In short, the answer is no!
Diogenes has often shown himself to be very shameless
Not only the gossip press, but also philosophers often seem to be sensationalists. This may be the reason why, when it comes to cynicism in school or university and Diogenes, as its most famous representative, the scandals he regularly caused in Athens are often told first.
So it is reported that he took his lunch in the middle of the market. Nothing special for us, who have long been accustomed to hamburgers to go. But for the Greeks it was unseemly, bad behavior – shameless.
But that was not all. Diogenes did far more shameless things. Among them also such, for which we would come today even in the prison: he peed simply somewhere and he masturbated even completely openly. If people then looked at him, he said to them:
Oh if only it were that easy to satisfy my hunger by simply rubbing my belly.
His pupil Krates, of whom I tell more elsewhere, even performed coitus in public with his wife, who was also a Cynic.
All quite shameless.
Shame is an emotion we can control
Elaborated by the Stoics and successfully applied in modern psychotherapy is the small second of freedom we have not to let feelings directly control us. The Stoics recognized that it is not the events that produce our feelings, but the opinion we form about those events. True, we cannot directly control our feelings. But before they set in, we can consciously reevaluate the event.
Diogenes, for example, may have decided that there is no reason at all to be ashamed of eating in public. He has learned to allow the need to eat here and now, when he feels like it, even if it is socially frowned upon. And so with practice, that is, virtue, which is understood as practice, shame disappears more and more. And after a few test runs, Diogenes will have learned to enjoy his meal quite shamelessly, without getting a red head, in the middle of the marketplace.
Being fat is not beautiful
OK. I’m ashamed to say it, but I am, once again, fat. And that’s not nice. I don’t want to have sex with a fat woman. And my young attractive Kenyan girlfriend, I know, would also rather have a young, slim, attractive boyfriend. Now I really can’t do anything about my age. But I am working on my weight. Successfully, by cynical/stoic means. (It’s not the offer of soft drinks that triggers my feeling, but my opinion about it) So I want to be ashamed. My shame motivates me. It reminds me not to stop my diet.
Remember the story of the buried talents. The loser said to the king:
“Lord, I knew you were a stern man; you reap where you have not sown and gather where you have not scattered; because I was afraid, I hid your money in the ground. Here you have it again.” Wasn’t that rather impudent shameless behavior towards the king? The latter had good reason to first give the coward only one talent and then to take it away from him.”
The cynics of antiquity explicitly opposed the effeminate life of the Athenians. Should they welcome it when one of these effeminate sissies is not even ashamed of it?
Whitney Thore proudly presents herself in front of a large audience. She wants to sell us that being fat is no reason to be ashamed. And we should nod obediently. And keep it to ourselves that we wouldn’t like to have her as a girlfriend.
This kind of shamelessness, which still wants to force us to agree and lie, does not meet with the approval of cynics.
Shamelessness is not a virtue. Body shaming however, is a different topic.