The Public Has Shifted on Public Shaming

From Museum DM Guy to Phillies Karen, the kind of public shaming that would have yielded digital high fives in 2017 just doesn't fly anymore.

Photo by peter bucks on Unsplash

Imagine the following scenario happened to you. You’re a single, attractive young man with a good job: a lead researcher for an AI company. At the museum, you meet an attractive, single, intellectual woman about your age and begin chatting with her about a painting. Meetcute city!

Nothing comes of it, but later that day you log into Twitter and notice a photo that woman posted of herself at the museum has gone viral. Perhaps it wasn’t a missed connection after all. Naturally, you want to reach out, but you don’t want to be the low-effort oaf who just messages her, “hey.” But of course, you need to introduce yourself before you get into any real conversation, so you DM her to see if she remembers you. She does, and she seems friendly in her response. That’s a good sign, right?

Now, you have to escalate to a real conversation that might eventually lead to more. But what do you say? Clearly not “How’s your day going?” or anything to that effect. After all, you’ve heard about how much women hate uncreative, copy-paste approaches. You decide to go the extra mile. You see that this woman recently wrote a blog article about AI, your field of work. You read her article, and decide to strike up some banter by noting you have a shared interest, but that you respectfully disagreed with her thesis. She responds, “OK….good luck with that.”

Clearly that didn’t go well. Maybe she would have preferred “hey.” Maybe she was simply never attracted to you and there was nothing you could have said that would have helped. Maybe the attempt at a friendly debate was too much. Oh well. At least nobody has to know about this little fumble, right?

Wrong—because shortly after she received your last message, she screenshotted it (with your name and face) and blasted it to her thousands of Twitter followers, with the caption, “I am begging the men of this world to be normal.” When someone tells her she could have just ignored you and moved on without publicly shaming you, she doubles down and says that you deserve a “public reckoning” for your behavior, and that you should have known better than to fancy yourself her “intellectual peer.”

If you’re already active on Twitter, by now you know this is a real thing that happened, and the people involved (who I won’t be naming on principle, although the cat is likely out of the bag anyway) were basically the Main Character(s) du jour yesterday. I wasn’t even planning on writing today until I was tagged in the thread without context, probably because the person who tagged me knew that this drama was classic CHH chum. I’ve written a lot about how silly social norms still carry risk when you break them. I wrote about the danger of anonymous gossip apps and my own experience being targeted on one. I wrote about how a minority of dogmatic anti-flirting voices (RUNNING CLUB IS NOT FOR DATING!!!!) made men unnecessarily scared of speaking to women in person, including in social settings. I also wrote about the death of dancing by non-professionals, and how this ties into the fear of breaking social norms, the comfort in taking fewer social risks, and the ever-present risk of being publicly filmed and shamed.

*Stefon SNL voice* This story has everything: social norms, public approaches, flirting, missed social cues, accusations of mansplaining, public shaming, and a shaming reaction from the public to the public shaming.

That’s right. The woman’s attempt to bring on a “public reckoning” didn’t work. Or, well, maybe it did, because the public turned on her for the attempt. It wasn’t just men, either. Women and men alike echoed that simply ignoring him, or rejecting him privately, would have been fine, but putting him on blast for shooting his shot (even if he did so in a way she felt was weird) took it too far. In fact, she received so much hate for her behavior that after daring Twitter to “do their worst” and adding in a sassy nail polish emoji, that she locked her account.

A friend of mine (also on Twitter) texted me shortly after to say she was surprised so many people took the man’s side. I completely see why she was surprised. This type of behavior (the public shaming, not the DM approach) was considered fairly normal, if not acceptable, in pretty recent history. But something has happened gradually since then. The public reckoning has come—for public shaming itself.