The Walk of Shame? Are You for Real?

This cheesy phrase needs to go.

-Karen Callaghan

I happily admit that I love (and perhaps am obsessed with) celebrity gossip, but occasionally even I get tired of the Lohan/Stewart/Speidi chronicles. Isn’t there anyone else who’s doing something, well, interesting and unexpected? Maybe even a little outrageous? Then along comes the tale of January Jones and her late-night multi-vehicle accident.

Jones, who plays ice princess Betty Draper on Mad Men, crashed her Range Rover into three cars that were parked on a dark L.A. street (wow, this is sounding kind of noir, right?) and left the scene. Returning a short time later, she told police that she’d been fleeing the paparazzi when her SUV went out of control. Police said that drugs and alcohol were not involved in the crash.

Maybe, just maybe, Jones was trying so hard to elude the paps because of a photo that appeared a couple of days earlier, showing her coming home in a taxi and (are you ready?) wearing the same dress she wore the night before. How the paps and their editors must have drooled over that one! Minutes later, it seemed, the photo was on the web with a caption about Jones doing “the walk of shame” – because, you know, she had spent the night with a guy.

Read January Jones Hits and Runs

It’s no surprise that this tacky phrase is popular among male college students, a group that, by and large, will never win the title of Most Sensitive Men. But that’s understandable. Most of them are still in the late stages of adolescence, when sex is treated as a dirty joke rather than a profound expression of love or an ecstatic physical experience. What’s not so understandable — in fact, is really annoying – is that the walk-of-shame concept is applied almost exclusively to women.