A PROBLEM WITH “STIGMA”: So a while back, Rich Lowry and Maggie Gallagher (and then Lowry again; his original piece isn’t online) had a dispute about whether mothers who work outside the home should be “stigmatized.” You can go read their pieces; I thought Gallagher clearly had the best of it, but then, I’m biased. Point One is that hello, working outside the home is not a misdeed! In many circumstances, it is best for the children that the mother stay home. But in many other circumstances, it’s not. Some mothers need to earn a living (duh), while others straight-up just enjoy their work and are able to do it while caring for children. That’s really hard, but it’s by no means impossible. (Many of the women I respect most were stellar mothers who worked outside the home while their children were young.) In fact, I’d misremembered this dispute as being about women who get pregnant (by choice) out of wedlock, because that seemed like a more understandable candidate for “stigmatizing.”

Gallagher handled the arguments really well (unsurprisingly), but I’d like to focus on actual misdeeds, and why thinking in terms of “stigma” is deeply misguided.

Stigma is humiliating. And it’s not a humiliation inherent in the situation. (There are a lot of humiliations involved in being a mother, or being human for that matter.) It’s a humiliation consciously imposed from outside. To the extent that it’s effective, it’s effective because it humiliates. Now, being humiliated, in itself, isn’t always bad for people; sometimes it can be totally salutary, a wake-up call, or an opportunity for spiritual growth. But when we look at stigma, we can’t just look at the people on whom the stigma will be imposed. We need to look also at the effects of stigmatizing someone on the person who stigmatizes. And it seems to me that once you have seen someone be humiliated for something she did wrong, especially if you personally were part of the group imposing the humiliation, it is much harder for you to believe that she could ever make up for what she did; get her life in order; or be redeemed. Think about what the effects would be on you if you passed by people in the stocks every day. The effects on both stigmatizer and bearer of stigma, I think, are bound to be terribly poisonous, because stigma transforms a behavior into an identity. The person becomes the wrong action; it becomes her identity, in the eyes of the people around her and, worse, in her own eyes. This is something you hear a lot from ex-prostitutes: They had become, in their own eyes, “just prostitutes.” If that’s all you are, there’s no point in trying to be something else, something better. Thus stigma may provide negative incentives, so that fewer people do the stigmatized deed, but it also traps people who have already done the misdeed and makes it harder for them to see a way out.

But stigma is an understandable attempt to deal with the fact that people do all kinds of lousy or naive or bullheaded things. We put ourselves in situations where other people (like, say, our children) get short-changed or harmed. We do stuff that’s wrong, stuff that has harmful effects throughout society. But stigma is not our only option for responding to people who screw up.

The other option is: challenge. Challenging someone begins a relationship; unlike stigma, it imposes a responsibility on the challenger. It’s easy to slip into self-righteousness here, too–there are no easy answers–just as it’s easy to slide into relativism and callousness if you won’t challenge someone who does something wrong, or point out when she screws up. But I think challenging someone–making it clear that you’re on her side, you view her as an equal (not the passive object of your action), and you don’t think you’re perfect any more than she is–strikes me as an attitude we can take that acknowledges wrongdoing and isn’t afraid to call wrong actions wrong, but also doesn’t have a “sheep and the goats” view of humanity in which I, the Good Person, look down on the Bad Stigmatized People below.

(I’ve used “her” throughout, here, because it strikes me as noteworthy that “stigma” crops up so much more frequently in discussion of women who screw up than in discussion of men who screw up. But the same points I’m making apply not only to women who get pregnant out of wedlock but to guys who brag about sleeping around, not only to prostitutes but to alcoholics, etc. To all of us, actually, at one point or another in our lives.)