Shame culture: "Yes, but will it work?"

Kate has some very sage thoughts [UPDATE: So does Dara] on my article in praise of shame culture:

Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question [a fifteen-year-old who was given a hard time by a convenience store clerk when she tried to buy a pregnancy test --H] making a change to her own moral philosophy, just going to enough lengths not to get caught. What the individual does in private doesn’t matter, unless the consequences of that action ever become public and identifiable. This is fine if you think the problem can be solved by the teenager using enough contraception to ensure she never has to face another check out clerk. That’s not what the clerk herself had in mind, however, given that she was keen to dictate her customer that “you shouldn’t be having sex at all”.

The social behaviour actually enforced by the clerk was: Buying pregnancy tests is shameful. Therefore, don’t buy pregnancy tests at all.

This, of course, is no help to anyone. Whatever your views on abortion, it’s clear that the earlier a pregnancy is discovered, the better.

We now live in a society where sex has been largely divorced from its visible consequences. So to use shame culture to stop someone having extramarital sex, you have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act.

I disagree. People have sex for all kinds of silly reasons, and people refuse sex for equally silly reasons. Not having the right lingerie on; having a test the next day; knowing that friends of yours work at the "free morning after pill" counter at the Women's Center, knowing that they could guess the guy on whose account you were there, and not wanting to be embarrassed in front of them. And these are just the ones I've heard about. I'm sure there are more, and that they are equally goofy.

We can debate the behavior of the clerk in question, but the fundamental question is: Should a fifteen-year-old's experience of buying a pregnancy test be unpleasant for her?

I can imagine someone saying, "No; that's mean!" Kate seems to be saying, "No; it won't work." I'm sympathetic to the worry that this will just force teen sex underground and therefore make it less safe and healthy, but I, for one, am not sold on the idea that, in order for shame culture to work, we "have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act." People deciding whether or not to hook up usually have an eye on future consequences (the question of whether your social stock will go up or down when the hook-up becomes public, for instance), and I would like the humiliation of buying a pregnancy test at fifteen to be one of the future consequences in view.

To the abortion concern I would cite Kevin James: "Simply make sure they understand that an abortion is the far greater shame."