A both personal and socio-critical examination of toxic shame – over our sexuality, our bodies, our origins – and how to free ourselves from it.
DIE UNVERSCHÄMTE FRAU
[The Shameless Woman]
by Miriam Stein
Goldmann/PRH Germany, September 2026
Being able to feel shame is key to our survival as a social animal. It’s a clever little mechanism that ensures we follow social norms. But whereas men usually seem capable of dealing with it relatively well, women often overdo it. It’s a powerful emotion, and from childhood onwards it’s like a toxic friend in your ear, controlling your decisions, keeping you in line, and telling you that you aren’t empathetic / confident / slim / feminine / smooth / natural enough. No matter how emancipated a woman you are, thousands of years of patriarchy aren’t something you can shake off just like that.
Bestselling author and journalist Miriam Stein has known all about shame ever since she was a little girl. In fact, she was practically born with it: in 1977, someone left newborn Miriam on a South Korean street corner in a shoe box, wrapped in newspaper. Was her mother not allowed to keep her? Was she ashamed of her pregnancy? Meanwhile, Miriam has gone through puberty, experienced her own pregnancy, survived career setbacks and relationship crises, and even seen off perimenopause – the female ‘shame supernova’ par excellence. In « The Shameless Woman », she sets out to expose the many false narratives that darken so many women’s lives, and to forge a path towards liberation.
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Miriam Yung Min Stein was born in South Korea in 1977 and subsequently adopted by a German family. She has performed on stage with Christoph Schlingensief and Rimini Protokoll, and is an acclaimed culture journalist. Her bestselling Die gereizte Frau (‘The irritated woman’), about the menopause, turned what was largely a taboo topic into one openly discussed in public. In her most recent book, Weise Frauen (‘Wise women’), she went in search of female wisdom. She lives with her family in Berlin.
Healers, shamans, priests, midwives, soothsayers: in antiquity, female communities and networks exchanged valuable, even life-saving, knowledge about nursing, healing, spirituality and sexuality. But in our patriarchal societies with their male-dominated academic discourse, female knowledge was often dismissed as irrelevant or un-serious and esoteric.