Thoughts on making an arse of oneself

In a popular Sandton watering hole the other night I walked up to a table of complete strangers because I thought they were friends of my date. “Hi,” I smiled. They looked at me, faces blank. As it verrrrrry gradually dawned on me that they knew neither of us from Adam, I yearned for the earth to open up beneath my feet, 2012-style, and swallow me whole.

“Oh God, I’m sorry,” I said to the onlookers. Then I turned to my companion. “I’m not even drunk!” I wailed. “I don’t have any excuse!” I turned back to the table of strangers. “I’m not even drunk!” I said, gesticulating wildly to emphasise and therefore cunningly disguise my discomfort.

Even now, I cringe at the memory. Like pretty much everyone, I hate making an arse of myself. I do it all the time, and every time it happens, I am swept away by a wave of shame and dumped on the desolate shore of my childhood self. When I was twelve, a teacher humiliated me in front of the entire class, and the memory of that remains so visceral that even now it has the power to make me feel physically ill. In many ways, my childhood was one wretched episode of embarrassment after another. As a result, I became petrified of the attention and opinions of others, so the fact that this latest demonstration of my hopeless predilection for klutziness arose as the result of an attempt to overcome my shyness has only served to remind me why I blog about life instead of actually living it.

People like me — we know who we are: the crimson ones, inflamed with awful self-consciousness — can only comfort ourselves with the knowledge that embarrassment is important for the smooth functioning of society. Those prone to it are less likely to turn into mass murderers, flashers or ANCYL politicians. Embarrassment has been the source of fairly extensive research from the time that Goffman first examined the phenomenon in 1967. This author argues that embarrassment “serves the important social function of appeasing the observers of social transgressions”.

In 1982, Semin and Manstead demonstrated that transgressors who displayed embarrassment were regarded as more likable by others than those who appeared unconcerned. (Manstead has also co-authored a 1997 paper titled “The moderating role of self-efficacy beliefs in the relationship between anticipated feelings of regret and condom use”. Not that this is necessarily related to embarrassment, but I thought it was interesting.)

More recently, magnetic resonance imaging has been used to study the brain in a state of embarrassment in order to reveal which neural systems are involved in the processing of intentional and unintentional transgressions of social norms. People with damage to the areas of the brain involved in processing the transgression of social norms can exhibit severe behavioural problems. Not caring what others think of you can be deeply problematic (I am reminded here of the Little Britain character Anne.)

Besides its role in keeping human beings in line, embarrassment has a fascinating and impeccably literary etymology. It was first used by the inimitable Samuel Pepys in his Diary; Pepys in turn adapted a French word first used by the essayist Michel de Montaigne. A more gifted observer of human nature would be hard to find.

So embarrassment, as it turns out, is nothing to be ashamed of. Though, if I could have any choice in the matter, I would choose to feel it less often — and less keenly — than I do.