To think that social standards have slipped because people don’t feel shame anymore?

Yeah, I mean, women showing their ankles and being out in public without their chaperones. Oh hang on, that was back when standards slipped in the 1800s.

I got into the lift today and none of the men took their hats off, most of them weren’t even wearing hats. No, wait, that was the 1920s

And a whole bunch of children spoke to me before they were spoken to…

Society has been “slipping” since society began.

What is it with all these froth inducing posts nowadays? Is this place too quiet or something?

Well I'm very old and was born in 1960. My mother married in an empire line gown and my grandparents rented her and my father a house near Brighton for 18 months so I was born far away, to avoid the scandal and the shame! When I was 12 and my parents separated, I was the only girl in my class affected by divorce.

I don’t think it’s lack of shame exactly.

I think our society has become more
and more individualistic and everyone is more focused on doing what suits them rather than compromising for the benefit of those around them.

It’s probably because we don’t live in small tight knit interdependent communities any more - so some don’t worry about annoying or being rude to others as they’ll probably never see them again, and even if they do, they don’t need them for anything.

You must be very old then. I’m 61. I don’t remember it being shameful to be a single mother or gay. I was a single mother at 30 in 1993. No stigma. But l had loads of friends at university in the mid 80’s who were gay or single parents,

I think there's a distance between shame and doing the right thing. Being a Christian involves forgiveness.

I don't think the old workhouse postings were particularly edifying. Mary Elizabeth, bastard of Eliza.

I don't think anyone needs to experience that level of shame ever again.

Overall I'm glad that a lot of stigma, taboos and shame have gone, and that clothes are much more casual or relaxed. Shoes as well. I have wonky hips and feet and used to get so much foot pain which now know was from having to wear smart shoes with a heel at work. Since the pandemic my feet have been amazing, no pain at all, as I can live in comfortable shoes It doesn't mean you can't be smartly dressed if you want to. In my lifetime it used to be shameful to be gay or be a single mother, particularly a teenage one (no shame for the fathers who have buggered off).

Are you shaming the op?

I can’t understand this.

That is only much worse is happening under the multiculturalism/destroy the UK /make it third world agenda powers to be have taken money to implement and the naive and the contended have been bleeting along to. Under your nose. Get to know them and you'll see.

I agree with both of you.

The other side is that the Victorians were fond of public shaming and also of blaming the poor for their own misfortunes.

We literally already do both of those things now, except the public shaming is global, these days. The rules around what is shameful behaviour are just as intricate and arbitrary and underpinned by a moral sense, although secular.

This is an excellent point @Ddakji

Shame is not always a bad thing at all.

If someone allows their dog to shit all over the pavement outside your house, should they not feel ashamed they didn't pick up after it?

Because with every generation we move more towards an “anything goes” mindset.

We are now at a point where we celebrate adult men in animal fetish gear interacting with children at Pride marches. Pride being the opposite of shame, of course.

I think we live in a society now of very much ‘Every man for himself’

Even under Thatcher it wasn’t like this. People were still polite and considerate in public.

I think shame about some things actually helps hold societies together. Not about things like menstrual blood or kids’ behaviour, for example, but about spitting, or bringing fetishes outside, or not picking up your dog’s poo. Those are things which people should be ashamed of doing, but it’s as if we now don’t have to think at all about how our behaviour affects other people. As an example, the past few summers where we live we’ve been plagued by people playing music really loud, at concert level, with huge rigs, so that it’s clearly audible even inside and there’s no point trying to listen to anything else. That never used to happen, it was only ever a small speaker, never at ridiculous levels, never all night long. It’s not life threatening but it’s miserable for everyone else, and when people ask them to turn it down they seem to do it more, deliberately (I have actually seen one group set up right near one particular house on purpose to upset them because they asked them not to play the music so loud). It’s a small rural community but nobody seems to have any way of persuading this group to respect other people’s right to “quiet enjoyment” or whatever the phrase is, and there’s no social sanction either like there might have been once upon a time.

They're just racist

But a lot of what you talk about was perfectly acceptable int he 80’s and 90’s.

But people didn’t wear pyjamas to Tesco and abuse everyone.

But that doesn’t really make sense. If you’re saying that our society is crumbling due to immigration then how can lockdown, when people physically couldn’t come here, possibly be related?

Shame is a bad thing. How many people spend years dealing with it in all kinds of therapy etc?

i can’t really relate to your example, i am
an adult who owns my actions. I don’t just do things then feel immediate shame

It's just the standards we've imported, boundary erosion and having to accept whats not acceptable in our culture and not expecting people to fit in with our values manners and our society.
And since the three years of lockdowns everything has gone to hell tenfold and even some of the civilised people started behaving like animals.

The bleeping lime bikes and people just pushing through the gates at train stations. Jumping fares used to be the reserve of kids and scallies but if you watch at my local station, which is a nice area, it's about 1 in 3 people don't pay. No attempt to hide it either. I saw someone the other day walk up and ask to be let through and kind of shitty that they wouldn't allow it.

It's the lack of consequences rather than strictly lack of shame I think. This is also evident in the way people shoplift now, no more is it a sly crime carried out by people too scared to get into real crime, now it's a blatant and comes with explicit or implied violence.

Sure, let's go back to the shaming of yester year. More homosexuals must be beaten up, lose their jobs and be jailed just for loving someone of the same sex! Any female teenager or grown woman who dares to have sex before marriage must be packed off to a mother and baby home to have their child forcibly removed after birth. After all, her parents and employers will be too ashamed to have her back! Any man who is ashamed of his wife can have her forcibly committed to an asylum for daring to disagree with him! Corsets must of course make a comeback because it is shameful for a waist to not be so small that you pass out if you try to take more than a few steps!

If seeing pyjamas in tesco are the price we have to pay for the progress we have made, I'll take it.

Maybe a bit of shame is a good thing though if it encourages people to pick up after their dog or take their rubbish home or refrain from cutting their toenails on the train. I drove up the A9 today, they’ve not long cut the grass and there is miles of shredded plastic rubbish.

Littering is such lazy, selfish behaviour. I think you should feel shame/ guilt.