That the experience of shared humiliation is used in this context to encourage readership may seem to be exemplary of the final exit of good taste within publishing.Christopher Lasch writes in a 1992 New Republic article concerning shame and the creation of a seemingly uncensored media:“Is there anything our culture still attempts to conceal?...Nothing can shock us anymore,least of all intimate revelations about personal life.The mass media do not hesitate to parade the most outlandish perversions,the most degraded appetites.”Lasch,Christopher,“For Shame,”New Republic,207,no.2(1992),p.2.When reading of a fellow teen's traumatic experience involving a leaking maxi-pad and a light-colored dress or the humiliation involved in passing loud gas during a silent chemistry test,it does seem as if no barriers exist between the personal and the publishable.However,these texts included in teen magazines and written in a manufactured“teen voice”are not only developmentally appropriate but also socially instructive.
In an overview of the psychological studies related to the emotion of shame,Thomas J.Scheff cites 1978 Elias's treatment of shame as the most inclusive.According to Scheff,“Elias shows that many of the principal sources of shame in modern societies(are)the body functions,one's appearance,and one's emotions”and that these sources of shame are relatively new.“Elias shows how shame was being used to socialize feelings about sexuality,etiquette and emotion(by the nineteenth century).”Scheff,Thomas J.,“Shame and Related Emotions:An Overview,”American Behavioral Scientist,38,no.8(1995),p.3.These sources of humiliation still make up the landscape of embarrassment described in the teen texts.When examining the experiences catalogued in teen tales of embarrassment,these circumstances are very often mined for humiliating content.
Embarrassing Incidents
In an analysis of six months of embarrassing stories content published in 2002 in three leading teen magazines-Teen,Seventeen,and YM(all of which were located in a noncirculating collection in my local library)-a number of thematic consistencies became visible.Within each collection,scenarios related to teen social encounters,rule breaking,and physical control show-cased teen-(and often,gender-)specific landscapes as potential etiquette minefields.The subjects of these stories were coded with the following thematic titles:
“Showing Too Much Interest in a Boy,”“Amorous Errors,”“Accidental Nudity”(partial or complete),“Underwear”(mention of or view,unworn),“Menstrual Period”(including the surprise onset of a menstrual period or the view,by others,of any feminine hygiene product),“Beauty Blunders”(clothes,hair,or makeup mistakes noticed by and remarked upon by others),“Showing off”(accidents that occur when the narrator is vying for attention),“Clumsiness,”“Stood up by Date,”“Bathroom/Excrement Related,”“Caught Making out,”“Caught Breaking Rules”(including school rules or household rules),“General Etiquette,”and“Other”(various errors).While some of the incidents described in the texts illustrate deviance from generally socially understood mores(“General Etiquette,”“Caught Breaking Rules”),the chronicling of the other less universally understood scenarios serve to,as Scheff writes,“socialize feeling about sexuality,etiquette,and emotion”specific to the behavior of adolescent girls.Clearly,teenaged girls caught“out of control”(making out with a partner,showing off to attract attention,applying makeup with a heavy or an uneducated hand)risk embarrassment and social alienation.The teenaged reader,made aware of the risks of certain behaviors in certain scenarios can,by studying these columns,develop a literal vocabulary of humiliation while absorbing subtextual societal rules.
The data included in the figures attached to this research are indicative of an initial and individual reading of the collected embarrassing stories.Verification of these findings occurred later and involved the rereading of the texts by the primary investigator and the reading and evaluation of the texts by a secondary reader.In the reading process,each reader was asked to code the embarrassing stories in terms of their“aboutness”and based on a list of subject headings created for this purpose.The“aboutness,”or the subject of each anecdote,was to be considered the“thing afforded matter or action of a specified kind;a ground,motive,or cause”(from the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of“subject”).That is,though the general theme of all the narratives was“embarrassment”or“embarrassing stories,”the subject selections reference the potential causes of the humiliations described.Content Analysis Statistics(Using Cohen's Kappa)
