The shame of being a man (Gender studies)

'The shame of being a man--is there any better reason to write?' wonders Gi lles Deleuze, and so do I. Here, I say that to write is not to free oneself from the shame of being a man. Writing might also be a way of meeting with shame, a coming into male shamefulness. I try to conclude that male shame is less to be regretted than one might at first think, There are four stage s to this article. First, I say that men are coming into shame. Men have of ten before been ashamed of particular ways of falling short of being a man, but now some men are encountering the shamefulness of being a man as such and at all. Second, I briefly review some of the thinking about shame, espe cially in its relations to guilt, that has been done in philosophy, psychol ogy, anthropology and sociology during the past century. I suggest that, wh ere shame tends nowadays to be seen as a moral emotion, and to be discussed as an ethical problem, its reach is larger than this. I argue that shame i s not only to be thought of as a moral prop or provocation, but as a condit ion of being, a life-form, even, and will offer a brief, wild phenomenology of it. Third, I suggest that male masochism is not so much the expression of shame as an attempt to exorcize it, by turning shame into guilt and ther eby taking its measure and making it expiable. Fourth, I consider the power of shame, suggesting that it has possibilities beyond those traditionally claimed for it. Doubtless, one can die of shame, as Salman Rushdie has said ; but, stranger than this, it seems one can live of it too.