A teacher was outed for past sex work. Now she’s written a book about shame

Shame is often weaponized against women – see Anita Hill, Amber Heard and Kamala “cat lady” Harris. Melissa Petro is all too familiar with the experience. In 2010, she was a public school art teacher in the Bronx and the New York Post published an exposé about her former sex work; she was removed from the classroom.
In her book Shame on You, Petro, 44, interviewed 150 subjects about their own shame spirals, exploring mom shame, financial shame, body shame and career shame.
Petro estimates she has been working on Shame on You for about 20 years. When she was 23, she signed up for a memoir-writing workshop. The resulting work-in-progress swerved from a personal account of stripping in her teens and sex work in early adulthood to become a rousing exploration of shame and how it affects women.
Unlike embarrassment, which generally carries a component of humor, shame is bound up with a singularly destructive sense of self-loathing. “Not only have you failed, but in shame you hold yourself singularly responsible for that failure,” Petro writes.
Petro spoke with the Guardian about the impulse to share (or overshare), the degradations of the dating scene and how the shame epidemic might be the new loneliness epidemic.
Your book really resonated with me. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a free-floating sense of shame and I’ll lie there reviewing the previous day’s conversations and text threads, trying to find something to fixate on.
I think of shame as funhouse mirrors you walk into when you’re shame-prone. When you’re experiencing shame, you walk into that room and everything is distorted.
Considering how it affects so many, it’s odd that “shame” isn’t a word we say out loud that often.
It’s an emotion, and it’s also not something that’s so much in our lexicon. I mean, I guess that’s why: because we’re ashamed of the things that make us feel ashamed. It’s so threatening to feel shame because it implies that there’s something wrong, and a reason you were exiled, cast away. It threatens us on this primitive level. To say that there’s something that I’m ashamed of is to say there’s something so wrong with me that people are going to reject me.
When we start to peel the onion and look at the layers of shame, there are other nuanced feelings, and when we do that, we’re developing our emotional granularity. If we feel humiliation rather than shame, it’s actually a little more liberating, because we know we’re being wronged.
How much of the shame that we feel would you say comes from external sources?
Women are being surveyed and criticized. And also we carry this voice in our heads. With my four-year-old daughter, I already see it. She knows how to perform as a good girl, and she knows what will evoke criticism. Those rules were implanted at a very young age, and then they’re just reinforced.
The backbone of the book is your own personal staircase of shame. You started out dancing, and then you were doing sex work, and then you were exposed on a very public level.
I had really developed a certain resilience from shame by the time I was outed by the New York Post, thankfully, because otherwise that would have killed me. I had done a lot of the work as a result of having worked in the sex industry. But I didn’t actually identify it as shame. I knew that I had a sickness inside me and that my secrets were creating a turmoil, a dissonance. I didn’t have a sense of values any more because I was so entrenched in dishonesty.
You protected yourself from that inner turmoil when you quit that work.
There were a couple months after I stopped trading sex for cash, where I just tried to date normally, and it was so demoralizing and degrading. That was really my bottom, because now I wasn’t even getting paid for it. I was just meeting these men and feeling like utter shit and feeling out of control because I was behaving in ways that I promised myself I wouldn’t, and there I was doing it.
You mention in your book that after being outed as a former sex worker, you were moved to the New York City department of education’s “rubber room”. I know it’s a purgatory for teachers who’ve been put on some sort of notice, but can you describe what it’s actually like?
You’re picturing a padded room, with kids throwing chairs at the walls, right? It’s not like that at all. It’s just the name for this institution, which is really like a typical office building in downtown Brooklyn that the removed teachers are sort of inconspicuously scattered about among real workers. And then you just sit there. You’re not given any tasks.
I shared a cubicle with a data entry worker, and she was amazing. She worked hard. It’s hard to come in and do the task every day, but she fucking did it. She was always there on-time, and she left on-time because she had a typical office job, and then she had to sit next to me, this wacko who’d been removed from the classroom.
What did you do while you were sitting there?
I listened to podcasts. I discovered the website Jezebel. I listened to This American Life. It basically radicalized me, because I had all the time in the world. It was something like 100 days. Everyone treated me like I was a cold sore, because I’m doing nothing, sitting there while they’re working. I kind of get it.
In your book you say: “Disclosure and writing in particular is a powerful therapeutic tool. At the same time, becoming vulnerable makes us, well, vulnerable.” What is the balance between being open and self-protective regarding the material you share with your readers as far as healing goes?
I came up in an era of the personal essay and this idea of the confessional essay. And even still, now there’s some appetite for the confessional essay. So there’s a temptation to perform your shame. I write for money, and I write to know myself. I look at the other personal essay writers of our moment and I think some of us have developed a certain resilience to shame. But we are still vulnerable.
You’ve written a lot of personal essays. Why did you decide to put out a cultural study?
[The book] started out more as a memoir, but my agent really encouraged me to believe I was more than just that story. She made me hold it back – until literally the eighth page of my proposal, I was not allowed to mention the words “stripper” or “hooker”. I’d always started with that as a way of protecting myself, by being titillating and interesting. But she forced me to not lead with that, and in doing so, I discovered that my experience was so much bigger than me.
We’ve all heard of the “loneliness epidemic” by now. But you bring up a sister disease: the health implications of shame.
We know that stress affects our heart – heart disease is the leading killer of women. So to think that it isn’t affecting us, or to pretend it isn’t affecting us, is causing a health crisis.
Shame on You by Melissa Petro is out via GP Putnam’s Sons on 10 September