What if you wrote something, something that was true and significant to you, and those words launched a media attack of shame and judgment that rendered you nearly silent – how would you feel? What would you do?
Melissa Petro is a writer, a mom, and a wife. Her book, Shame on You, How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, is a brilliant examination of how society, and people in general, mortify women that we don’t understand.
It happens every day. Taylor, JLo, Britney, to name a few well-known ones. Artists living in the public eye until, for some reason, the media decided to take them down. Melissa and I connected on a quote: “I think we become whoever would have saved our younger self.”
Originally, Melissa and I were going to discuss how she and her mother became estranged, but we only touch on that briefly and don’t dig into the reasons why. In reflection, that is okay. What you witness when listening to Melissa is someone becoming the person that she needed when she was young. This is Melissa’s story.
Melissa Wrote About Her Experience With Sex Work and Experience Mass Media Humiliation
Ten years ago, Melissa was a New York City teacher and freelance writer with a degree in creative nonfiction. She wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about her experience with sex work that called out Craiglist for shutting down the erotic services section of their site.
Her story was misconstrued, and Melissa ended up losing her job. She faced extreme backlash in the media, and even Mayor Bloomberg spoke out against her. The New York Post ran a derogatory story with the headline “Bronx Teacher Admits: I’m an Ex-Hooker.”
What Melissa experienced is called “mass media humiliation,” and it was a common occurrence in our culture today. Regular people, mostly women, are turned into characters and experience relentless humiliation until the next story takes over the news cycle. They become the pariahs.
The online footprint that this experience left behind still follows Melissa. Now a freelance writer and author, she’ll never have a “real” job again. Not only that, but the shame leaves a lasting emotional impact.
Melissa was shamed for simply acknowledging the existence of the sex work industry, even though we all know it exists. In fact, we know that prominent men participate in the industry, but they don’t experience the same level of shame that women receive. Her experience illustrates how society silences women to keep them in their place and defend the status quo.
Melissa’s Exploration of Shame and Womanhood in Her New Book
In 2024, Melissa released a book about her experience called Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification. She began writing it as a memoir, but it naturally expanded to include women with similar experiences as her. She wrote about how shame is used to make women feel bad about themselves.
Shame is a pernicious feeling of being not enough, wrong, and fundamentally bad. It makes you feel like you have to hide because of what you’ve done and what you are. You can either hide it or try to become better. Shame creates the need to try harder, do better, perform for others, and please others.
Melissa is now a mother to two children, and her experience has taught her that no matter how hard she tries, she will never live up to society’s expectations of women. No woman can.
In her book, Melissa reveals these stats: more than 75 percent of executive women suffer from imposter syndrome, and among working women with children, only one in four feel they are effectively balancing motherhood and their careers.
The way to deal with shame is not to avoid it or try to prevent it. Instead, women must become acquainted with and curious about their shame and its source.
Shame is inherited
One way to get curious about your shame is to explore its roots. If you have a parent who’s shame-prone, you’re likely to be shame-prone as well. Shame is inherited from your closest caregivers. Many kids, like Melissa, internalize a feeling of wrongness.
However, this feeling goes unspoken and festers. It often causes kids to become hyper-independent overachievers, people-pleasers, and performers.
Shame is like a weather pattern. Just like we can’t avoid rain, we can’t avoid shame. The anecdote to shame is not to avoid it but to feel it. When you take a soft and curious approach to shame, you can treat it like any other emotion that needs to be felt.
You Can Turn Shame Into Your Superpower
Your shame is telling you something. When you feel like you’re not enough, your impulse is to move away from people. However, as you build your shame resilience, you’ll learn that this feeling actually means you need to move toward people.
You’ll learn to find safe, trustworthy people around whom you can be your full self. When you find them, you can share your story in a safe and appropriate way, which removes the control that shame has on your life.
Truth Wants to Be Exposed
Shame makes you hide yourself and your truth, but the truth wants to be exposed. The bigger the elephant in the room is, the more it demands to be revealed. It loses some of its power when you speak the truth about your embarrassments. The truth brings it down a size.
Putting language to your shame also helps you understand your story so you aren’t terrified of it anymore.
You can break your shame cycles through:
- Confessional storytelling or narrative therapy
- Returning to the body
- Feeling your truth
- Developing critical awareness
- Finding comfort in community
When you live an out-loud and expressive life, you can help build more shame-resilient communities.
Why Melissa Stopped Speaking to Her Mother
About a month before her book came out, Melissa stopped speaking to her mother. She read the book Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel, which talked about the grief of not having an emotionally distant mother. However, when your mother is still in your life, you aren’t able to grieve losing them.
Melissa was always the one to call her mother, and their conversations were surface-level at best. She decided to stop calling and hasn’t heard from her mother since. The space has given her time to grieve their relationship and feel peace about it. Today, she’s grateful for her mother and feels no ill will toward her.
