NO SHAME IN THE ONE-NIGHT-STAND GAME
Written by: Aria Vega
Sex positivity writer, Aria Vega, reclaims and reframes the 'walk of shame' from moralists and misogynists
It wasn’t long ago that the notorious ‘walk of shame’ was seemingly fixed in Western cultural imagination. Emerging in the Nineties as collegiate slang and later immortalized in pop culture, the sight of a person — let’s be real, usually a woman — apparently returning home from a hookup was riddled with stigma. But the catcalls and judgmental glares were always about more than nightclub attire at an incongruously early hour.
The real issue was that the woman wearing it was deemed to be flaunting her sexuality in a culture that happily commodifies it while simultaneously scolding her for daring to take pride in it. From that perspective, six-inch heels on a Saturday morning are akin to having a scarlet A tattooed on her forehead, advertising a woman having out-of-wedlock or otherwise illicit sex. Sexual shame, long a potent and powerful tool of patriarchal control, along with rigid beauty standards and revenge porn, is a weapon that has been wielded for long enough. And it is weakening.
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TIME FOR A NEW NARRATIVE
New technology deserves much of the praise for changes in attitudes. Before the Internet, young people were largely at the mercy of skittish, often embarrassed parents and stylized movie scenes from which to work through sexuality and gender. Now smartphones have given all of us — girls and women in particular — the megaphone of social media, which we’ve used to unpack and push back against the misogynist social norms that went unchallenged for millennia, and to support each other’s sexual expression. We’ve even got dating apps that let us screen potential suitors, and ride-sharing apps that provide discretion during post-hookup departures.
All of which has worked to reduce both the social impetus and the opportunities to shame women for making pleasure their prerogative. As sex positivity and bodily autonomy have become core tenets of progressive politics, the term ‘walk of shame’ has essentially devolved into a relic of the recent past to be uttered with eyerolls and air quotes. After all, shame can only stick when its targets have internalized the projections of the shamers. More women than ever have rejected that burden entirely, which is truly something to celebrate.
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MAKING SHAMELESS STRIDES
This isn’t to say that the status quo has been wholly inverted. One could argue that the street harassment spurred by a walk of shame hasn’t actually abated but rather relocated to cyberspace, a fact cited by the growing number of women now refusing to date online. Though modern technology is clearly capable of unleashing a social sea change, it’s still merely a tool and not something that’s going to save us from ourselves. The way we utilize this tool is ultimately a reflection of our collective core beliefs, which obviously still need some work.
Professor of psychological sciences and former Fulbright scholar Dr Christina Scott has given this plenty of thought.
“Women’s roles have changed dramatically in the last 50-plus years, and with each step we take closer to equality it threatens to pull power and status away from the patriarchy,” she says. “[Therein] lies the reason for the hateful comments; it is fear.”
Perhaps a true reclaiming of the walk of shame means a willingness to directly confront that fear, holding our heads high as we take up any space we see fit — wearing exactly what we want, at any hour of the day.
Another potent way to push back is for women to focus less on what it looks like to claim our bodily autonomy and more on what it feels like. Because it’s not just about how we appear to others, or how much sex we do or don’t have. That mindset only bolsters the notion that one’s value can only be measured externally.
“Shame comes from feeling morally judged by others, and then subsequently judging ourselves for our actions,” adds Dr Scott, and it makes perfect sense. When your sense of self is derived from shameless entitlement to your own desires, it will never need reclaiming since it can’t be taken to begin with.
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