This is interesting to me, as an early childhood educator.

Social conditioning is of course one of the things we do, when working with very young children. We're teaching them what types of behaviours are acceptable in our society, and how to be members of that society.

Shame's not one of the most useful tools, and isn't used often. But it does sometimes have its place when addressing behaviour that can't be addressed by the more useful "We don't do that because it hurts other people" or "We don't do that because look, now the toy is broken" type of strategies. It's for the "We don't do that because we just don't do that" behaviours.

A really good example is picking your nose and eating it, or playing with it. There is no actual good reason that this is not OK, but we all agree that it's considered socially inappropriate. The mild shaming of "No, that's yucky, please don't do that, and go wash your hands" works well here.

So, anyway, I believe that shame does have a small place in the toolbox of social lubricants.

It could be argued that some of what we're seeing in the Trump White House is what people with no shame look like,and it's not pretty.

@1 yeah, interesting question. The funny thing about shame is it's actually pretty weak at preventing behavior. It's strong at screwing people up after it failed to prevent behavior. So you should only deploy shame against a behavior if shame is going to win! Meaning if the behavior is weakly motivated. Meaning... shame isn't good for too much.

Setting shame up against a strong fundamental human desire like sucking cock is a very bad idea, unless the collateral damage is the goal for some people.

I agree - using shame against something like that is just asking for self hatred.

But you can be pretty sure that the reason you don't play with feces, or eat vomit, or do other things that you find disgusting, is not that they are inherently disgusting, but that someone used shame to teach you that people don't do that.

Shame is very good at instilling disgust, and while we all certainly don't agree that sucking cock is disgusting, there ARE things that we are all OK with everyone being disgusted by, such as the above examples.

Positive modeling of how we want people to act is the least harmful social conditioning tool, but it doesn't work for everything.

I just wanted to make the point that we tend - especially we good liberals - to think of social conditioning as a bad, coercive thing. And it certainly can be. But it's also something we must have if we are to live together in groups - we need to learn what's rude, what's mean, what's disgusting. Most of this you learned when you were so young you don't even remember learning it.

I realize that exploring the concept is important for the interview. The manner of interviewing after the first three questions rubs me the wrong way though. It feels like "Isn't shame sometimes okay though? How about if this happens? Not even a little? WHY DON'T YOU GIVE SHAME A CHANCE?" I wonder if a different angle could have also been used in the space given.

Dirty Lola is pretty cool. I'd love to hang out with her for a longer conversation, and the next time I go to NYC I hope to check out a live performance of Sex-Ed a GoGo. The dear Doctor, on the other hand, seems to still be working his way past his own personal issues and psychological baggage around sexual shaming. Physician, heal thyself!

Great talk Dan, and you look cool with that hair cut.
Shame is so caught up with religion and sex,
and it can lead to such murderous outcomes.
Dan Savage, you are such a great role model as a non monogamous gay husband and father.