Performance model of sex, Angry Eye

[gement]

I just read an essay on the performance model of sex (versus the traditional commodity model), which really lays out the nature of how we can even have a concept of 'dubious consent' in sex, when it would make no sense for any other pleasurable hobby:

"B. B. King has played with everybody, but no one would argue that he asked for it if someone kidnapped him and made him cut a demo tape with a garage band of strangers."

There's also an analysis of how the Nice Guy mindset fits into the commodity model, which uses the delightful phrase "Pussy Oversoul." The whole thing is in Yes means yes! and can be viewed on Google Books here: Toward a Performance Model of Sex

--

I've seen several links in the last week to The Angry Eye. It's an hour long and it documents the educational exercise where a facilitator treats blue eyed people (defined as all non-brown eyed people) as systematically lesser. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. If you find it difficult to sit through, you're doing it right.

I was glad to get to see this, because I was bitterly disappointed in 3rd Grade when I did not get to participate in this exercise. (The 4th Grade class where I went for English was doing it.) I'd always wondered how it would look, how it would feel. I was picked on a fair amount in grade school, but I remember already having an acute awareness in my sheltered little all-white town that this was different.

Having seen the video now, I wonder how many grade school teachers I would trust to facilitate this. Not many. I wonder how I would have behaved. I hope, with a certain amount of justification, that I would be the one who burst into tears but made no excuses, answered politely, and stayed.

The most important "Oh." for me was the blank, bemused, or mildly irritated looks on the black women when the facilitator asked them if they'd been spoken to like this, and if it would drive them to tears.

The socialization of tears is a mystery to me. I am told I've been a waterworks since I was two. I don't recall deliberately using tears to get my way. I do recall being hideously embarrassed, over and over, when I couldn't stop myself from crying at an inopportune time, because a teacher was sharp with me, because another student snubbed me, because I was embarrassed or angry or frightened. It got me sent to therapy.

If I could have stopped, I would have. It's gotten better with maturity and good bipolar meds, but it's still something I have to fight. It comes up at least once a year in workplace situations, try as I might to stop it. That sharp feeling behind my eyes is there right now just thinking about it.

I can't imagine what it would take to burn that reaction out of me.

Comments

[caladri.livejournal.com]

I really liked Toward a Performance Model of Sex, thanks for linking to it. I think the author takes an unduly-behavioralist view of how humans work that disallows for internal conflicts, though; this is useful in deconstructing Nice Guys™ without equivocation, but less useful when it leads to assertions that enthusiastic participation never gives way to denial, whether of consent or of something else — indeed, such deceit and even self-deceit doesn't just exist with sex, but with commodities generally, so it would have enhanced the paper to include that complexity. Which is a very fine point, though I think reflective of a conflation of theory and practice that could be problematic. Thankfully, I think the rest of it (and especially the core of it — that section seemed like a reach) stands up to rather better to scrutiny.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I envy your better theoretical basis for critique. Could you please expand on your objection so I can keep up?

(This is completely sincere. I always sit forward in my chair when you start using theory and analysis in ways I never was trained to do. My understanding doesn't pace my interest, though.)

[annissamazing]

Definitely going to be checking these out when I'm not at work.

I tend to cry when I get angry. I discovered a few years ago that it stems from not being allowed to show I'm angry (which I believe is gendered socialization because boys are allowed to show their anger). It's not acceptable for me to be angry so I swallow it and that inevitably leads to tears which makes me even angrier and it turns into a vicious cycle. I changed my behavior when I discovered that and now I rant. Yelling would be more effective (and I've done that on occasion), but that is genuinely not acceptable, so now I rant. I say whatever I'm thinking, regardless of what it is. And, oh, the words that come out! I always thought I was slow-witted, but it turns out I just had too many filters slowing my wit down.

Icon only because I'm talking about anger and I rarely get to use it.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Aha, and I have almost no angry or confrontational responses. So there we go.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Replied via E-Mail due to length and some personal details I felt like including but perhaps not posting.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

So, if I may paraphrase back, the essay's model is insufficient for dealing with situations of mixed and conflicting emotions.

I agree. I am someone who has consented with mixed feelings to dancing and other social outings, which were hypothetically for the purpose of shared enjoyment. I just wasn't set for enjoying them, so my company became a commodity I was giving during the parts of the interaction I wasn't thrilled about.

It would have spoken well of my social partners if they'd noticed. It would have spoken well of me to express my disinterest clearly. (But there we get into socialized responses, victim blaming, etc.) My analogy falls apart because the events I'm referencing are often defined as courtship, which is to say a lead-up to sex.

But when I try to carry it over to, say, a gigging musician whose friend keeps asking (pressuring) em to come over and jam, the analogy seems to hold. Peer pressure is a mess, and people put on a happy face about things they don't entirely want to do. The performance model won't fix that.

Socializing people in a more active consent model could eventually blow away an awful lot of "just to be polite" social engagements, though. That's a lovely thought.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

I would go a step further and say that in very few situations are emotions neither mixed nor conflicting. Also, I think that examining behavior is insufficient to judge emotions and motivations. And that just because two behaviors seem related to the observer does not mean that the processes behind the behaviors are related.

Is victim blaming relevant to the kind of communication you're talking about? I'm not sure if a consent model applies to it any more than it applies to all communication. I mean, in the gigging musician model, there are all kinds of reasons why asking persistently would not lead to a breakdown in consent, and the ultimate sign of consent is whether the musician chooses to go. If the musician chooses to go because they're not good at saying no, or just to shut the other person up, then that almost doesn't make sense in the performance model, but in the commodity model — they are treating themselves like a commodity. In the performance model, you can shout "encore" all you like, but whether the musician performs one is wholly up to them.

Like you say, though, social conditioning is a huge factor there, and cannot be simply ignored, but it also seems to me to introduce so much complexity as to simply break the metaphor, the simplified framework.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Well, as Randall Munroe points out, if the map were the terrain, we'd just need another map.

The fact that it's often socially or physically unsafe for some people to openly say "No" is poison to communication around consent. "I have to wash my hair" means ask again next week, right?

I've been grateful for the anti-socialization training wheels I've gotten from friends who are Aspies. If I want my friend to know what I mean, I'm just going to have to say it directly. OH WAIT THIS WORKS WITH EVERYBODY.

Well, it doesn't work with everybody, but it works a lot more often than the old way. And the practice of it pulls into sharp relief how often and violently I avoid saying No. The awareness of that makes me look at how it affects models like this one.

So I see the performance model is akin to Newtonian mechanics: it trivially solves a whole bunch of gross-scale problems but still leaves significant fiddly bits for the relativists to work on.

* Sharp tangential side note:

Any deep analysis of victim blaming will currently run aground of the fact that I don't believe in free will this month. :) For me, this doesn't remove much of the entitlement payoff, because I was getting pretty acutely aware of the fallacies of merit.

What it does for me is completely blows blame out of the water. No more blame, or its more genteel cousin "personal responsibility". We're all ticking along and doing our best with what we've got; that can need an upgrade, but there's neither blame nor guilt when a car needs repairs.

This means when I catch myself saying 'should have' about myself or anyone else, as in "I should have told them I didn't want to go," I take a step back because I smell blame. I made the best decision available within my tool set. I would benefit from better tools for saying no.

[gement.livejournal.com]

If the musician chooses to go because they're not good at saying no, or just to shut the other person up, then that almost doesn't make sense in the performance model, but in the commodity model — they are treating themselves like a commodity. In the performance model, you can shout "encore" all you like, but whether the musician performs one is wholly up to them.

Ah! Okay, I just spotted a thing. There are a minimum of four places the model matters in a transaction between two people: The model I'm using, the model you're using, the model I imagine you/society uses, and the model you imagine I/society uses.

To cut down on pronoun abuse, let's call me the musician in this scenario, and you the audience. (This is already broken because that's a commoditized exchange, but the invited and inviter is often a similar transaction.)

You as the audience may be whistling and screaming for the sheer joy of it, inviting me to come out and play some more if I would like for the sheer Performance joy of it, because this is great. You innocently model that I share the Performance model.

I as the musician am modeling what I would do in the Performance or the Commodity models, and then guessing what your reaction would be. In this particular example, unless there has been some vast cataclysm of rock etiquette, I model that you will expect an encore and respond with entitlement unless I explicitly preface my exit with, "I seriously don't do encores. No. Really, not joking. It's nothing personal. Good night!"

Vast Cataclysm of Rock Etiquette should totally be a cover band, but I'm not sure for what.

If I perceive or predict a requester is in Commodity mode, then I predict unpleasant consequences for refusal. Certain social frameworks and behavior patterns make me more likely to guess that, including repeated contact requests when I haven't responded or given what I see as significant encouragement.

Everyone's definition of significant encouragement is different, but the entire point of Yes means yes is that a shrug isn't good enough. It shouldn't be on the musician to rebuff the friend over and over. It should be on the friend to say, "Hey, you seem pretty booked every time I ask you about getting together. If you want to get together, how about you get in touch when you have some time? I understand if you're too busy."

So some of it is responding with less entitlement (to make no safer) and other of it is rephrasing invitations to opt-in instead of opt-out.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Hm. It seems as if the commodity model comes into being when a person's performance is valued much more by someone else than by the person themselves (including if the person has a negative value associated with that particular performance). It then becomes a trade good, which can be exchanged for a thing of greater value. Whereas if the person put extremely high-magnitude valuations (both positive and negative) on their own performances, then a commodity model becomes less useful to them.

An economic analogy might be people who don't want to sell their houses/farmland/whatever to developers who want to raze what's there and put up something else. A slightly more ... I can't really say "risque" or "edgy" on this topic ... analogy might be copyright holders who don't want their works used out of a controlled context.

Hm. Rape as eminent domain to seize the property of the Pussy Oversoul? E.g., that woman is valuing her own sexual capacity too highly, so we need to step in and enforce a more reasonable rate of exchange. That seems creepily accurate.

[gement.livejournal.com]

creepily accurate.

I keep staring at this and can do nothing but agree. Nice call on noting the valuation conditions that make the model relevant.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Certainly that fits somewhat with ideas of "corrective rape", although regime change might be more fitting.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

The other thing that this analogy is calling forth in my head, is the effect that wealth imbalance has on the situation. Person A with 10 million dollars can apply a lot more objective "value" measured in dollars (as opposed to subjective value which seems to be measured in time), than person B living below the poverty line. Which makes it incredibly easy for them both to view all of person B's abilities and desires as commodities that can be traded for money. Ergo, human chattel!

[gement.livejournal.com]

Betcha they "don't appreciate that" a lot more dramatically for those of us who don't look like pretty white girls, though.

The last line of my OP was partially rhetorical. I can't imagine what it would take, but I can guess, just like I can intellectually understand how a former partner who was physically abused found his iron self control and pain tolerance. I just have no gut comprehension of it.

Re: The Angry Eye

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

In case you haven't seen it, here's a recording of (I believe) the original exercise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bWlTZZN3DY

I've also seen a different instance where she did it with adults and... yeah. ~shifts uncomfortably~

[drakemonger.livejournal.com]

In first or second grade I taught myself not to cry, because others would make me cry for sport. Now, some thirty years later, it pretty much takes death of a close friend or family member to "make" me cry. Or, I should say, *let* me cry. I would wish tears were far more accessible to me.

I like the deconstruction of the commodity metaphor, and I agree that the metaphor of musical performance has some nice features and doesn't have the failure modes of the commodity metaphor, but I suspect that the musical performance metaphor has some failure modes that the authors don't discuss, and I'm not sure if they just didn't feel they had the space for them, or if they weren't aware of them, or what. Of course, I'm presently failing to articulate what these failure modes are, so I might not have much room to bitch.

[gement.livejournal.com]

People who feel an obligation to "fake it," which can be easily encouraged and manipulated, is the most obvious weakness to me.

Beats the hell out of "whatever I can beg, bargain, steal, or take is winning," but yeah, there's more to do there even among well-meaning people.