“Where there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue”
-Samuel Johnson
On the 13th of September 2026, I woke up to a video posted by Andrew Hiller that I found rather disturbing. It was made even more disturbing by the fact that I have been consuming copious amounts of Myron Gaines X content of late. One of the recurring themes that is addressed in Myron’s videos is that society is descending into chaos because the cord that ties women and shame together has been severed. He presents a compelling case, and for the most part I agree. Myron also ties a lack of shame to a lack of femininity because shameless women are necessarily more masculine and masculine traits are a deterrent to masculine men. It’s the idea of women becoming the men they want to marry and all that. So while my mind has been wrapping itself around the symbiosis of masculinity and femininity, Hiller posts a video on YouTube. I am watching the video and I can’t even believe what I am seeing. I am in complete disbelief as the video unfolds, and it is at this point when I immediately decide to take myself out of essay writing retirement and address this issue.
A Win Is A Win
It’s the Beijing Hyrox competition and a pale female caucasian athlete, Joanna Wietrzyk, is wearing short black tights and a black sports bra. Her race and her wardrobe choice are pertinent for the imagery, they add shock value to the images that were circulating after the race. While going through the different stations of the competition, Wietrzyk has a full Code Brown on the floor. And what does she do in response to the brown slushy running down her legs? She just carries on. Unimpeded. Unbothered. Undeterred. She didn’t even skip a beat and ended up winning the entire competition. The horror! Fecal incontinence is a part of life, we all have a story but what made her story particularly horrifying is that she responds to her malfunctioning butthole by ignoring it and pressing on. Who does that? But that is not even the worst of it. In Hyrox, athletes share equipment and she was leading throughout the competition. So that means all the other athletes had to use equipment that she had just sullied. There is a picture of a row machine with a pond of diarrhea on the seat that will forever be imprinted in my mind. Aaagh! Just gross! Personally, I peek or inhale a whiff of doo-doo, I am out. Unconstrained fecal matter in communal spaces is biological warfare. It is Amber Heard terrorizing Johnny Depp by dropping a deuce on his bed. No one emerges from that unscathed. It is deeply personal and if I were a fellow competitor, I would have been incensed to have to do chest-to-floor burpees in her snail trail of poop. I would have stared with arms outstretched into the darkening sky with pealing thunder and streaking firebolt lightning, or in this case the ceiling of an arena pulsing with EDM, and vowed to have my vengeance. In that moment, a villain would be born and all of humanity would have to pay for the injustice of my thighs making physical contact with a non-family member’s poop on that row machine.
Meanwhile, while Wietrzyk was intravenously replenishing her fluids post competition, she posts on social media: “A win is a win”. Just let the audacity of that sink in. Now that we have given that post its moment, let’s break this down. Wietrzyk is an elite athlete, therefore she has the mindset of an elite athlete, winning at all costs. In her mind, she was channeling her Michael Jordan Game 5 energy where he played suffering through the symptoms of food poisoning. Dubbed The Flu Game, Jordan went into that game a man and emerged a legend as the Bulls took the win. It’s not far-fetched to think that Wietrzyk imagined a similar story arc for herself and visualizing the circumstances as solidifying her legendary status and becoming ensconced in the lore of athletic greatness, that she has what it takes to win at all cost. While I am a wildly competitive person, it is annoying really, I do not espouse the winning-at-all-cost sentiment. Even though she is an elite athlete, and I, well I don’t know, have a mean Fran?, I think winning at all costs is not really a thing. In fact, I think it can lead to a lot of societal problems. All of us, elite athletes or not, should have non-negotiable lines of the lengths we are willing to go to win. And shame is the mechanism that helps us to toe those lines. Shame keeps us in check.
The problem with the Wietrzyk victory is that she left her shame at the hotel that she was staying in on the morning of competition. It is easy to read the words her shame and have a visceral aversion to them because in our modern times, shame has gotten a bad rep. We are told to not be ashamed of anything and to live out our truths and for people to take us as we are and all the other aphorisms of our times. While there are situations where shame can be weaponized to oppress, stifle and manipulate, shame is mostly adaptive. A complete disregard of shame is maladaptive and destructive. If we analyse the Wietrzyk victory, we can see how what happens on the micro can be applied to the macro.
Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World discusses the role of shame in society in an episode titled The Strange Symbolism of K-Pop Demon Hunters: Shame, Attention, LGBT, Jung. “The function of shame is to help you understand what it is that can participate in the unity of a group and what can’t.” He then goes on to describe how shameful acts are destructive to whatever communal structure is being participated in. If we consider how this applies to Wietrzyk. We have a competition that has roughly 12 000 participants and all the participants, by virtue of deciding to enter into the competition, have to carry themselves in such a way that they do not detract from anyone else’s experience. When Wietrzyk decided to not forfeit from the competition immediately, her actions were shameful because they were destructive to the overall spirit of the game. There were health concerns for the participants who paid money to compete and probably even travelled to the competition and there were costs incurred by Hyrox itself for having to destroy equipment and flooring following Wietrzyk’s actions.
Pageau, in a simple twist of fate, actually uses defecation to expound on his second point on shame. Other acts can be considered shameful because the acts, which are innocuous in and of themselves, are taking place in the wrong places or in inappropriate contexts. He describes how taking a dump in the bathroom is completely fine, but taking a dump in the living room is shameful and unacceptable. It is a breakdown of structure and is a sure way to invite chaos and in this case, disease into living spaces. The problem with entropy is that its effects are exponential, once small structures are destroyed, all the floodgates open and society becomes inundated with all manners of problems.
In his video, Hiller lay the bulk of the blame on Hyrox, as an organisation, and secondarily on the athlete. I lay the bulk of blame on the athlete’s shoulders because as an adult, she is ultimately responsible for her own actions. Like all organisations of Hyrox’s size, decisions are made slowly, especially retrospectively. Wietrzyk was in the best position to make a quick decision, take the L and evacuate herself and her bowels elsewhere.
Bring Back Shame
An excerpt from Why Women Deserve Less by Myron Gaines:
With the internet making it seem women can have all the men in the world, they will never settle for a guy who is good enough. The internet offers them many options even if they find a quality guy. Women will always be tempted to look for something better since it is embedded in their DNA. The result is “runaway hypergamy,” where women will want something better and insist on it. This will put them on a never-ending treadmill to find the perfect man, ironically ensuring she never sees him because there's “always a better man out there.” Because of this, you can expect women to be initially interested in you but inevitably flake, ghost, break up with you, or even divorce you if a better option arises. This isn't to say every woman will always leave you the second she's offered a better deal, but their propensity to abandon a relationship is now a permanent fixture of western female psychology. Remember that women account for 56-70% of date flakes and 70-80% of divorces in the west. In line with their “runaway hypergamy,” women's dating standards are delusional. They will insist on dating a man whose income, height, age, and status put him in the top 1% of men, while they are average and think nothing of it. But while you know for a fact there is no chance these men would ever commit to them, their expectations are not forged by reality but by the artificial world the internet has painted for them, especially Instagram. With hundreds of messages in her inbox, hundreds more trying to slide into her DM's, and all her internet social circle telling her how “amazing” and “beautiful” she is, your average woman is convinced she can get a top-tier man. Do not expect any consistency between a woman's appearance and the type of man she thinks she's entitled to.
The quality of women will decline. In not being that interested in men in the first place but still having a limitless number of men thrown at them over the internet, women will find no reason to remain beautiful or feminine. Why should they? It takes a lot of work, and the armies of simps on the internet will ensure even the most average of women have the male interest and attention they need. This has already happened with 70% of young women now overweight or obese. A similar percentage have mutilated their bodies with egregious piercings or tattoos. But women's personalities have also been destroyed. Where sweet, kind, feminine women once were, we now have vapid, arrogant, vindictive, and mean women today. The vast majority of them are simply not capable of a healthy relationship.
And now, an excerpt from Why Women Deserve Even Less by Myron Gaines (yeah, this guy is on a roll with these titles):
And then there’s “empowerment.” Permissive is one thing. So is libertarian indifference. But encouraging and celebrating what women do, no matter how mundane it is, is “empowering!” Ooooh, you paid your rent! You’re empowered! You pumped your gas?? You’re empowered! You got a Doctorate in Social Work, but sell pictures of your butthole online to make interest-only payments on your student loans? You go girl! You're empowered! Culturally, women have been conditioned to believe anything they do is “amazing” and “empowering” usually by people who are screwing them over for some ulterior motive. Corporations want to sell women $85,000 hand bags and use them for cheap labor. Democrats want women to vote for them at the expense of a loving nuclear family. Colleges want to screw women out of their tuition money. And men just want to fuck them. “Yeah, you’re brave and amazing, now give me your money/labor/vote/tuition dollars/a blow job.” This provides an environment where nobody is checking women, correcting them, or telling them the truth, even if it’s for their own best interests. But further reinforcing this delusion is women’s ownership of their own lives. Yes, like anyone else, women have complete and total ownership of their own lives. And yes, therefore they have 100% complete and total right to make the choices they want. But they confuse the “right to make a choice” as the “right choice to make,” meaning in their minds ALL of their choices are infallible...no matter how bad and destructive those decisions might actually be. This has not only led women to think it’s OK to be a sex worker, but that it’s also...you guessed it..."empowering.”
If we remove the initial emotional reaction to all of that, then we see that Gaines has a point. At least I do. The titles of his books are wild and incendiary but there is hardly anything in what he writes about women that is not true. It’s sobering really and devastating for society as a whole.
When feminism walked into the annals of history, shamelessness came in riding its coattails and has now overtaken it. As I have been growing up observing the world around me, I have just witnessed society swinging between extremes. Men were once loved and now men are trash. Women were nothing but property but now we need to believe all women. We went from having two genders to a thousand. There is a pervasive all or nothing approach to most things in our culture, all the nuance has been lost and it is fostering a whole host of problems.
So, in walked Female Empowerment in all its glamor and glory only for it to devolve into a “why women deserve less” society. Remember the male gaze? The objectification of women by men? Oh now women have objectified themselves to even more extreme levels than men ever could. We have sexualized everything, even selling pictures of our feet (gross) or buttholes (as Gaines so eloquently put it) for men to jerk off to. Women are posting themselves in bikinis on Instagram, with zero instruction from men. Women from good families, with present dads, have just thrown their great upbringings into the ocean and descended into sex work for a quick buck. Women with children have sex tapes for public consumption. Women having sex with 100 men in one day. Furthermore, they boast about it on the internet. Picture this: a woman in a car complaining about the revolving door that is her dating life going into graphic detail about the type of sex she is getting or not getting from men of varying phallic sizes. IT. IS. TOO. MUCH. Sometimes I understand why they say women should be seen and not heard or is it children? Ha! Ha! I’m kidding but ndamn women do the most.
Two days ago, I was in an Uber and the driver is regaling me with anecdote after anecdote of the kind of things he has encountered in these here streets. He was a decent looking guy in his prime and you could tell he had no problems getting women. But at the end of that ride, I was embarrassed for the women of this country. We’ve sold ourselves cheap and even our love comes with an explicit price tag. There is even a culture of mavuso, of a man needing to pay a woman who willingly decided to spend the night with him money in the morning or face the threat of a rape case being opened against him. The guardrails of shame have been removed and empowerment has become synonymous with exploitation of ourselves and others.
Survival Of The Shameless
In Humankind, Rutger Bregman writes about how blushing is a strictly human expression. “Blushing, after all, is quintessentially social – it’s people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.” Caring about what other people think is important and will keep you alive. Obviously not everyone’s opinion matters, including most people in your social media comment sections. And here you thought this entire essay was about shaming women. Not quite so. Although, women are sure doing their big one.
Bregman writes:
Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless… For millennia, shaming was the surest way to tame our leaders, and it can still work today. Shame is more effective than rules and regulations or censure and coercion, because people who feel shame regulate themselves. In the way their speech falters when they disappoint expectations or in a telltale flush when they realise they’re the subject of gossip. Clearly, shame also has a dark side (shame induced by poverty, for example), but try to imagine what society would be like if shame didn’t exist. That would be hell. Unfortunately, there are always people who are unable to feel shame, whether because they are drugged on power or are among the small minority born with sociopathological traits. Such individuals wouldn’t last long in nomadic tribes. They’d be cast out of the group and left to die alone. But in our modern sprawling organisations, sociopaths actually seem to be a few steps ahead on the career ladder. Studies show that between 4 and 8 per cent of CEOs have a diagnosable sociopathy, compared to 1 per cent among the general population. In our modern democracy, shamelessness can be positively advantageous. Politicians who aren’t hindered by shame are free to do things others wouldn’t dare. Would you call yourself your country’s most brilliant thinker, or boast about your sexual prowess? Could you get caught in a lie and then tell another without missing a beat? Most people would be consumed by shame. But the shameless couldn’t care less. And their audacious behaviour pays dividends in our modern mediacracies, because the news spotlights the abnormal and the absurd. In this type of world, it’s not the friendliest and most empathic leaders who rise to the top, but their opposites. In this world, it’s survival of the shameless.
And that in itself is a shame. Erick Kabendera’s book, In The Name of the President, articulates a trajectory that has befallen many African leaders. While the book is mainly about Tanzania’s former president, John Magufuli, and all the atrocities he carried out against his people to remain in power, Kabendera mentions how Julius Nyerere had led Tanzania to freedom and was a beacon of great leadership only to change for the worst when he was president, abandoning most of the values that his constituency loved about him. That is the worst fall from grace for any leader in my eyes, to see someone you believed in become hollowed out by power becoming a decrepit shadow of a great man once was.
But there is hope. Roughly 2700 km southwest of Tanzania, there was once a president who is MY president. Mark Gevisser wrote a brilliant, unauthorized biography on Thabo Mbeki, The Dream Deferred. Gevisser did not hold back when it came to “chief”. He wrote about it all: the good, the bad, the ugly and the humorous. He wrote extensively on Mbeki’s flaws and grave errors, including Mbeki’s position on Robert Mugabe, another African leader who took a sip of the Kool-Aid of power and like many of his contemporaries, refused to relinquish it. Regardless, what I saw in the book solidified how I had always seen Mbeki. He was a man whose heart remained uncorrupted by power. He never lined his pockets, even with the infamous arms deal, and he didn’t cling to power. He let go graciously even though he was not happy with the turn of events. He was above reproach when it came to the typical temptations that turn men into tyrants. In one of his lectures, Mbeki said that we should remember the name we carry and that in itself is an antidote to shameful behaviour. He carried the name of the party (ANC) and of the people of South Africa with him. He was also the last bastion against deferring the dream any longer. And as Langston Hughes asked in Harlem, “what happens to a dream deferred?”
In 2024, the ANC lost its parliamentary majority and had to negotiate a coalition with some of the other parties in what is called The Government of National Unity (GNU). The ANC’s loss did not come as a surprise to anyone. Mandy Wiener’s book, The Deal, exhaustively chronicles the circumstances leading to the formation of the GNU. Like many parties that become prey to flagrant corruption, as the ANC became following Mbeki’s ousting, the party became cannibalistic and feasted on its own organs. So the shameless survive, until they don’t.
Self-Esteem Is Not The Solution
Just looking at Myron Gaines words, we can tell off the bat that women do not suffer from low self-esteem. Contrarily, women’s self-esteem is sky high which is how they have convinced themselves that they deserve much more than they offer and why many of us are insufferable. It is the conceit of self-esteem that also feeds the delusion that they do not need to change and they are perfect just the way they are. Pumpkin spice and everything nice. Pageau likens this attitude to “taking a dump on the living floor.” He says that taking pride in our idiosyncrasies is not the solution to shame. Shania Twain was wrong, take me as I am is not how we are meant to deal with shame, neither is trauma-dumping on other people.
It has been reported that women are more unhappier now than they have ever been. More women are on SSRI’s now and I have seen a lot of women open-faced crying on the internet. Currently, 70% of women in the states are medicated. If female empowerment was meant to make us more fulfilled, why are most of us unhappy? Could it be that shame was protecting us from our own bad decisions and now our lives have spiralled out of control?
As a Christian, Pageau advocates for humility as the final solution to shame. Interestingly, Bregman also shares stories of how the ego’s of people in a tribe were kept in check through shame. Anyone who became too big for his/her britches was cut down to size. Not because of envy or covetousness, but because pride cometh before a fall as the saying goes. It kinda makes you look at tall poppy syndrome in a different way. If taking pride in something is about excellence and doing your best, then I can get behind that. However, if pride is about thinking you are above other people, then I can see how that can lead to destructive paths.
The truth is that living on this earth can get you banged up and bruised up a bit but despite this, there are people who love us and care for us. But in its hand, shame holds out an invitation to us. An invitation to transform and become better people for ourselves and for those we love. We are also invited to be kinder, as women, to men in general who we need to push this life thing with.
