlejuice trousers making shock punk on TikTok, people could stand to have a lot more of it. In fact, if there is a defining characteristic of contemporary Western pop culture as a whole, it is shamelessness. That extends to sex, which is why we have human pups making Instagram content in Burger King. That in itself is a sign that something is amiss. There’s a permissiveness to the way we talk about all sex now, which is good to an extent, but also flattens its complexities and tidies everything away in boxes of ‘healthy’ or ‘authentic’ self-expression. It doesn’t allow for honest cross-examination of our desires, the possibility of them going malignant, or that huge numbers of people either don’t understand their desires or can’t act on them. As a result, shame has gone largely uninterrogated by mainstream art and entertainment. For such a universal feeling, especially in a sexual context, it has become invisible.
This is especially strange considering that some of the most popular films of the last 18 months have billed themselves as erotic. From Saltburn to Love Lies Bleeding and Queer, sex has been hitting the box office harder than Robbie Williams on the bag in 1999. Shame, however, rarely factors. Nosferatu and Babygirl both touch on it, but not in a meaningful way. Nosferatu is the story of a young woman who has been tormented by shame (represented by a literal monster) since childhood, but overcomes it by embracing her sexuality as a virtue (I’ve written more about that here). Babygirl follows a high powered SheEO embarking on an affair where she plays the submissive to a twenty-something intern, risking her career and marriage, but nothing happens. The result of this presumably life altering relationship is that she amicably transfers the intern to Japan and occasionally gets fingerblasted by her husband. Both films fall a long way short of dealing with abjection – feelings of true worthlessness, acts of real degradation – and, in the interest of permissiveness, let their women off the hook.
The erotic thrillers of the late 80s and early 90s continue to loom large in the cultural consciousness in part because they were reacting to a more shame-based society. Would Sharon Stone crossing and uncrossing her legs in Basic Instinct be such a big deal now that every news headline comes with a spoonful of pussy in the ad bar? Probably not. The same goes for the more psychological films of the 2010s, like Nymphomaniac and Shame – stories of sex addiction, arriving off the back of 2000s raunch culture, in which the protagonist’s desire pathways become so mangled they’re no longer able associate arousal with normal feelings of attraction. I’m not saying that either late-20th century fears of women’s liberation or Loaded-era banter need to make a comeback in order for erotic films to be good again, but that the most powerful erotic films are usually in conflict with the prevailing attitudes of their time.
There is a permissiveness built into the recent wave of erotic films that directly correlates with the way sex is talked about online – liberally, with a wink and little at stake. They bolster (or maybe, since they rely so heavily on viral marketing, are bolstered by) contemporary attitudes, rather than subverting them. I touched on this in a recent essay for Dazed, but the erotic films of the 2020s have, so far, played it safe by introducing deviance as a potentially destructive force and then leaving us with the idea that it’s a positive one. One review of Babygirl even suggested that its “hottest and most subversive kink” is that “successful, driven, married mother in her fifties” gets to have a workplace affair and face zero personal or professional consequences. Spicy stuff! I’d like to see Brazzers do something with that.
If the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s exposed societal pressures around technology, gender roles and the nuclear family through sex (Videodrome, Basic Instinct, Eyes Wide Shut), the erotic thrillers of the 2020s respond to our current anxieties around sex by attempting to assuage them. They fall short because they buy into the digital myth that we live in a post-shame world, when we don’t.
For my money the only artist engaging with shame in a real way is Ethel Cain, whose new album Perverts is an unbelievably bleak stretch of experimental ambience that agonises over the desire to be pure versus the reality of being human, the hit of euphoria and the wretched numbness that kicks in when it becomes a fixation. In the end, nothing is reconciled. Perverts opens with a decree that “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator” and ends with the narrator mumbling that she “can’t feel anything.” It’s uncomfortable and sad, and it’s supposed to be.
By contrast, the films I’ve mentioned all have a tendency to avoid discomfort or ruin, which is novel but toothless. If production companies are truly willing to be “subversive” and “boundary pushing” – as Babygirl et al have been described – there should be a huge narrative film about Chemsex in the pipeline. Something, anything, that pushes against the cultural tides of right wing moral panic or blanket sex positivity.
In fairness, I’m sure some people will interpret Nicole Kidman eating a boiled sweet out of the palm of a guy in an oversized Nike hoodie as a Sharon Stone moment. I’m willing to accept that might be enough to challenge the average understanding of humiliation, and not just a “slow Wednesday.” At the same time, there’s a definition of consent shoehorned into a workplace interaction and a line towards the end that confirms how we’re not supposed to think of BDSM as a patriarchal fantasy anymore because that’s old people shit. Regardless of personal proclivities it’s hard not to feel like these explainers exist where the hot flush of shame should be, or at least the discomfort of ambiguity – letting viewers figure out where these cards fall within themselves. When all’s said and done the most honest scene in Babygirl is the one where Romy’s shame comes out in a crazed, displaced burst – not in a hotel room, not on her knees, but at home in bed going absolutely mental at her husband for kissing her.
There’s a fine line between shame and self-awareness. You can have both, neither, one without the other. It looks different for everyone. For one person it’s punching a headboard, for another it’s being so afraid of your desires that you avoid pleasure entirely. In my experience, shame is most destructive when you know yourself and deny it anyway, but it can’t simply be alleviated by doing the opposite. That dynamic doesn’t have a logical inverse. There’s an incredible scene in Nymphomaniac Vol. II where our main girl Joe addresses her sex addicts anonymous (SAA) group, accuses the therapist of being “society's morality police whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the Earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick,” then walks out on the whole thing. “I'm not like you,” she tells them. “I am a nymphomaniac and I love myself for being one, but above all, I love my cunt and my filthy, dirty lust.” It’s an act of fearless agency, and her life becomes categorically worse after it.
This is where the erotic storytelling of the 2020s, for me, fails. There is a lack of admission that complete sexual liberation, getting what you want all the time, can be an end in itself.
You can read my Dazed piece about popular entertainment’s “return” to sex after years of post-MeToo prudishness here.
Also, I’m doing a Valentine’s Day Loveline. Please send your burning questions about sex, romance, fantasy, obsession or indeed shame to this email address and I’ll answer them all in one post. All names kept anonymous. What happens on Gabrielle stays on Gabrielle.
Such a great piece this!!! Totally sympathise with your frustration where there is something a lot less hot about this flat, liberal attitude to sexuality. A lot of the time, the shame is the fun part. Your piece kind of made me think that you cannot be proud of your desire (at least not straightforwardly). Like, to really desire something in that pained horny way, there has to be something (shame, morality) that is keeping you away. As soon as you enter this mindset that there is nothing to be ashamed of, that it’s all empowering, that it is only fictitiously degrading or dangerous or at odds with other aspects of yourself, it loses its pull. This has noticeably become problem for gay guys, where I think the pride mentality has been great for making open gay relationships a mainstream thing (which is unambiguously good and I have no desire to return to the dark ages), but maybe we have failed to figure out how to experience that young hot fiery desire for depravity in a social context which is suddenly telling us that our desire isn’t depraved and is in fact cool and IN. The band Model Actriz released an album a couple years ago which deals with that dark steamy gay shame in a very HOT and PRETENTIOUS way - highly recommend.
Brilliant piece, and nicely argued. I’m kind of taking something at random here but I think it’s a good example of what you are saying and caught my eye: “At the same time, there’s a definition of consent shoehorned into a workplace interaction and a line towards the end that confirms how we’re not supposed to think of BDSM as a patriarchal fantasy anymore because that’s old people shit.” I totally get that, but my question: if not that, then what meaning does BDSM have; or is that beside the point as it doesn’t have to ‘mean’ anything or point to anything deeper? And if that’s the case, do you think we’re living in a post-therapy world, in which we no longer look for underlying meaning?