Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

I trudged miserably back to my hotel. If keeping people waiting in restaurants for hours is what it’s like to live in a post-shame world, I thought, give me a bit of shame .

At midnight Donna e-mailed me: “FUCK! I’m SO sorry.”

“That’s FINE!” I e-mailed back.

“There’s a public disgrace tomorrow if you want to come,” she e-mailed.

• • •

It was midnight outside a sports bar in the San Fernando Valley. From the front, the place looked dark and empty — all shuttered up. But Donna had told me to go around the back to the fire door behind the bins. When Max had told me how impressive Kink.com was, he didn’t mean the sports bar. Kink.com headquarters is a giant, ornate 1914 armory in San Francisco, equipped with all sorts of dungeon and torture equipment. I knocked on the fire door. A security guard ticked me off a list.

I scanned the barroom. There were twenty people in there — middle-aged men sitting alone, some young couples. Everyone looked nervous. A man walked over to me.

“I’m Shylar,” he said. “Shylar Cobi.”

“Are you a porn person?” I asked him.

“Twenty-three years,” he said. “It’s all I know.”

He had a sweet, melancholy face. He reminded me of Droopy.

I asked him a bit about his life. He said he didn’t just work with Donna. He was a producer for hire, averaging fifty porn shoots a year. Which meant he had a thousand credits in all, including — I later discovered on IMDb— Orgy University, Wet Sweaty Boobs , and My Slutty Friends .

“So what’s the plan for tonight?” I asked him.

Shylar shrugged. “Same as always. They fuck, he finishes, we clean up, everyone goes home.”

He gently squeezed my arm to make sure I was okay. He wasn’t the only one. Various members of the production crew kept doing it to me all night — rubbing my back, squeezing my arm. I suppose, being tweedy and owl-like, I just don’t look like the sort of person who normally hangs around extreme porn shoots, and I think everyone wanted to ensure that I was not feeling intimidated or about to faint. It was sweet. Porn professionals were being so nice and considerate toward me that it was almost as if I were the person about to have his genitals electrocuted. But it wasn’t to be my genitals. It was to be the genitals of the porn actor Jodi Taylor, who was sitting in the corner of the bar discussing logistics with Princess Donna, who now stood up, hushed everyone, and made a speech about what was expected of us.

“So,” she began. “The name of the site is Public Disgrace. It’s a site about public humiliation. You guys are all just people drinking and having a good time, and you have no idea that we’re going to be turning up at this bar. When we come in, you’re all invited to participate to a certain extent. You can grope the model, assuming you have clean hands and short-filed fingernails. We have nail clippers and nail files if anyone thinks they’re going to need them. You can smack her ass, but this is not about you showing us how hard you can smack someone. I don’t want to see anyone take full swings. Sometimes people try and show off with their spanking. I’m sure you guys can all spank very, very hard, but I don’t want to see it. Other things you can do. You can spit on her body. You can pour your drinks on her. You can pull her hair. You can gently smack her in the face. But try not to be too obnoxious. You are totally welcome to shout things out and verbally degrade her. That is encouraged. But just don’t be that guy .” She summarized: “So. Don’t get shitfaced, don’t fist her ass, enjoy.”

Donna and Jodi Taylor disappeared to a corridor outside, where Donna attached a ball and chain to Jodi. Donna gave a signal to the cameraman. He pressed record. And it began.

—

The drinkers feigned surprise at the sight of Donna pulling a shrieking Jodi Taylor into the bar. “What IS going on?” said a man in a beanie hat. He slammed down his drink in “outrage.”

Donna ripped off Jodi Taylor’s clothes and attached electrodes to her genitals.

“What are you DOING?” said the man. He seemed to be the only crowd member daring enough to improvise dialogue or simulate emotions of any sort.

“It’s electricity,” Donna said. “Do you want to shock her?”

“Do I want to SHOCK her?” he said. “I just came in to get a drink. Oh. Okay.”

Donna handed him the remote control. He pressed the button. Nothing happened.

“Turn it off and turn it on again,” said Donna. He did. Then he pressed the button. Jodi Taylor screamed.

(Later, during a break from filming, a few crowd members expressed doubt that there really was electricity coursing through the pads into Jodi Taylor’s genitals, so one of them placed the pad against her hand and pressed the button and shrieked. Later still, I got an e-mail from Jodi Taylor: “Obviously if something like public disgrace happened to me in real life, it’d be extremely intense, horrifying and awful. But that’s the beauty of porn. You can actually do these crazy things without actually doing them. It’s all make-believe. It’s pure fantasy and a fantasy is never humiliating or scary. It’s awesome. Princess Donna is all about making the PORN GIRL’S fantasy come alive far more than the fantasy of the people viewing it. Only with her can you have a fantasy as taboo as gangbang or public disgrace and actually get to live it out while being completely safe and comfortable.”)

Shylar Cobi had told me that the crowd was composed of friends and friends of friends, with one exception. A hired porn actor was mingling among us. And now he emerged and started having sex with Jodi Taylor. At this, everyone became a bit bolder, if still slightly stilted. “Put ice on her tooth,” a man shouted. Someone poured beer over Jodi Taylor’s head. I tried to maintain a respectful distance, but from time to time, when needing to ensure that I was accurately chronicling the minutiae of it, I think I drifted into shot. And so, if you are a Public Disgrace viewer and the erotic ambience was ruined for you by the sudden emergence of a bespectacled man peering in close and writing things in a notepad, I’m sorry.

Then they finished and cleaned up, and everyone went home. Later I spent a little time with Donna. I told her I thought she’d definitely created a more mindful working environment than most regular offices. There were no bullying bosses stalking around shaming the employees. “Are other corners of the porn industry more frightening and exploitative?” I asked her. “And that’s why everyone here was making a special effort?”

Donna nodded but said she didn’t want to talk about other parts of the porn industry. She wanted to talk about what she was trying to achieve with Public Disgrace. “America is a very puritanical place,” she said. “If I can help one person feel less freakish and alone because of what they like, then I’ll be a success. But I know I’ve already reached more people than that.”

• • •

A few weeks passed. And then I received an interesting e-mail from Max Mosley. Like me, he’d been thinking a lot about what it was about him that had helped him to stave off even the most modest public shaming. And now, he wrote, he thought he had the answer. It was simply that he had refused to feel ashamed.

“As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,” he said, “the whole thing crumbles.”

I reread Max’s e-mail. Could that be it? Does a shaming only work if the shamee plays his or her part in it by feeling ashamed? There was no doubt that Jonah, and Justine too, had been having intense conversations with their shame. Whereas Max was just refusing to engage with his at all. I wondered: Was unashamedness something that some people just had? Or was it something that could be taught?