Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

— WILL HEAVEN, The Daily Telegraph , OCTOBER 27, 2009

Amid the hundreds of congratulatory messages I received, one stuck out: “Were you a bully at school?”

Was I a bully at school?

—

When my son was five years old, he one day asked me, “Did you used to be fat?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was fat when I was sixteen. And I was thrown in a lake for being fat.”

“Wow!” Joel said.

“There are two lessons to be learned from this,” I said. “Don’t be a bully and don’t be fat.”

“Will you show me what it looked like?” he asked me.

“Me being fat or me being thrown in a lake?” I asked.

“Both,” he said.

I puffed up my cheeks, waddled self-consciously around the room, fell over, and said, “Splash!”

“Will you do it again in slow motion?” said Joel. “And put a cushion under your shirt?”

So I did. This time I added dialogue: “Please don’t throw me in the lake! No! Splash!”

“Will you sound more scared?” said Joel.

“PLEASE!” I shouted. “I might drown. Please. No, NO!”

Joel glanced, startled, at me. It was his fault that I’d gone that far. He’d been like Sam Peckinpah, forever directing me to make it more grotesque, basically getting me to mime the swallowing of dirty water as I struggled to the surface. But I think he’d trusted that within my reenactment I would at all times retain some dignity.

But then he smiled.

“You were SO fat!” he said.

My life has basically been a good one, but my mind forever returns to those two years in Cardiff — between 1983 and 1985—when I was bullied every day, stripped and blindfolded, and thrown across the playground. Those years hover over me when I walk into new rooms, meet new people.

• • •

It seemed to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

—

I remembered something that Jonah Lehrer had said to me back in Runyon Canyon. He’d said, “I look forward to reading your book so I can learn how people find a way out of shame.”

I hadn’t thought about writing some sort of a public-shaming recovery guide. But what he’d said stayed with me. Were there old-timer shamees out there who had managed to survive theirs intact and who could offer enlightenment to the distraught victims of this new shame dynamic? Were there people out there who had found a way out of shame? I knew just where to start.

F1 BOSS MAX MOSLEY HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS EXCLUSIVE: SON OF FASCIST HITLER LOVER IN SEX SHAME

Formula One motor racing chief Max Mosley is today exposed as a secret sadomasochist sex pervert. The son of infamous British wartime fascist leader Oswald Mosley is filmed romping with five hookers at a depraved NAZI-STYLE orgy in a torture dungeon.

Before hammering away at the girls he plays a cowering death camp inmate himself, having his GENITALS inspected and his hair searched for LICE — mocking the humiliating way Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II…

At one point the wrinkled 67-year-old yells “she needs more of ze punishment!” while brandishing a LEATHER STRAP over a brunette’s naked bottom. Then the lashes rain down as Mosley counts them out in German: “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Fünf! Sechs!”

With each blow, the girl yelps in pain as grinning, gray-haired Mosley becomes clearly aroused. And after the beating, he makes her perform a sex act on him.

His Jew-hating father — who had Hitler as guest of honor at his marriage — would have been proud of his warped son’s command of German as he struts around looking for bottoms to whack. Our investigators obtained a graphic video of his sick antics.

— NEVILLE THURLBECK, News of the World , MARCH 30, 2008

• • •

Max Mosley sat across from me in the living room of his West London mews house. We were alone. His wife, Jean, was at their other house, where she now spends most of her time. As Max told the Financial Times ’s Lucy Kellaway in 2011, “She doesn’t like going out, she doesn’t want to meet people.”

Nobody I could think of had ridden out a public shaming as immaculately as Max Mosley had. A powerful and hitherto not especially well-liked society man and the head of the FIA, Formula One racing’s governing body, had been photographed by the News of the World ’s hidden cameras in the most startling sex situation imaginable, especially given his particular Nazi associations, and he had somehow managed to emerge from the scandal completely intact. In fact, it was even better than intact. People liked him more than ever. Some people thought of him as a standard-bearer for our right to feel unashamed. That’s how I thought of him. And now Max was every shamee’s aspiration. I wanted him to talk me through how he did it.

But he looked embarrassed by my question. “I’m no good at introspection,” he said.

“But you must have some clue,” I said. “You stood at the newsstand that Sunday morning reading the News of the World article…”

“It was immediate,” Max said. “It was a whoosh. It was, ‘This is war.’” Then he trailed off and gave me a look to say, I’m sorry, but I really don’t do introspection .

I think he was as curious about the mystery as I was. But he didn’t know the answer.

“You had a strange childhood…” I tried.

“I suppose my upbringing toughened me up a bit,” he said. “From a very early age, I realized that my parents weren’t like other people’s parents…”

—

Until that “Sick Nazi Orgy” headline, the thing Max Mosley was most famous for — unless you were a Formula One racing fan — was his parents. Max’s father was Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder in 1932 of the British Union of Fascists. He gave Nuremberg-style speeches in London during which hecklers were illuminated by spotlights and viciously beaten in front of the crowd. Oswald Mosley stood onstage and watched. Max’s mother was the beautiful socialite Diana Mitford. She and her sister Unity were so besotted by Hitler — with whom they both became friendly — they’d send each other letters like this one, from Unity to Diana:

23rd December 1935

The Führer was heavenly, in his best mood and very gay. There was a choice of two soups and he tossed a coin to see which one he would have, and he was so sweet doing it. He asked after you and I told him you were coming soon. He talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely.

With best love and Heil Hitler,

Bobo.

Hitler attended Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford’s wedding, which took place at Joseph Goebbels’s house in 1936. Max was born in 1940, and when he was a few months old, his parents were interred for the duration of the war at Holloway Prison in North London. Those were his first memories — visiting his imprisoned parents, “which doesn’t strike you as unusual when you’re three, but as you get older, you realize they’re disliked by a big section of society. Still, they were my parents, so I was completely on their side. When someone argued with me about my father, it was easy for me to win because I knew all the facts.”