So You've Been Publicly Shamed (15 page)

—

So, in an empty conference room in a quiet corner of the magazine's offices, I dressed as a woman. Makeup 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 toward the editor's desk in the manner that the movement coach had instructed.

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 toward 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.

And then I stopped. I couldn't do it. I turned, went back downstairs, and I put on my male clothes.

—

A week had passed and our relationship remained frosty. She felt I had prevaricated unprofessionally and was acting too sensitive. “Don't over-think it, Jon,” she'd e-mailed me. “It's just a fun feature. Shouldn't be the cause of some sort of a midlife crisis.” I felt that the story's original premise had fallen to pieces and the reason they were happy to send me out into the world looking nothing like a woman was that in our line of work the more humiliated a person is, the more viral the story tends to go. Shame can factor large in the life of a journalist—the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others.

Nobody must ever see those test pictures,
I'd been thinking all week.
Never.

—

Now, as I lay in my hotel room, I understood the truth of it. My terror of humiliation had closed a door. Great adventures that might have unfolded involving me dressed as a woman would never now unfold. I'd been constrained by the terror. It had blown me off course. Which, actually, meant that I was just like the vast majority of people. I knew this from studying the work of David Buss, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

One day in the early 2000s Buss was at a cocktail party when the wife of a friend began flirting with another man in front of everyone: “She was a striking woman,” Buss later wrote. “She looked at her husband derisively and made a derogatory remark about the way he looked, then turned right back to her flirtatious conversation.”

Buss's friend stomped outside, where Buss found him fuming, saying he felt humiliated and wanted to kill his wife: “I had no doubt that he would do it. In fact, he was so wild with rage, such a transformed man, he seemed capable of killing any living thing within an arm's reach. I became frightened for my own life.”

Buss's friend didn't kill his wife. He calmed down. But the incident shook Buss up. Which was why he decided to carry out an experiment. He asked five thousand people a question: Had they ever fantasized about killing someone?

“Nothing,” as Buss later wrote in his book
The Murderer Next Door
, “prepared me for the outpouring of murderous thoughts.”

It turned out from his survey that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women had experienced “at least one vivid fantasy of killing someone.” There was the man who imagined “hiring an explosives specialist” to blow his boss up in his car, the woman who wanted to “break every bone” in her partner's body, “starting with his fingers and toes, then slowly making my way to larger ones.” There was a bludgeoning with a baseball bat, a strangling followed by a beheading, a stabbing during sex. Some people were set on fire. One man was exposed to killer bees.

“Murderers are waiting,” Buss's book bleakly concludes. “They are watching. They are all around us.”

Buss's findings deeply distressed him. But I saw them as good news. Surely fantasizing about killing someone and then not doing it is a way we teach ourselves to be moral. So Buss's conclusions seemed silly to me. But there was something different about his study that I found extraordinary. It was something that—as Buss's research assistant Joshua Duntley e-mailed me—“we did not code for specifically.” It was the part where Buss asked them what had stimulated their murderous thoughts.

There was the boy who daydreamed about kidnapping his schoolmate, “breaking both his legs so he couldn't run, beating him until his insides were a bloody pulp, then I'd tie him to a table and drip acid onto his forehead.” What had the schoolmate done to him? “He ‘accidentally' dropped his books on my head and all his friends had a good laugh.” There was the office worker who imagined “tampering with my boss's car brakes so he'd have a braking failure on the motorway.” Why? “He had given me the impression that I was a real loser. He would mock me in front of other people. I felt humiliated.”

And on it went. Almost none of the murderous fantasies were dreamed up in response to actual danger—stalker ex-boyfriends, etc. They were all about the horror of humiliation. Brad Blanton was right. Shame internalized can lead to agony. It can lead to Jonah Lehrer. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least to a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

And so there in my room I decided that on day two of Brad's course I would go for it. I would let the shame out. I would be Max Mosley. I would be radically honest.

•  •  •

O
n day two of Brad's course, Brad asked me in front of the group if I'd like to take the Hot Seat, given that I'd been so quiet on day one.

I cleared my throat. Everyone was smiling expectantly at me as if I were the start of a good television program.

I hesitated.

“Actually, I won't,” I said.

The expectant smiles turned quizzical.

“The truth is,” I explained, “I don't think my problems are as bad as everyone else's problems in the room. Plus, I don't like conflict.”

I clarified that I wasn't against conflict in a
weird
way: I quite enjoy watching other people being in conflict. If I notice two people yelling at each other on the street, I would often stop at a distance and have a look. But it just wasn't my thing to
participate
in conflict.

“So I don't want people to think I'm anti–Hot Seat,” I concluded. “They've been my favorite parts of the course so far. I find the lectures in between them quite boring but the Hot Seats are great.”

“So you want there to be a Hot Seat but you don't want to be the one to get in it?” said Brad's friend Thelma.

“Yes,” I said.

“I say do a Hot Seat right now, go ahead and get in it,” Thelma said.

“No, no,” I said again. “I'm honestly more comfortable watching other people do it.”

“CHICKEN SHIT!” Thelma yelled. “I call CHICKEN SHIT! If you get a chance to jump on Jon, do.”

“Ha-ha,” I said. “But seriously, I've got nothing that's so pressing for me to be in the Hot Seat. I don't want an awkward silence and I don't want to dredge something up. I'd be faking it. I just think other people here have got more issues than I do.”

“BULLSHIT!” yelled Thelma.

“YOU'RE AN ARROGANT CONDESCENDING BASTARD!” said Brad.

“I don't think I said anything condescending,” I said, surprised.

“‘You people need it and I don't,'” said Brad, impersonating me.

“I actually really resent you for saying that,” said Jack, the veterinarian with the sex addiction. “It was FUCKING condescending. I also resent that you're sitting there fiddling with that fucking phone constantly, which I find extremely distracting. I RESENT YOU FOR HOLDING THE PHONE!”

“Can I say something about the phone . . . ?” I said.

“We don't give a fuck what your reason is,” said Brad. “We're going to resent you whether you explain it or not.”

“That's not how conversations work,” I said.

“Jon, do you have a resentment you want to share about anyone in this room?” said Melissa, hopefully.

I paused. “No,” I said.

“I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT YOU'RE A BULLSHIT ARTIST AND EVERYTHING YOU'RE SAYING IS BULLSHIT,” yelled Brad.

“RIGHT,” I screeched. “I resent YOU”—I glared at Jack—“for saying I'm condescending. I'm NOT condescending. I was basing my opinion that your problems are worse than mine ENTIRELY on the things you've all SAID IN THIS ROOM. And I resent YOU”—I looked at Thelma—“for acting like Brad's stooge, like his gang member. There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people. You swamped me with a tidal wave of Brad's ideology.”

“THAT'S A STORY YOU'VE MADE UP ABOUT ME!” shouted Thelma. “Yeah? He wants to tell me, ‘FUCKING BACK OFF,' but he's afraid of the conflict! So his mind kicks in!”

“I resent you for repeatedly yelling ‘Chicken shit' and ‘Bullshit' at me because . . .” I said.

“Not ‘because,'” said Thelma. “That's interpretive.”

I stared openmouthed at Thelma. She was COACHING me? In fact—it dawned on me—none of the yelling was a break from their therapeutic milieu. It was Radical Honesty. It works wonders for some of Brad's clients. But it wasn't working wonders for me. I was beginning to feel intensely rageful.

“Do you resent me for telling you what to say?” said Thelma.

“Yes, I fucking do,” I yelled. “I massively fucking resent you for telling me what to say.”

“Poor little thing,” said Brad. “We're so sorry we hurt your tender little feelings. Okay!” Brad clapped his hands together. “Lunch! I hate to abandon you, Jon, but I'm going to leave you cooking.”

The group stood up and began drifting away.

They were breaking for lunch?

“But I'm still very resentful,” I said.

“Good!” said Brad. “I hope you remain incomplete all lunch.”

“I don't see any value in that at all,” I muttered, as I put on my jacket.

—

Out in the hotel corridor Mario the marijuana dealer smiled and told me, “I don't think Brad's finished with you yet!” I understood why Mario said that. Brad seemed to have just broken his own golden rule. He hadn't ensured that everyone stayed together while my anger played itself out. No love had been given the chance to grow. I had been cast out into Chicago at an apex of resentfulness.

I spent the lunch hour stomping around the streets. After lunch, I had only a few hours before I needed to catch my plane back to New York, so I laid out for Brad my complaint.

“You broke for lunch right in the middle of it,” I said. “You left me seething.”

Melissa leaned over and removed my baseball cap from my head. I flinched.

“I could have been suicidally unhappy about it,” I said.

“We were running ten minutes late for lunch, so I made the decision to leave you cooking,” Brad said.

After that, things moved on. Jack the veterinarian sex addict who hated my fiddling with my phone took the Hot Seat. He recounted a time his father physically attacked his mother in front of him. It was a heartbreaking story. He closed his eyes tightly as he told it, so I took the opportunity to quickly check Twitter. I hate not knowing what's happening on Twitter. Soon after that, I caught my plane home.

—

We all kept in touch for a while. Mary e-mailed me to let me know how things had gone with Amanda: “I tried the Rad. Hon. approach and she was super resistant and defensive and pretty much closed to what I wanted to express. I could feel the waves of anger coming off her while talking to her. Since then I have had to still see her at the gym and at times I've ‘ignored' her. Other times we've had civil, pleasant chats (not that many).”

Another member of the group e-mailed us all to report that he attempted Radical Honesty on his wife, but she responded by trying to physically push him away so he told her that he would “‘get the ax and defend myself by killing you.' Rightfully she was scared, as she knows that often I confuse truth with fantasy. We all do. So the police came by. I am under consideration for a job that involves a security clearance, so any ARREST will result in no offer there . . . I love you all, especially Thelma, who I find extremely attractive, and I want to have sex with her (you). Perhaps I could even treat her (you) as my wife.”

Brad wrote back, copying everyone in: “What you say is completely insane. Your best bet is to seek out a psychiatrist who can prescribe you a mild tranquilizer.”