#UNSHAMED

The play she was inspired to write was called Shame, a tale of social media shaming in which the online community starts to show support for a victim by sharing their own videos and embarrassing tales. When people saw a work-in-progress version of the play, many said that they thought such a campaign might just work in the real world. Hence, this year, to coincide with her show’s run at the Edinburgh fringe, Jones is launching #Unshamed and inviting people to share some tale of excruciating personal shame, in the interests of showing that it does get better. The project launches next week with the #Unshamed Cabaret at Blackfriars in Glasgow.

The campaign echoes many concerns now being aired in the media. The hit Netflix show, 13 Reasons Why, centered on a teen suicide sparked by online shaming. #Unshamed intends to chart the vast range of shaming that occurs online – and not just the non-consensual sharing of intimate images that is the subject of Jones’s play. Online shaming is a far broader phenomenon. There is slut-shaming, drunk-shaming, fat-shaming, thin-shaming and gay-shaming. There are posts that shame people for eating in public, falling down, having body hair, allowing their children to misbehave, being politically incorrect, revealing too much flesh, quirky dancing, falling over, manspreading - a man sitting with his knees too far apart on public transport.

Already, the team involved have posted videos of their own and begun collecting stories. Jones’ own post, about her period of alcoholism, should provide comfort to those who have been drunk-shamed, or struggled with feelings of shame around an alcohol dependency or bad night out– and drunk-shaming is a popular online sport, to which there are whole Facebook pages and articles dedicated, often revolving around pictures of people in drunken disarray.

At the core of Jones’s story is the “most embarrassing and publicly shaming thing that has ever happened in my life”, a tale of how ten years ago, she was fired from the first professional acting job she ever had. At the time, she was, she recalls, nursing a broken heart with “raging alcoholism” and she turned up to rehearsal completely drunk. “The directors didn’t have any other choice than to let me go because I was a liability, and a danger to myself and others…All I could think about was the opportunity I had lost, how quickly the news was spreading, what people would be thinking about me, and how I’d let people down.”

“Losing my job," she says, "for being drunk is something that I even struggle to say it out loud.” She hopes, she says, by sharing these stories, to give those struggling currently with some kind of shame, “a digital hug.”

With a third of children saying they have been victims of cyberbulling, Jones hopes, in particular, that #Unshamed will be able to provide comfort and support to teenagers, who might be able to see through these posted stories that things really can get better. The campaign’s website also provides the contact details of support groups. In a 2015 survey of teenagers, a fifth of those who had experienced cyberbullying said that they had contemplated suicide.

The campaign is partly inspired by other viral social media campaigns like #nomakeupselfie, which prompted millions of women to share what they looked like without make-up, or It Gets Better, in which LGBT people post encouraging videos to support LGBT young people who are suffering bullying or harassment. It’s also part of a wider trend that uses solidarity and support as a counter to internet shaming. For instance, in 2015 Vodaphone released a set of emojis as a wordless way for social media users to express support for those tormented online. Last year, in the United States, after Sean O’Brien was fat-shamed online when a picture of him dancing in public was posted, a group of body-positive women got together and threw O’Brien a “Dancing Man” dance party.

Jones, however, doesn’t believe all shaming is bad – for instance, she doesn’t condemn ethical shaming. What bothers her is malicious shaming, particularly of young people. “Obviously shame in some contexts has a good outcome. On one level shaming things can be kind of a positive thing if it’s targeting bad things have been done, corporate manslaughter for instance.”

FIVE SHOCKING STORIES OF PUBLIC SHAMING

Warning: some details will offend and upset

THE online phenomenon that has the most shame attached to it is revenge porn. Among the stories the Unshamed team have already collected is one in which a woman explains how a man blue-toothed a film of her and him having sex to everyone at a big party. The result was, as the director of Shame, Allie Butler, describes, everyone at the party saw it. “This woman said that at the end the worst thing for her wasn’t that the sex was being seen, but that she hadn’t shaved, and everyone saw her pubic hair. Obviously she was ashamed that the video had been passed around, but also she was ashamed of the fact that she hadn’t shaved.”

Revenge porn was made illegal in England and Wales in 2015, and earlier this year the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm (Scotland) Act, criminalising the non-consensual sharing of intimate media, was introduced. A 2012-2013 survey from the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative found that one in ten ex-partners had threatened to post revenge porn, and 60% of them followed through on their threats.

Who gets targeted by revenge porn says a lot about our current attitudes towards sexuality, and what is deemed shameful - 90% of victims are women. LGBT people, according to a 2016 American study, are also at a higher risk than straight people, with lesbian and bisexual women the biggest victims.

But it’s not just in slut-shaming and revenge porn that women are more the butt of contemporary shaming. They are also more likely to be the targets of shaming for how fat they are, what they eat, how much body hair they have, what they consume in pregnancy, how they behave as mothers, breast-feeding in public, how much their clothes reveal. Much of shame, in fact, seems to revolve around the controlling of women’s bodies.

There is for instance, a Facebook page, dedicated to Women Who Eat On The Tube. The journalist, Sophie Wilkinson, after seeing a post of herself caught eating a pasta salad on a tube train, wrote an article describing the impact of the post, and particularly the misogynistic comments that accompanied it. She no longer wanted to wear the same outfit, felt she could never eat on the tube again, and before each meal, she wrote, she would now find herself wondering how she was going to look when she ate it.

Frequently what emerges, even from the stories the Unshamed team have already put online, is how complicated and multi-layered shame is - Neil John Gibson talks about how shame, on many levels, was part of his story of not coming out as gay until he was 29 years old. When he was a teenager he was, he says, “embarrassed about being gay”, then, in his twenties, having not yet come out that feeling “transferred from a shame of being gay to a shame that I hadn’t dealt with it when I was younger”. He became embarrassed about the fact that he had still not yet been kissed or been in a relationship.

Allie Butler tells a story of how as a teenager she seduced and had sex with her stepbrother, and how, while she didn’t feel ashamed about it at the time, many friends impressed on her the fact that she should.

Some of their tales relate to embarrassing incidents or mistakes. For instance, Belle Jones relates a particularly excruciating story told to her by a friend. “He was really full of the flu and he was staying with his mother-in-law at their house, and woke up in the middle of the night, thought he was going to the toilet, but actually ended up urinating on his mother-in-law’s face. How do you recover from that?”

Jones hopes that it will provide an antidote to the kind of existential shame exists in all of us from time to time, in which we feel bad, simply, about the fact that we exist, and then feel bad about feeling bad about that. As Jones puts it: “People don’t necessarily have to have been publicly shamed but everybody has a nugget of shame that they’re nursing inside them that they struggle with from time to time.”

There are times, too, when online shaming has gone viral and even spread through the mainstream media. Among those at the brunt of such wider shaming, was the 18 year old woman who became known as Magaluf Girl, after the film of her performing a series of sex acts in a club competition, in order to win a “holiday” – which later turned out to be just a cocktail. Belle Jones describes having thought it particularly horrifying that this woman’s face “was on the front of the red tops and she was just referred to as Magaluf girl.”

“What was bad was the public shaming of that young woman,” she says, “but also the fact the holiday that was supposed to be the prize, the holiday was a cocktail, so she just got this cocktail at the end of it. How can anyone do that to a young woman?”

ONLINE CAMPAIGNS THAT SHOW THE NET'S GOOD SIDE

#WhyIStayed In 2014 the hashtag trended on Twitter as part of a defence of domestic abuse victims after a media release of security camera footage showing NFL player Ray Rice, punching his then-fiancee, Janay Rice. It revealed shocking stories of domestic abuse, and the pressures brought to bear on women.

#ItGetsBetter The campaign whose mission has been to communicate to LGBT youth around the world, who are bullied or harassed, that it does get better.

#EverydaySexism Laura Bates set up the Everyday Sexism project to document and share stories of sexism, harassment and assault and show how big the problem was, and it did. Now its Twitter handle has 268,000 followers.

#IAmMoreThan Anti-bullying campaign launched by Kylie Jenner, in which victims of bullying shared their stories.

#WhenIWas In 2016 this hashtag swept Twitter with a deluge of women’s stories of the first time they were sexually harassed.

To find out more about #Unshamed go to www.unshamedproject.com/