"Public Shaming" with Clare Stephens

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Education, Comedy, Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture

4.5 • 905 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Pile-ons, performative outrage, apology rituals, and public humiliation have become a blood sport over the past decade. What happened? Was it a moral panic? A byproduct of new communications technologies? Or a storm in a teacup - a well-intentioned overreach, exaggerated by anti-woke right-wingers?

Clare Stephens is a feminist journalist who has spent years at the coalface of cancel culture. She spent years at Australia’s biggest independent women’s media outlet, Mamamia, copping heat from all sides and watching digital mobs turn ordinary mistakes into existential crises.

Now she’s written a novel about it, The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done, and created a podcast, The Pile-On. Clare and Josh unpack how cancel culture evolved, why it hit women differently from men, how shame works, and whether we’re beginning to find a healthier way of disagreeing online.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Gatay humans.
0:04.2	Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
0:07.5	And expressing dangerous ideas online certainly became pretty hazardous over the past decade
0:12.7	with pylons and public shamings and cancel culture and so forth.
0:16.5	What exactly happened?
0:19.0	What was the psychological and sociological phenomenon of the public shaming moment?
0:25.6	And do we have enough perspective on it now to try to analyze it coolly?
0:29.7	Today's guest is a journalist who has been studying pylons and public shaming from the very coal face.
0:35.9	Claire Stevens was a senior editorial lead at Mamma Mia, which is Australia's
0:40.5	largest independent women's media company, and so faced an enormous brunt of backlash, both from
0:47.6	sexist men and finger-wagging, censorious feminists alike. She's written a novel now about public shaming and feminism and digital
0:56.7	culture. The book is called The Worst Thing I've Ever Done. And she also has a podcast called The Pylon,
1:02.8	where she interviews prominent people about experiences that they've had in being publicly shamed.
1:09.2	I myself am an upcoming guest on that show. Claire is fascinating.
1:13.5	She has a substack, Claire Stevens, or NQR for not quite right, if you're looking it up. And I wanted
1:19.3	to talk to her about public shaming, pylons, being a woman online, being a man online, and what we
1:25.0	might expect from the next generation of online warriors.
1:28.6	I hope you enjoy it.
1:29.5	As much as I always do, the one and only Claire Stevens.
1:37.4	Nobody looks at the totality of the person's work or of my work.
1:42.1	Like they find the thing that most aggrieves them or frames me as a villainous or offensive to them. And then they ignore. Your body of work. Yeah, not even, I was going to say the body of work, but even other parts of the same interview or the same column or something. It's like, you know, but you said this one line.
2:01.9	Like, yeah, but read the thousand words that led up to that line or listen to the hour
	...

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