So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

by

Jon Ronson

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed makes teaching easy.
Hank (which is an alias) is a man who was publicly shamed for making vaguely lewd puns at a tech conference in 2013. Adria Richards, a Black Jewish woman who was also in attendance at the conference and sitting in front of Hank and his friend, took a picture of the men and posted it to her Twitter to shame them for speaking insensitively. The internet quickly turned against Hank—but when he was fired from his jobs, suddenly men’s rights activists began to launch a misogynistic attack against Adria Richards. When Hank spoke with Jon Ronson, he seemed overwhelmed by how quickly the situation had spiraled out of control, empathetic toward Richards, and condemning of the unfairly gendered harassment to which Richards was subjected.

Hank Quotes in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

The So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed quotes below are all either spoken by Hank or refer to Hank. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Good, Evil, and Inhumanity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6 Quotes

It seemed to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

Related Characters: Jon Ronson (speaker), Hank, Adria Richards
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed LitChart as a printable PDF.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed PDF

Hank Quotes in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

The So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed quotes below are all either spoken by Hank or refer to Hank. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Good, Evil, and Inhumanity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 6 Quotes

It seemed to me that all the people involved in the Hank and Adria story thought they were doing something good. But they only revealed that our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks.

Related Characters: Jon Ronson (speaker), Hank, Adria Richards
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis: