Sever the Sightlines

[S]haming has social meaning. It characteristically results in a desire to sever the sightlines between the self and the other. We talk about wanting to hide our faces and the characteristic look of shame—the head bowed, the eyes lowered. But that’s not the only way of achieving such separation. Rather than hide, one can instead do away with the onlooker. ‘He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world,’ as Erik Erikson famously put it (1963, 227).

— Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny