Wayne Koestenbaum's new book Humiliation looks at humiliation in pop culture...

Michael Jackson's father beat him; MGM fed uppers to Judy Garland. The performer must be coerced or brutalized to perform. "Beat It" and "Over the Rainbow" reverse the humiliation, or continue it.

Humiliation throughout history...

When I see a public figure humiliated, I feel empathy. I imagine: that martyr could be me. Even if the public figure did something wrong, I empathize... I'm seized by horror and fascination, by pity, by terror: here again, as if at the Acropolis or the Roman Colosseum, I see the dramatic onset of a familiar scene, an unveiling, a goring, a staining, a stripping away of privilege.

In an excerpt published today in The Stranger, Koestenbaum discusses the horrors and humiliations of the human body.