So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Ronson begins the chapter in media res at a workshop run by Brad Blanton at a Marriott hotel in Chicago. Blanton is a psychotherapist who is known for his Radical Honesty method. He believes that when people internalize shame, their shame grows, and so instead, people should be straightforward about what they are thinking and feeling. Ronson confers with a reporter friend of his, Starlee Kline, who had also taken Blanton’s workshop, and she describes it as “crazy” (151).

During the workshop, the participants sit in a circle and take turns sharing their most shameful secrets and being radically honest with each other. One participant, Mary, describes how she is going to confront her ex. When Ronson raises the possibility that someone could call the police on Mary, or anyone pursuing this technique, Blanton is unconcerned.

When he goes back to his hotel room, Ronson is in the middle of a dispute with his editor over his refusal to do an undercover story about how women experience sexual harassment while dressed as a woman. Ronson reflects how his fear of being humiliated stopped him from pursuing the assignment and how strong an emotion feeling humiliated truly is. He notes that according to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, a majority of people fantasize about murdering someone who humiliates them.

Ronson returns to the workshop, but he refuses to participate in the “Hot Seat” activity. The other workshop participants berate him. Ronson describes his workshop time as a failure, but he still believes Mosely’s hypothesis that if one refuses to feel ashamed, “the whole thing crumbles” (168).

Chapter 9 opens with an excerpt from a New York Times article about a Zumba instructor and sex worker in the small town of Kennebunk, Maine, who had been secretly recording her clients. The list of clients is released to the local newspaper in Kennebunk, the York County Star. Ronson decides to visit the town in the aftermath of these revelations, describing it as “a well-stocked laboratory” (171) of people who have been publicly shamed.

Ronson visits the courthouse in Kennebunk and sees the men being fined for solicitation. One man, a paster named Andrew Ferreira, agrees to an interview with Ronson. Ferreira says he visited the sex worker because his marriage wasn’t going well. In a follow-up months later, Ferreira says he lost his job and his wife, but in many ways, he had been treated with kindness and forgiveness after being exposed. In fact, Ferreira says the only person who had been mocked for seeing the sex worker was the one woman on the list. This leads Ronson to the realization that “no one cares” (177) about a man having consensual sex—it’s not a scandal. The same is not seen as true for women.

Ronson notes that people like John Dacre, editor of The Daily Mail, argue that we are living in a shameless world. Ronson counters that, instead, the shame no longer is decided by upper-middle class white male authority figures like Dacre but rather by people on Twitter. He reflects that the closest he has come to finding a shame-free paradise was at Kink, the porn studio, but even its owner, Donna, described feeling ashamed when an article on the celebrity gossip site TMZ wrote about her as “some idiot pornographer” (180).

This chapter covers the story of the theatrical performer Mike Daisey who experienced being “an object of hate” (184) after it was discovered he had fabricated parts of the story for the popular radio show and podcast This American Life. Daisey tells Ronson that after he became a father, he would go swimming in a pond near his house in northern Maine and that he was trying to drown himself. Later, he moved to Seattle where he performed The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, about how factory workers making iPads and iPhones in China were forced to use a toxic material called n-Hexane to clean the screens, leading to severe health outcomes such as hand paralysis. Host Ira Glass was impressed with the performance and invited Daisey to turn it into an episode of his show This American Life. As a result of the episode, which was the most listened to in the show’s history, there was increased pressure on the Chinese factories making Apple products to improve their practices.

Later, reporter Rob Schmitz identifies problems with Daisey’s story, such as the fact that Daisey only visited three factories rather than the 10 he claimed. Glass has Daisey come back on the show to explain and apologize for his falsehoods and fabrications. During his interview with Ronson, Daisey “build[s] a fictional history for himself” (192) on the spot, in which Daisey knowingly sacrificed his reputation to draw attention to the real problems in the Chinese factories.

Ronson then follows up with Justine Sacco, who spent a month volunteering with an NGO in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, after her public shaming before returning to New York City, where she found a part-time job doing PR for a dating website. Ronson and Sacco discuss the recently passed European Court ruling on the Right to be Forgotten, wherein people can apply to have news stories and blogs about them de-indexed from Google searches. Sacco said she had mixed feelings about the ruling, which could be used to protect bad people, and she was skeptical about its ability to help people in her situation.