Embarrassment

I need [an] occasional reminder that we're all in it together, trying to solve this damned conundrum of desire and shame. (Sallie Tisdale, Talk Dirty to Me, page 121)

Embarrassment is just as natural as sex

For many people, the earliest feeling they can remember having around sex is not pleasure or arousal but embarrassment.  This is not an accident of our social conditioning — embarrassment is an inescapable part of human sexual experience.  In different cultures it attaches to very different things, but in every culture, people find ways to be acutely embarrassed about sexual matters. 

There are undoubtedly advantages that embarrassment confers from an evolutionary standpoint — it puts us on our best behavior around sex, helps restrain our wild, unruly desires from disrupting social stability, and tends to make us more selective in our couplings. 

At the same time, it's quite a scourge from an individual's point of view — it makes sex a lot harder for us.  Even people who seem very comfortable around sex usually have to devote a lot of intellectual and emotional energy to deflecting and neutralizing their embarrassment.  Almost nobody gets off easy. 

So how do you deal with it?

Ride through it, excruciatingly painful though it can be.  Let's say you fart disastrously the first time your new lover is going down on you.  This might be the kind of thing that makes you feel like you're going to die of shame, as if life isn't worth living any more.  Any sign of disgust and embarrassment on your partner's face might amplify your own to an unbearable pitch, to a level of pain you don't think you can possibly stand. 

So take a deep breath.  Realize that it's only a fart, not a deceit or an unkindness.  It's not an irreconcilable personality incompatibility or value difference.  Sure, it feels worse than anything else you could possibly do, but it isn't. 

That doesn't make the embarrassment go away, of course.  So realize too that it's like getting a shallow cut on your finger while chopping vegetables.  The wound might hurt acutely for twenty minutes, but you know the pain will fade and the bleeding will stop.  As long as you take care of it, don't let it get infected and don't keep picking at the scab, it'll heal in a week or so and be gone, maybe leaving a little scar to remind you to be more careful next time.  The same is true of the embarrassment. 

Don't let it fester.  Talk through the things that bother you, bring them up and put them on the table, out in the open.  Being brave in this way frees you from a great deal of pressure.  Things often seem a lot less important once you actually put them into words.  Think of the people you know who admit laughingly to the most outrageous incidents — other people seldom laugh at them, they laugh with them, grateful that they themselves escaped such a fate.

The thing not to do is to push your own embarrassment outside yourself and try to make it someone else's problem.  If you find yourself embarrassed by what someone else is doing, recognize that making them stop or go away doesn't solve your problem at all.  You're still at the mercy of your own embarrassment — it doesn't really have to do with them at all.  If you face it, on the other hand, and tend to it, you can let it heal so it doesn't bother you the same way in the future. 

(For more information, see also our shame and embarrassment page in the psychology section.)