Friday, March 30, 2012

Friday Open Forum: The First Shame

I was having a conversation with someone earlier yesterday about the concept of sexual shame—whether it’s appropriate, when it’s a hindrance, and how it develops in our psyches from the very earliest age.

I was fortunate enough to have incredibly sexually-progressive parents who felt that what adults did in the bedroom was pretty much their own business. Nudity was pretty common in our household. I was educated not only in the proper words for the genitals and what came out of them, but in the concepts of foreplay and birth control, long before any of the other kids had gotten beyond the stork and cabbage patch concept. Even in my teen years, my mother’s advice about marriage tended to be, “For the love of god! Don’t get married until you’ve lived with someone for at least two years! Only after you’ve got the fucking out of your system will you know whether you’re good for each other!”

True dat. When you get right down to it, it’s about the most practical relationship advice you can give a young someone.

The conversation yesterday did bring to mind an incident from my youth, though, involving my grandmother—my mother’s mother. Now, my mother came from a deeply religious Southern family. Her grandfather and her father were Southern Baptist ministers. Her multiple brothers also went into the ministry, though they all broke away from it in one way or another later on in their lives. My mom was the first member of her Georgia clan who finished high school and got herself a college and then a graduate-level education; combined with her political activism, she had a reputation among both her own family and her in-laws as a firebrand radical.

My grandmother, however, couldn’t have been more opposite. Both women were equally stubborn, but where my mother was inquisitive and loved to laugh, my grandmother was sour and stern, and looked no farther for news than what she could hear over the bingo tables at the local Eastern Star lodge. My mother couldn’t stand cooking, and pressed me into kitchen labor when I hit the double-digits in years; my grandmother’s main talents had been birthing babies and baked goods. They fought like cats when they were in close proximity. More than once did my mom cut visits south short by tossing me and the suitcases in the back of the car and driving off (“For good!”, she’d yell, every time) in a huff with a squeal of brakes and a flurry of dust from the dirt road on which my grandparents lived.

I had to have been in first or second grade when the one incident of shame I remember from my very early years took place, because in my memory we’d just moved into the house where my dad is still living. I was in the basement with a boy from the neighborhood—I don’t remember anything about him except that he lived nearby and that I was trying to make friends with him, because I was new enough to the area that I didn’t have any. And my grandmother was visiting, which is the kind of thing she’d do immediately after a move, to maximize the chaos and discomfort.

My parents had bought (maybe for moving, maybe just for their offices) a Dymo label maker. Label makers in those days were heavy devices that look like the radar guns cops use on the sides of the highways, mated with the Starship Enterprise. One fed a narrow strip of plastic into these things, turned the wheel containing the alphabet and numerals and a few rudimentary punctuation marks until it reached the letter of one’s choice, squeezed the handle really, really hard, and distended the plastic tape with a die so that it embossed a character into it. When one had finally finished laboriously spelling out a word, one would advance the plastic tape, cut it, peel off the backing, and then stick the label on whatever it was that needed to be identified.

Back in the days before videos games and even electronic calculators, this device passed as nifty and high tech. Naturally, kids loved them. I’d taken my parents’ label maker and this other kid and I were down in the basement playroom messing around with it. One of us had come up with the brilliant idea of making a label that said KICK ME! on it, and we were taking turns sticking it on each other. I’d stick it on his forehead, and he’d giggle. He’d stick it on my shoulder, and we’d both laugh hysterically.

I know! You’re envying the sheer hilarity of it! And I don’t blame you! I stuck the label on his chest. Then he stuck it on my butt! Can you imagine? Walking around with KICK ME on my butt all day? What a laugh riot! We were laughing up a storm when I stuck it on his groin. Hilarious!

Then I looked up, and saw my grandmother standing on the basement stairs. She wore on her face the expression I always associate with my grandmother, pinched eyes, prim lips pressed into a grim line—the same expression she had almost twenty years ago when I drove overnight, all night, from Michigan to Virginia the day my mother died, and I stumbled out of the car and her first words of comfort to me were, “You sure have gotten fat.”

But that day, when I was no more than six or seven, I suddenly knew that I’d done something of which she hadn’t approved. I’d played around with another boy’s crotch. I knew that in her eyes, without so much as a word from her lips, that it was w-r-o-n-g wrong.

If it had been my mother, or my father, or any of their friends, such tomfoolery wouldn’t have gotten even a raised eyebrow. But my grandmother stopped there on the stairs, face pressed into that disapproving and disappointed expression, laundry in her hands, and stared. I stopped laughing, and backed away from the kid. Only when I was a good distance away, and she was certain she’d squelched any proto-homosexual orgies that might’ve arisen from the labeler incident, did she finally leave.

For the first time—maybe the only time—in my young years, I remember feeling flushed and shamed by the incident. She hadn’t said a word, but somehow she’d convinced me I was doing something wrong, something dirty. On a certain level I knew that my parents wouldn’t have cared about a kick-me label to the groin. They would’ve found it juvenile, but not worthy of condemnation. And in a lot of ways, it was the first time I was aware that my household was a little bit different in that respect than other households.

I sure as shootin’ never stuck another label on a man’s dick after that. I’ll tell you that.

For today’s Friday open forum, I’m curious about other people’s childhood experience in shame. I know mine is rather tame compared to some I’ve heard. But when was the first time you experienced sexual shame as a kid—and did it come from your parents? Your peers? From within? How did it change your behavior, after? Or did it? Do you feel shame is necessary, when it comes to sex? Or can it be a turn-on?

Let’s hear from you guys in the comments.

31 comments:

  1. Gentle Breeder

    I was young, probably 8 or 9 or so and playing doctor with my friend Craig. He and I both had our pants off and were standing in our underwear and touching each others packages. I remember being fascinated with Craig's because he could move his without using his hands (I didn't realize or even know what a hardon was then). He showed me and I touched it and at that moment my Great-Grandmother walked into my bedroom. She didn't give me a disapproving look, she just said "Stop it!" and "I am telling your parents" We were mortified, whipped on our clothes and headed outside. We never ever talked about it.

    Al

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    1. Al, do you still feel a flush of shame when you think about it?

      It sounds a lot like my story—only you got several bases further than I did!

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  2. I don't remeber any thing that would cause shame from when I was a kid. But the older you get, the less you rememeber.

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  3. Rob

    I absolutely do feel that "pit of the stomach" feeling when I think about it, even today. It hasn't made me stop playing Doctor. Now I am more of a Proctologist/Urologist and less of a General Practitioner

    Al

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    1. Al, don't most men visit the general practitioner first? Sounds like a good gig to me. :-)

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  4. Rob,

    I get the shame thing a lot, to the point where sometimes I stay awake at night worrying about things I've done months or years ago, but it never has to do with sex. I've told you this before, but my parents really never thought to talk to me about sex, so they never thought to tell me it was wrong, until it was much too late. They used to be a lot more laid back than they are now, and now they probably wouldn't hesitate. But back then I was more ridiculed by my parents for being SHY than anything else. Even my grandmother thought I was being ridiculous when I didn't want to change in front of her. Though now she seems to be on a sex is bad kick.

    I'm not entirely open with my family either, though. Even at a young age I knew that being with boys was not something I could talk to my parents or family about, so I just talked to other people (mostly my mentor but also some friends). There was never a thought in my mind that sexual exploration was wrong, just that I shouldn't tell my family.

    But I get enough gut-wrenching shame elsewhere, so I supposed I need a break somewhere.

    -Ace

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    1. Ace, I sympathize. I had enough shame on a daily basis about everything else in my life—the way I looked, the clothes I wore, my glasses, my braces, my hairstyle. Maybe so much of my sexual confidence comes from that being the one area of my life where I had so little shame.

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    2. That may be part of it. I sometimes think that my choice to be so sexually active as a youth may have been because of the lack of shame. My own parents went out of their way to make me feel stupid or ugly or bad at whatever I was doing. But when I had sex, I could tell if I was good or not (and guys told me, of course). So it was one thing I knew I could do and do well and that made me do it more. At least that may be part of what happened, anyway. Just a thought.

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  5. When I was young--I was in my neighbors yard behind a playhouse trying to get a little boy to pee outside so I could see his penis. I had only sisters and was curious. Several other kids were around but I was the instigator. Sometime later a slightly older girl was berating me for this behavior--something along the lines of I was too old for such things with a little kid. I felt shame--I had no response to her because then I knew it was wrong. Now--I know it was just curiousity--but shame is deep.

    Steph

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    1. Steph,

      Oh absolutely, it was just curiosity, and we all go through that phase. (I'm still curious.)

      It's interesting how you were policed by a peer, though. I wonder where she learned it?

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  6. I remember at age 12 going to my uncle's farm in Kansas to spend the weekend visiting when my cousins came in from California for their yearly visit in the summer. After playing outside all day we boys had to take our showers in the outdoor shed followed afterwards by the girls. On my suggestion we boys then decided to peak in the window and watch the girls shower (no curtains). The girls saw us watching and did a little nude dancing for us. Later that evening my aunt called us boys into a bedroom and lectured us about it all. My ears were glowing red and I was so humiliated and embarrassed. That impacted me for years being the shy & sensitive kid I was. My mother never said a word. Now go forward to 2008 and my aunt is 84. I am visiting her and we laughed about the incident; and I tell her I had always been 'gay' and she said, "I always knew this." Then she said your mother knew it but never brought it up for discussion. I Never did tell Mom I was gay. Wish I had of now but she has passed.

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    1. Anonymous, this was a really sweet story, on a lot of levels. The kid stuff was so funny and innocent, and the adult conversation with your aunt was quite touching. I'm glad you had that conversation; it sounds as if it was a good one.

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  7. This is an interesting forum question. I am sitting here thinking of all the times I was naked with my buddies at the ages of 6-8, and I cannot really remember feeling anything shameful about it. We were also never caught. One incident later on was when I was in middle school and had a sleepover with a couple of friends. I used to have a glow in the dark Casper The Friendly Ghost from some game that I don't even remember now. He was hollow inside, and we were all naked and comparing ourselves. Of course I got hard and put Casper on my dick. We laughed and joked about it, and it was all harmless until that became ammunition later on in the year when a friend was mad about something. The next thing I know, random classmates were asking me if I really put Casper on my dick. I was pretty embarrassed hearing this. I don't think I felt shame about it but it was embarrassing to have other kids hear that story.

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    1. Tom, I am so glad you shared this story, because it brought back a memory of my own that I hadn't thought about in about 40 years! My parents used to buy some kind of bubble bath that came in a bottle shaped like cartoon characters—the head of the character was the twist-off cap of the shampoo. I used to save the caps and, when I was six or seven, amuse myself at night by putting the caps on my erect penis, then make them flip back and forth by tightening my pelvic floor. It wasn't really a sexual thing. I just got endless amusement by making them bob back and forth that way.

      I guess it was early Kegel exercises, too.

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    2. Soaky bubble bath! I hadn't thought of that in at least as many years. My cousin Billy and I used to play with the bottle cap-heads in the same way when we'd take baths together on sleepovers. I specifically remember Huckleberry Hound and the Flintstones—and (of course) how Billy would run around the house wet and naked after our baths. I was more modest (then) but envied his 5- or 6-year-old libertine bravado!

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    3. Oh my god, Throb, I had the Huckleberry Hound one! I also remember having a Pink Panther one and a Frankenstein's monster head as well. My dick ran the gamut of disguises.

      I actually doubted this memory for a couple of minutes when I was writing it out, because it seems to me that those shampoo bottle caps—the interiors at least—had to be fairly small. But you know, my dick wasn't quite the size then that it is now.

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  8. When I was about 5 or 6, I lived in SC, and one of best friends was a little girl who lived behind me. We were together all the time that year. She had a little wooden playhouse in the back yard that her father had built for her with shingles and window boxes and everything. One day she wanted to take off her pants and show me something she had learned to do. So I took off my pants along with her. She had a bunch of crayons lined up on the floor, and she began sticking them in her vagina and taking them out, one after the other. I watched this, thinking, "That can't be good," but I was fascinated. Then I got the bright idea to take off ALL our clothes and run around the playhouse. She was game to run around with me, but she kept her shirt on and just followed me with her shorts around her ankles. I, however, was stripped absolutely bare and, I remember vividly, sporting a rock-hard, burning, throbbing, electric erection. It was a pretty spring day, near sunset, with the breeze blowing; I felt incredibly free. Three-quarters of the way around the house, I heard my mother call my name-- she didn't sound angry or shocked; it was just the voice she used when she wanted to call me urgently home from the back porch. I was immediately overwhelmed with shame and ran back into the house, quickly put my clothes on, and ran home. She matter of factly told me I shouldn't be doing that. I recall my father teasing me mercilessly about it after dinner.

    The next morning, however, getting ready for kindergarten, I couldn't find my underwear or my shoes. And I had the first of many oh-shit feelings in my life: I had left them in the playhouse in my urgency to get my pants on and get out of there. I felt even more ashamed and worried it would reopen whatever conversation had seemed to blow over the day before; maybe I was afraid my mother would be even more mad that I left my underwear somewhere that about the streaking. So I slipped out of the house and ran to the playhouse, which had been NAILED SHUT. I had to scramble up to a little window that was fairly high up toward the roof, then climb back out and jump. I was never a very athletic kid so I don't know how I did that except pure adrenaline.

    My friend's father had been livid and I was forbidden to play with her for a long time, and the playhouse stayed nailed shut. Now I just think the story is hilarious, but for a long time into my adolescence, whenever I would think of myself running free with a big boner in plain view of my mother, I would feel my stomach drop.

    In general, though, I'm like you, Breeder... My parents were pretty open-minded about these things, and I really don't feel any shame connected to sex (and certainly no GUILT-- that's utterly bizarre to me). It's a huge positive in my life and I'm grateful.

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    1. Cool,

      That is some story. I was horrified at the part where the playhouse was nailed shut.

      It's interesting the responses of your parents—your mom didn't sound terribly upset, and the fact that your dad was teasing you seems to indicate that he didn't take it all too seriously. The girl's father, though, surely sounds as if he thought the misdeeds were heinous.

      Trust me. Your mom saw your baby boner many, many times before that incident. I'm sure she wasn't phased.

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    2. Yeh, my mom was very much of the it-is-natural-for-children-to-explore school. My dad has always been something of a male chauvinist and I think he just liked the idea that at 6 his son was already getting into little girls' pants (never mind that she's the one who got into mine, a trend that continued through college when I finally just started doing it with guys like I wanted to). I'm glad to have had the parents I did. I once fucked a guy who curled up into a little ball immediately after (*IMMEDIATELY*) and started rocking back and forth and saying he had to go to confession. I can't imagine being trained to think that way. I love getting off and it makes me happy and everyone should do it all the time, forever and ever, amen.

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  9. I was 13 and still havent reach my puberty(i knew nothing about sex..seriously nothing,i still thought babies comes out the navel and god makes the baby..lol..for real)..my friends would play grabbing their junks but i was too shy..untill it come to a point i cant control my curiosity..at the beach as i was playing with my dad,i grabbed his junk(not in a sexual way)..my dad was shocked but he just laughed and joked about it..thinking about it now,i feel so shy,i knew it wasnt sexual but still i cant believe i did that....

    another example-still 13,while standing in que for assembly or canteen,there's this good looking handsome friend of mine,i would stand behind him and since the line is packed,our body would be so close,my crotch touching his arse..i would always try to move my hand whenever we are in that position just to feel his bum to see whther he is wearing any undies or not,checking for underwear line..at that time i couldnt realize why i was always hard whenever i did that and worse that i feel he knew i did that still acts as though he didnt ,what was i thinking at that time...

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    1. i felt so guilty as at the age of 15 realising what i did was wrong to my friend(even though he either didnt mind it or didnt realise it),i ended up tutoring him chemistry after school to get over the guilt 2 straight years..thinking of it now ,i guess it was a innocent sexual awakening although i do still feel guilty till today thinking of it...was it wrong?

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    2. James, why feel guilty over any of it at all? If it wasn't sexual, it wasn't sexual. And if your friend didn't realize or didn't mind, why feel guilt about it now?

      It's too late to erase those two years of atonement, but it does seem you could put aside your guilt and just accept those incidents for what they are, today.

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  10. I remember being all of maybe eight or nine years old when it happened. The family was altogether watching "Victor Victoria" on the TV. I was enjoying it immensely when my dad started complaining about Robert Preston'e performance as "Toddy". He said that he seemed "to enjoy it too much".

    He then regaled us about an incident when he was in the navy where he busted a guy's windshield with a thrown beer bottle for being hit on while on leave in San Francisco. I remember being frightened and automatically realizing that I was sympathizing with the guy my dad had terrorized. i was the only one who didn't laugh at the story. I remember just this cold feeling in my gut realizing for the first time my attraction to guys was wrong. It took me until 21 to really get over that.

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    1. Dmakron,

      I had in-laws like your dad. They used to horrify me. More than anything, the casual, laughing way they denigrate the minorities they don't like instills self-worthlessness and hatred in younger generations.

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  11. When I think of my adolescent shame, it's about being in the closet; avoiding the obvious gay guy in my year, lest my friends realise I was gay; not speaking up when the youth group leader at my "liberal" church told us homosexuals would go to hell (even though my female best friend did); going on dates with girls. These were the things at the time that made me deeply ashamed of myself. They made me feel dishonest and cowardly.

    Cheers

    Jamie

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    1. Jamie,

      You had to have learned that shame sometime earlier, though. It's not one of those things that's presented to you at adolescence in a ceremony.

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  12. Rob,

    The idea of shame brings two thoughts to my mind -- one sexual, the other not. The sexual one has to do not with something I did, but something done to me. I was molested by an uncle when I was 12, and felt an overwhelming sense of shame, as if I had somehow done this, rather than been a victim. I think I couldn't grasp the notion of my uncle being disturbed, or cruel, or both, and my complete uncertainty with what to feel and what to think somehow coalesced into a needless and wrongheaded sense of shame. The shame was so great that I never told anyone until decades later, when I told both a therapist and my wife.

    But when I think of the concept of shame I also think of how we could use a little more of it today in areas of life that are not at all sexual. People today don't seem to be ashamed at getting caught doing inappropriate things, whether they are middle-managers padding expense accounts or financial executives screwing billions out of people. There is too little shame about violating confidentiality, or invading people's privacy. There is too little shame about the nature of public discourse, since the absence of a sense of shame is one of the things that has made the civic discourse in this country so coarse. If Rush Limbaugh had even the slightest sense of shame, he wouldn't be Rush Limbaugh -- but there are so many others almost as bad, who demonstrate just as powerfully how the absence of a sense of shame can take dignity and respect along with it.

    So shame is a complicated business. In my view we feel much, much too much of it about sex, where we should really feel no shame at all, unless we have violated the wishes of another person. And we don't feel enough shame in other aspects of life.

    PJ

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    1. PJ,

      Well, of course there are different kinds of shame. I was talking about sexual shame in this particular case, but it's true that it comes in all colors and forms. In some cases shame is appropriate—I'm not sure that feeling shame about having sexual impulses early is necessarily one of them.

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  13. I was a pre-puberty 10 or 11 year old, and had been walking around my neighborhood, when I really need to pee and was not close enough to return home. Nearby was a neighborhood service station, so I went in the men's room to pee. On the wall was a condom machine, and for 25 cents I could buy a package of 3 condoms. I did not know what condoms were or were for! But I did have a quarter in my pocket and so of course I bought them.

    When I got home, I went to my bedroom and opened one of the packages and found this balloon like device. I played with it for a few minutes, but couldn't decide how to use it. The remaining two condoms I tossed into my bookcase headboard.

    So later my mom cleans my room and finds the unopened condoms. She calls me into my bedroom and proceeds to give me a lecture about not having sex with girls (she didn't know that I was gay, nor did I) and that I should not have sex with girls even with a condom! Well all this at the time went completely over my head, but I knew I had done something wrong and felt great shame. My curiosity got me into a lot of trouble that day!

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    1. Uncutplus,

      Hilarious! I'm curious whether the story became a funny one that got bandied about at family gatherings, or whether it was never referred to again?

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    2. NEVER discussed again!!! The moral I learned from that story was to never leave your sexual paraphernalia around for someone else to find!

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