While reading for my course on Honor-Shame culture a friend pointed out the following brilliant passage from Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons. It bears reading, not only for the squeamish feeling it will create in men, but for the meditation it will provide those who want to understand the agony of those who find themselves in a world that has passed them by.

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals – male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male’s obsession with revenge… but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff. But the feeling itself, male humiliation, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it. The same man who will confess with relish and in lavish ghostwritten detail to every sort of debauchery and atrocity will not utter one peep about the humiliations that, in Orwell’s phase, “make up seventy-five percent of life.” For confessing to humiliation means confessing that he has cringed, caved in, surrendered his honor without a fight to another man who has intimidated him – that he has been unsexed and has plunged into a misery worse than the prospect of imminent death. Eternally, the sheer fear of physical confrontation – even now – in the twenty-first century! – when life’s major victories are won not by knights in armor on the field of battle but by sedentary men in central-heating-weight worsted suits inside glass-walled electronic chambers. Nor will a man ever free himself from that sickening moment of capitulation. A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will experience the very feeling, every neural sensation of that moment, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing.

Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons (Picador, New York, 2004), pp. 293-294.