Shame — a feeling that arises when something that ought to be private somehow becomes public, with a resultant tendency to concealment. It is not only bad things that people try to conceal; we might, for example, want to conceal some good deed that we had wanted to remain private — it is only the publicity that we think bad.

Shame only occurs in the human world.  In the animal world there are various forms of fear, but this is not the same thing.  Fear is always a negative emotion, a reaction to some threat of some evil (experienced, perceived or imagined).  In human beings, shame and fear may look a bit alike, but in fact they are quite distinct.  Human shame may well be accompanied by the fear that what ought to remain hidden may become public.  But the essence of shame goes beyond fear.  It is rooted in the interiority of human persons.  From this interiority arises the need to conceal certain experiences and values.  Fear does not manifest any such inwardness, but only a reaction to evil.

Sexual shame: an almost universal tendency to conceal from the gaze of others (and especially those of the opposite sex) those parts of the body which determine its sex.  It is often manifest in the feeling of a need to avoid nakedness.  Now, there can be other motives besides shame to avoid nakedness, including a need for protection against cold that will vary with the climate.  The partial, or even total, nakedness exhibited by primitive peoples in tropical conditions means that nakedness is not simply shamelessness, for these cultures often take the concealment of parts of the body previously exposed to manifest shamelessness. Dress can not only conceal but also call attention to the body's sexual parts.  In short, it is not possible simply to identify modesty with the use of clothing or shamelessness with its absence.  Rather, the best we can say is that there is a tendency to cover the body and its sexual parts that is often concomitant with sexual shame.

The essential feature of sexual shame is the tendency to conceal sexual values, especially as a person conceives them as "a potential object of enjoyment" for those of the opposite sex.  Before a certain age, children's minds are not yet receptive to such values, but as they become conscious of this sphere of values, they begin to experience sexual shame as an interior need of an evolving personality.  Generally they have no need to be taught this or have it imposed from the outside.

The development of sexual modesty (the readiness to feel shame) takes a different course in females than in males, and this difference seems to be related to the differences between the sexes in regard to sensuality and emotion.  Precisely because sensuality's orientation towards "the body as an object of enjoyment" is so much stronger in males, there is a great need for females to gain some insight into male psychology and to develop a sense of modesty.  Yet the very tendency for emotion to be stronger than sensuality in females can make them less aware of the strength of sensuality in men.

That women are often thought to have greater "purity" than men is not necessarily the result of greater chastity so much as of the female tendency to experience emotionally the value of a human being as a person more than to feel the sensual attraction to a human being as a potential object of enjoyment.

Men tend to be keenly aware of their own sensuality, and for them this is a source of sexual shame.  Men tend to become aware of sexual values in ways that are bound up with their own bodies and with the bodies of others as potential objects of enjoyment.  The sense of shame comes first from the way in which a man involuntarily reacts to the sexual values of the bodies of persons of the opposite sex, and then (perhaps as a consequence) at the reaction to his own body.  Shame comes from a sense that the reaction may not be compatible with the value of the person, and at the origin of modesty in men is a constant eagerness to avoid what is shameless.

Central to personhood is self-mastery, and no one except God has any rights to another person.  The independence of a person resides in the power of self-determination, and no one may lay claim to another, unless the person permits this by making a gift of self in love.  This sense of objective inalienability and personal inviolability finds an important expression in the experience of sexual shame.  The experience of shame is a natural reflection of the essential nature of the person, for shame presupposes the inner life of the person.  Only a person can feel shame, and only something that is personal in nature may not morally be made into merely an object of use.  In a way, sexual shame is a sign of the supra-utilitarian character of the person, for the feeling of shame manifests a sense that neither one's person nor the other person must be allowed to be merely an object to be used for another's enjoyment.

In this way a proper understanding of sexual shame can provide some general guidelines for sexual morality.  Although sexual values are the direct object of shame, the ultimate (but indirect) object is the person.

Shame serves to exclude any attitude toward the person that is incompatible with the supra-utilitarian nature of personhood. Since such attitudes can arise because of the sexual values inherent in the person, sexual shame spontaneously tends to conceal these values.

But there is another and deeper meaning in this spontaneous urge to conceal sexual values.  It is not simply a matter of hiding what might produce a sexual reaction.  The spontaneous need to conceal sexual values bound up with the person is the natural way that leads to the discovery of the value of the person as such.  The value of the person as such is linked to its inviolability, and sexual modesty serves both as a kind of defensive reflex-mechanism for protecting the value of the person and as a pointer to the value of what is protected.  Shame manifests the value of the person not in some abstract intellectual way but in a lively and embodied fashion.  The feeling that the person should not be violated — neither by touch nor even by being made an object for use merely in thought – is an indirect way of affirming the value of the person as such.

There is also a certain natural shame involved in the physical aspects of love.  The feeling that there is something indecent in having other people watch the intimacies of love-making has nothing to do with prudery.  Rather, a sense of shame is proper here, for physical manifestations of love between a man and a woman (especially in marital intercourse) find their justification and foundation in a love that is a union of persons and not merely an agreement about the mutual use of each other as mere means to an end.  But only they are personally and interiorly aware of this justification, and only for them is that motive something interior. Anyone else would simply encounter the external manifestations of response to sexual values.  The union of persons (the objective reality of love) would remain inaccessible.  Now, if shame tries to conceal sexual values to protect the value of the person, it must also try to conceal a shared response to sexual values  to protect the value of love itself, especially for the two people who are experiencing it together.

Further, human beings are generally ashamed of involuntary reactions, for they are not the result of deliberate choice (e.g., passionate outbursts of rage, or panic fear, or certain physiological processes that occur apart from willed choice).  Given the interiority of the person, we are suspicious of what is not chosen inwardly but just happens exteriorly, physically, and irrationally.  It is precisely because all these external aspects are so conspicuous during an experience of sexual values in which their personal union is hidden within each of them and invisible to anyone else, that love insofar as it is a matter of sex and the body needs concealment.

The Law of the Absorption of Shame by Love

Seen by anyone else, the physical aspects of love involve shame, but within the individuals shame is absorbed by love.  Shame is so profoundly personal a phenomenon that it can only exist in the world of persons.  It has a dual meaning: (1) flight — trying to conceal sexual values, lest they obscure the value of the person as such, and (2) longing to inspire or experience love, for love usually develops on the basis of sexual values.  But since love is a union of persons, the decisive factor is the appreciation of the value of the person.

To say that love absorbs shame does not mean that it destroys or eliminates it.  Rather, shame is reinforced so that love can be realized in full.  Love utilizes the characteristic effects of shame for its own purposes, and especially the awareness of the proper relationship between the value of the person and sexual love.  Shame is a natural form of self-defense for the person against the danger of becoming merely an object for sexual use.  One person must not push the other into this position, nor should a person voluntarily descend into that position.  For love is an attitude to another person which essentially precludes treating the person as an object for us.

Affirming the value of the person is the basis on which someone who loves another strives for the true good of the beloved.  The disposition of will in someone who loves and the tendency to regard a person as an object of use are mutually exclusive.  Where there is real love, shame (as the natural way to avoid such a utilitarian attitude) loses its reason for existing and gives ground to the extent that the person loved in this way is equally ready to give him/her self in love.  Hence, sexual intercourse between spouses is not a form of shamelessness legalized by external authority, but is actually in conformity with the very demands of shame (unless the spouses themselves make it shameless by their manner of performing it).

Only true love is capable of absorbing shame, for in true love sexual values are subordinated to the value of the person and in which sensuality and sentiment are imbued with affirmation of the value of the person.  Given such an attitude, there is no reason for shame or for the concealment of sexual values, for there is no danger that they will obscure the value of the person or destroy its inalienability and inviolability by reducing the person to the status of an object-for-use.  There is no longer any reason for shame, for the will is now fixed by love on the true good of the person, not on exploitation.  The value of the person is not just abstractly understood but deeply felt.

But connected to the absorption of sexual shame by love there is the danger of superficiality.  Within a given person, shame is a negative feeling, in some ways like fear.  As love grows, fear gradually diminishes, and the feeling of shame inspired by sexual desire for another can become blurred in consciousness during the growth of emotional attachment and can be lost.

There can result a view that the very emotion of love gives people the right to physical intimacy and to sexual intercourse.  The mistake here is to confuse love as an emotional experience (even if reciprocated) with love completed by a commitment of the will, which requires that each person chooses the other in an unconditional way in a lasting marital union open to parenthood.  The objective character of love as commitment stands in contrast to the purely subjective character of love as an emotional experience (which is, from the ethical point of view, still immature).  Hence the absorption of shame by love must have more than a merely emotional basis.  Merely to eliminate the feeling of shame by an amorous feeling would actually contradict the essential nature of sexual shame properly understood.  It would amount to a shamelessness that merely takes advantage of such transitory emotions to justify itself.  True shame gives way reluctantly, and when there is some impoverishment (by natural temperament, or by cultural conditioning) there may be need to cultivate sexual shame by education in real love.

The Problem of Shamelessness

Shamelessness refers to the absence or negation of shame, the falling short of the demands of shame, a clashing with the demands of sexual modesty.  It can be encountered in various ways of behaving in either sex.  There is admittedly something relative to individuals and cultures here (a greater or lesser sensual excitability, for instance, or a higher or lower level of moral culture, or the external conditions of climate and social habit).  Yet this relativity does not imply that there are no objective factors, however much other conditions may vary.

Shame is a tendency, uniquely characteristic of the human person, to conceal sexual values sufficiently to prevent them from obscuring the value of the person as such.  This tendency serves the purpose of protecting a person who does not wish to be used by another (in practice or in intention) but does wish to be loved.  Shame inclines a person to conceal sexual values that are especially likely to become an object of use, but only to a certain extent, so that in combination with the value of the person, they can still be a point of origin for love.

Shamelessness wrecks all this.  Just as shame can be physical or emotional, so too shamelessness can be physical (giving sexual values such a prominence as to obscure the essential value of the person) or emotional (rejection of the healthy tendency to be ashamed of reactions and feelings which make another person merely an object of use because of the sexual values belonging to him or her), e.g., the lack of inner shame about urges toward sensuality and sexual exploitation.

Emotional shame should not be confused with prudery (hypocritical concealment of one's real intentions with regard to persons of the opposite sex or with regard to sexual matters in general), let alone with Manicheanism.  Rather, emotional shame is a healthy reaction against any attitude that disregards the essential value of another person and degrades that person to the level of an object for sexual use.

Physical shame (e.g., modesty in dress and behavior) is necessary because emotional shame is a possibility.  Conversely, emotional shame is necessary because physical shame is a possibility.  The ways in which one can be shameless are numerous, and the development of healthy customs in regard to sexual relations depends on developing a mature sense of shame.  It is not a matter of puritanism or prudery.  Dress, for instance, can accentuate sexual values as well as conceal them, and this accentuation is not necessarily incompatible with sexual modesty.  What is genuinely immodest in dress is what deliberately displaces the true value of the person by sexual values and what is bound to elicit a reaction to the person as a possible means of obtaining sexual enjoyment and not a possible object of love by reason of his or her value as a person.  But it is not easy to apply this insight in specific cases of dress, for dress is always a social question and a function of healthy or unhealthy social customs.  Considerations of an ethical nature are always in play here alongside questions of an esthetic sort.  The human being is not so perfectly in control of all his or her reactions that the sight of another's body will necessarily arouse innocent affection and disinterested appreciation; it can also arouse concupiscence or the desire to enjoy sexual values without regard for the value of the person, and this possibility must be taken into account.

And yet there clearly are situations in which nakedness is not immodest (e.g., physical labor, bathing, medical examinations), and nakedness should not be equated with physical shamelessness.  Only someone who takes advantage of such an occasion to treat the other merely as an object of enjoyment is guilty of shamelessness.  There is need to make one's form of dress agree with its objective function; but outside of its proper context, the same form of dress could well be immodest.  Immodesty is only present when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person and is designed to arouse concupiscence.  In effect, this is a depersonalization by sexualization.  But this is not inevitable, and it is quite possible for nakedness when accompanied by mutual sexual enjoyment in marriage can fully preserve respect for the dignity of the person, for love has genuinely absorbed shame.

Needless to say, it requires real internal effort to refrain from reacting to the naked body in an immodest way.  The human body itself is not shameful, nor are sensual reactions.  Just like shame and modesty, shamelessness is a function of the interior of a person, and specifically of the will, by reducing another person to merely the role of an object to be used for one's own enjoyment.

A related topic.  For the sake of realism, art has a right and duty to reproduce the human body, and the love of man and woman, as they are in reality, so as to speak the whole truth about them. By contrast, pornography accentuates the sexual element with the object of inducing the belief that sexual values are the only real values of the person and that love is only the experience of these values.  But this destroys the truth about human love, which is always a matter of interpersonal relationship, however great the place of sexual values in such relationships.  A work of art needs to get at the truth that human beings are persons, no matter how deeply it has to go into sexual matters.  The readiness to distort these matters will only give a distorted picture of reality, and thus endanger those who contemplate such works, for the human will often shows a great susceptibility to deformed images of reality.