The Laughing Shame of Husband-Shaming

Ever one or two minutes behind the latest “thing”, I only discovered yesterday, for the first time, the delightful new trend of “husband shaming”. You know. It started with dogs. The dog tore up the couch, and then the owner came home and hung a sign around the dog’s neck. “I tore up the couch today” reads the sign. And we all paused the finger as we scrolled through Facebook, and chuckled. Because Facebook is so great. And everyone loves a picture of a dog doing the wrong thing.

Then, a couple months ago, someone sent me a private message of a young teenage girl being forced to hold a sign. Something about insisting on using a cell phone, and getting in trouble. Ha ha ha. It was actually more of a stomach-turning-over-with-sorrow picture. And the private message conveyance was because the poster of said picture is a well known Christian whom everybody loves. Gosh I really want to tell you who it was, just for prayer, so you can pray for her…

And now I guess we’re allowed to do it with our husbands. Because, as this person so helpfully points out, “Nothing says mutual respect quite like public humiliation, am I right?” She says everything I would have said so just go read her.

Is it possible that we’ve, um, misunderstood the proper use of shame? To say it another way, isn’t it interesting that, in this brave new world, we’re not supposed to feel ashamed, of anything–no sexual desire, no inclination of the disordered mind, no self oriented thought is ever to be considered under the scrawling Facebook sign of Shame–so we are left with other people’s behavior (in this case people who should be quite close to us) which is neither moral nor anything, getting the humiliation of Facebook treatment. Shame is going to creep in somewhere, and if we don’t let it be about That Which Is Actually Shameful, we just end up with the gentle belittling of The Other for a couple of laughs.

Curiously, the bedrock of Christian mercy has always been there as the countering medicine to cure the proper experience of shame. If you never can feel the humiliation of having done the wrong thing, and having wrecked something for yourself or another, it will be very hard to understand God’s mercy, wherein he absorbs your shame and humiliation in himself on the cross. A sign, don’t you know, was hung over his head to indicate his appalling crime of being King Over All. And people walked by and laughed and mocked and pointed at him. Funnily enough, though, he didn’t deserve to be there, did he? He really was King Over All. We should have all been there naked and bleeding instead of him, because of all the ugly and shameful things we’ve done.

When you get to have the cross at the center of your piece of paper, held up to the joking throngs of Facebook, you might find that a marvelous merciful kindness happens. Instead of picturing the person who has irritated you and Done the Wrong Thing, you could consider the real and true grievously harmful moments in your own day, and ask for Jesus to cover them over, to hide them, to take them away (it’s called forgiveness, it’s such a great thing) at which point the shame itself also is taken away and you get to go free and clear.

I love a laugh more than anyone. Truly I do. But this isn’t funny. It’s embarrassing. The person posting the picture is the one who should feel embarrassed, who should wish to have hidden the unkindness and have it forgotten forever. It’s true, as the author above said. If a woman was there, on Facebook, holding a sign made for her by her husband, foul would be shrieked from everyone’s Twitter feed. But men aren’t human, any more, are they. Nor children either. They are lumped in with the funny, cuddly, but Not Human cat and dog. Isn’t it a nod to slavery, to put a sign like that in someone’s hands? Isn’t it a touch diminishing of the humanity of another, to reduce them publicly to a foolish action?

Let marriage be held in honor by all, says St. Paul, and so of course we make a mockery of it. I sort of like that autocorrect keeps trying to change ‘brave’ to ‘grave’ because that’s where this culture is headed.