Media, celebs and society as a whole are just plain shameless now

One of my all-time favorite movie moments occurs in “Some Like It Hot,” the 1959 film starring Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis.

Curtis and Jack Lemmon play musicians who inadvertently witness the Valentine's Day massacre in the Chicago garage and are now running for their lives. In a comedic sort of way, of course.

Dressed as women, they join an all-female band headed by train from Chicago to Florida, where they meet Marilyn Monroe, and hilarity ensues.

The moment I'm speaking of happens at the train station, when the overbearing matron who runs the band warns her nebbishy assistant, "All my girls are virtuosi, and it's your responsibility to make sure they all stay that way."

What makes this moment so wonderful, of course, is that the mores of time banned the writers of the movie — Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond — from using the word "virgins."

The restrictions gave birth to the comedy.

Today, such a movie moment couldn't happen.

That's because there are no restrictions.

Instead of that delectable moment, in a movie which came out only a year after I did, you'd see Harvey Keitel's backside as he's getting Marilyn Monroe pregnant.

The world has suffered a serious loss today, and that loss is shame.

Let's define our terms.

Guilt is how I feel about myself when I do the wrong thing.

Shame is my concern about how the world will see me when I do the wrong thing.

Guilt is a private matter, so it's harder to judge its presence or absence.

But it's blatantly obvious today that shame no longer exists.

It just doesn't matter how anyone else sees you.

This is true from our political candidates down all the way to our private lives.

It's especially true in our news media.

They've been saying, "If it bleeds, it leads" since at least the 1970s — anything gory or mayhem-filled is your main story, no matter how little effect it may have on the viewers' lives.

Back then, though, and even until recently, they didn't show the footage of that gory mayhem.

There was a sense of what therapist and author John Bradshaw called "healthy shame" — a sense that certain things or certain images did not belong in the public sphere.

That's all gone.

Tune in the news, if you must, and you might or might not be advised that a segment contains "graphic images."

But there they will be.

Dead bodies.

People being shot or strangled to death.

Children being taken from their parents on surveillance footage from inside a 7-11.

Some might argue that this is nothing new.

After all, weren't the violent images of warfare in Vietnam on the evening news the very thing that turned the nation against that war?

No. That's a pernicious myth.

I remember news footage from the Vietnam War, because I watched the evening news back then.

I was a strange kid, I admit it.

But the news did not contain imagery of soldiers killing or dying.

You might see soldiers moving through the jungle, but you never saw actual carnage.

Something's lost when we have no sense of healthy shame, when we can let everything hang out.

It's not just the subtlety of language that enabled Wilder and Diamond to craft such a brilliant movie as “Some Like It Hot.”

It's a sense of dignity. Of proportion. Of respect.

In “The Iliad,” we learn that in ancient Greek culture, the corpse of a soldier killed in battle had to be buried, because its unburied state was considered an embarrassment and a shame.

Today, with all the killing in the world, we are simply inured to violent images, which unfortunately breeds more violence.

There are two ways to get on television news.

One is to accomplish something meaningful.

The other is to shoot up a movie theater or an airport terminal.

Would there be fewer copycat attacks if we didn't leave a roadmap to copycats?

About 15 years ago, the actress — and I use the term loosely — Pamela Anderson, was asked how she would explain the existence of her sex tape to her children when they came of age.

This was at that seemingly prehistoric moment when she was one of the very few people to have done a sex tape.

"We'll just explain that back then, mommy and daddy used to film everything," she explained brightly.

The headshaking ludicrousness of the explanation notwithstanding, today you'd have to feel that she has a point.

Today, we make videos of everything, from sex to murder.

And then we post it for the world to see.

The loss of shame is, in and of itself, the real shame.

Michael Levin, a 12-time bestselling author, runs BusinessGhost.com, a provider of ghostwriting and publishing services.