GIF About a year ago, a (male) New York Times writer tweeted:

East Village sad girl taking a single slice of broccoli white pizza home to her apartment. #therealness

— Sam Sifton (@SamSifton) May 7, 2014

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below"Sad girl"? Okay, first of all, eating is a basic function of survival. Men eat alone all the time, even sometimes—gasp—white pizza, and nobody seems to put them on suicide watch. But this woman is sad, not to mention #brave, because she's masterminding an elaborate plan to eat while presumably not in a social setting! She's taking her precious pizza to her apartment to avoid consuming food, solo, among other human beings. But even her own home isn't a safe zone for a single woman's mealtime, thanks to the lame trope that women who eat alone in their apartments are all "eating their feelings." Harrumph.
More From ELLEThe expression "walk of shame" is gendered in a similar way: If a girl is walking home at 8 a.m. in a club dress and heels, people assume she's ashamed of it. And with this context thrust on her, often it becomes equal, if not greater than, her own. Pop culture perpetuates this idea; take last year's Walk of Shame rom-com, which garnered a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes and featured —in the words of Christy Lemire, who reviewed it for RogerEbert.com, jokes that revealed "a repetitive misogynistic streak." Lemire adds: "Just because a pretty blonde woman is traipsing about the streets of Los Angeles in a skimpy, yellow dress and high heels, this does not make her deserving of scorn and degradation."
Nobody learned their lesson, however. Last month VH1 greenlit a half-hour unscripted show called Walk of Shame Shuttle, which, according to the Washington Post, revolves around female drivers "[picking] up people from places where they maybe wish they hadn't spent the night and takes them home, thus avoiding the dreaded 'walk of shame.'" The "people," judging by the promos, are all women. And that "maybe wish they hadn't spent the night" bit? That inference is the heart of the problem.

Are u watching for Me tonight... #WalkOfShameShuttle #VH1 #TV #TVStar #victoriademare #icon #legend #historymaker

A photo posted by Victoria De Mare (@victoriademare) on Apr 15, 2015 at 11:43am PDT

Even when you leave a one-night-stand elated, the expression—and the insidious sentiment behind it—slips in. I have both heard and/or uttered strikingly contradictory sentences like: "Last night was sooooo fun but I had to do a walk of shame home." You slut-shame yourself in a way you barely even notice.
Often, the word I really wanted when I said I did a walk of shame was akwardness: I did a walk of awkwardness. Especially true in my early twenties, when the morning-after return from an "away game" was still a new phenomenon. Now that I'm in my late twenties, things are different. I can own being a grown woman who enjoys sex (or even just a makeout-pass out combo) but doesn't always pack contact solution or roll-up flats in my purse every single night. That can make me feel a little disorganized the next day if I did decide to sleep over, but shame? That's a different beast.
I know because I have, actually, done walks of shame. There was the time I took the PATH home from Jersey City in a party dress, after spending the night for the umpteenth time with a guy I really liked who'd been telling me "not to expect anything from him" for over a year. Another, while I was trying to rebound from him with a series of one-night stands, wandering around Brooklyn with a dead iPhone trying to find a subway stop via echolocation and magic.
"The Walk of Shame isn't when you let society down—it's when you let yourself down."
But the shameful feeling I had on those mornings wasn't because I'd gotten drunk and casually hooked up with these guys. It was from my hung-over awareness that the unfulfilling (and orgasmless) hookups had little to do with any genuine sexual desire and much more to do with my lack of emotional self-care at the time. It happens when you know that whatever you did last night didn't make you happy, and you knew that even going into it. The Walk of Shame isn't when you let society down—it's when you let yourself down.
Some of the women eating pizza alone in restaurants are sad. Like... sure, that's just statistical probability. But, like labeling any random girl in a club dress at 8 a.m. as someone doing a "walk of shame," making sexist assumptions about her simply based on her existence is absolutely absurd. As one woman put it in her reply to the broccoli pizza tweet:

If it were a man, this tweet would not exist. “@SamSifton: East Village sad girl taking a single slice of broccoli white pizza home.”

— Jasmine (@jasminemoy) May 8, 2014

Now that's something that's sad—but true.