The Virtue of Shame

Emily Maynard vs Guarding Your Heart. Another ship lines up a broadside against that rotten barge. Mostly good stuff, though Emily goes too far when she says that "shame and vulnerability are antithetical concepts; they cannot coexist." Shame, far from being destructive of sincere relationships, is crucial to them. It is a capacity to regard and to fear the judgment of others. It's a form of social moral reasoning that operates where the individual fails to reason for himself, and it functions just as much between two lovers as it does between a gathering of neighbors at a bar or a parade of activists at a march.

Emily speaks from a Christian subculture in which shame still operates. The particular moral reasoning of the Guard Your Heart tradition is wrong-headed, as she shows. And yet it is regrettable that outside that subculture, shame, especially sexual shame and the shame surrounding familial piety, has lost most of its power, and to the extent that it is still regarded as a substantial threat to practicing of all kinds of moral perversions, appears only as an object of derision.
Moderation! The dialectic of both...and, rather than either...or.
Roger Scruton is excellent on shame.
Keep in mind the background of Scruton's thinking, which is that personal identity is fulfilled through a pre-political experience of membership in a community:
"Man can set his feet on the ladder of self-realisation only when he has some perception of its reliability, and this cannot be achieve by subjective fiat. He must first find himself at home in the world, with values and ambitions that are shared. We must first be able to perceive the ends of his activity not in himself but outside himself, as proper aims in a public world, endowed with a validity greater than the validity of a mere 'authentic' choice."
(Scruton, but NOT from the essay on stigma, citation unknown)