Shame still exists, but its causes are different. Now, it is no longer moral failings we deride. Instead it is being vulnerable, getting caught. The shock about Paris Hilton's first sex tape was not that she'd been having sex, but that it had been filmed and made public. In the case of drunk shamings, the shame is in falling asleep in front of everyone on the couch, with a little rivulet of drool in the crease of one's mouth. It is being out of control.
"It's like a payback for being an idiot," says Josh Abramson, 23, who went to the University of Richmond and is another founder of Shamings.com.
On the site Shamings.com, oblivion is just a one-way street. Dead to the world but not the Web is a young man taking a nap and coated with gravy mix. Below, a victim Saran-Wrapped to his bed, and a partygoer who was the first to get wet at a kegger.
(Shamings.com)
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The drunk shaming has a presence in pop culture, even if the term itself does not. On "The Sopranos," Tony's trouble-making son, A.J., goes out partying, and wakes up with his cheek glued to the carpet and his eyebrows shaved off. The fine men of MTV's "Jackass" helped popularize the notion of "antiquing," in which the shamer throws flour in a victim's face. Their victim was merely asleep, but antiquing is also used in drunk shamings.
A lot of shamings are not sent to Shamings.com but instead posted on personal Web sites, sometimes in photographic series (See the fellow asleep, see a hand with a can of shaving cream entering the frame. You can almost hear the thump of the bass line and the snickering of the guy holding the camera.) A Web site for University of Notre Dame students ran a poll: "Best method for drunk shaming." Sharpies and highlighters were the most popular, while "cheez whiz/mustard/peanut butter" got only 2 percent of the vote.
Brian Battjer, a 28-year-old former software start-up employee in Manhattan, has loads of pictures of shamings, many of which he posts in the photo diary he keeps online. His are gentler shamings, without magic marker or shaving cream or nudity, and they are often carried out on strangers who have passed out in public. (He cut his teeth in college with an online photo series of his friends throwing up.)
One of Battjer's shaming series features something he calls "Drunk Guy Jenga," in which the goal is to place objects on the drunk person without waking the person up. (Coins, a cell phone, a small woman.) Another series shows various people making funny faces next to a young woman who has passed out in the corner of a karaoke bar. When Battjer's victims wake up they don't know anything happened until they see the photos floating around the Internet.
"You only do stuff to them that, like, they don't want to beat you up," Battjer says. "It's funnier that the person is none the wiser. To me, that's funnier than your friend waking up with, 'I'm gay,' on his face." He laughs. "I mean, that is funny, but that's just a little more base."
Battjer says some time after the karaoke bar incident, the young woman e-mailed him, upset, asking him to take the pictures down. He told her he would if she insisted, but weren't they funny? He says she relented.
The guys who run CollegeHumor.com and Shamings.com say they get those requests occasionally, too, and they always take the pictures down. (They also say that, based on the captions, some of the shamings appear to be sent in by victims themselves.) But how many guys out there don't even know their faces are on the Internet, wearing blue eye shadow and red lipstick? Shamings.com's Van Veen says he has no idea how many pictures are sent in without the victim's permission.
Shamings.com was started last July as a spin-off of CollegeHumor.com, which Abramson and Van Veen created in 1999 and serves as the flagship for their various Internet enterprises. CollegeHumor.com, which is more popular than Shamings.com, has shaming photos, but it also has other high-quality, alcohol-themed content, like a picture some kid sent in of a Christmas tree decorated with beer cans. It's unclear just how popular the Web site is: Abramson says the Web site got almost 8 million hits in December, but Reston-based Web watcher ComScore Media Metrix measured just under 1 million. Abramson and his partners, who are based in Manhattan, also have a Web site that sells T-shirts with clever sayings ("SEX: do it for the kids") and a Web site that sells a line of huge foam hands all making an obscene gesture.
Abramson says since he graduated from college, he's begun to feel "at least a hint of moral responsibility." On Shamings.com, he and his partners have placed a warning: "If your friend is beyond drunk and may become unconscious, quit messing with him and get him some help."
"We don't really want to encourage it, even though it's good content for us," Abramson says.
But if kids are going to send in pictures, he adds, he's happiest if they're high quality. He likes seeing the more adventurous shamings, like the one where a kid was locked to a bicycle post, or the one where some people "put a kid in a dog cage -- things like that, that are a little more creative, you know?"
