Performance and Performative.

A long time ago, my spouse and I played with someone as a couple. Usually, I only do threeway-play if it in involves cuckolding (me) but she was fun, cute and casual and I was curious so we went for it. Prior to the play, she said that she had very low tolerance for pain and even though she did want to experience some pain, she wanted it at the very low end of the intensity spectrum, and so we told her to indicate as soon as something approached her threshold. She did do that and we stayed within the demarcated boundaries of pain. A week later, she planned to attend a play-party where she had negotiated scenes with a few different people (not with me or my partner, who wasn’t there) and a few days before the party she asked if she could talk to me about her nerves.

She was nervous about the type of play she had planned (because a good deal of it was impact), I told her she only had to do what she enjoyed and if she was uncomfortable with the amount of pain she had negotiated, she could always change her mind and communicate that, or stop the play as soon as she got to the point of it being too much like she did with us. She continued to insist that she wouldn’t grow or learn if she didn’t push herself and she didn’t want the people at the party to see her as someone who couldn’t take it so she resolved to just get through it. Once at the party, she asked me if we could have a moment in the bathroom and she admitted she was very scared but when I recommended that she communicate that to the tops she was playing with and design the play in a way that was more exploratory than definitive in terms of how much impact there would be or reduce the number of scenes she planned, she said I wasn’t being very supportive.

“Everyone is going to be watching, this is the time to bring the confidence, no?” she said.

She gritted her teeth and got through the party, doing every scene she had planned, basking in the approval from the tops after she was able to take it, but that was the last time I ever saw her around. She left the scene, stopped attending munches, didn’t appear at any other events and aside from a few, brief, passing conversations with me after the party, she also disappeared out of my life. I cannot be sure it was because that experience was overwhelming and too difficult to repeat, but I will say, I encounter these sentiments quite frequently, even though the method of handling them is often different for each person. Nerves at the prospect of playing in public are common, I think, probably similar to nerves at the prospect of public speaking, but this is not about nerves, it’s about the pressure and necessity of performance that seems to accompany a lot of kink-exploration. I’ve had people confide in me about being afraid to play with their partners in public because the presence of onlookers makes them feel like they have to just take it lest they make their tops look bad, people who prefer to play in public because their pain-tolerance is higher when they do because they know people are watching, people who feel less kinky because they don’t play in public and not to mention, the impact of the public-facing elements of a social media platform dedicated entirely to the demonstration of sexuality.

Before we go into it any deeper, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. The existence of public play and spaces to the end of safety, accessibility and community-guidance is a goal I get and support (and I won’t really get into how much of that goal is really being met because I don’t do enough public play to get a say and we all differ in our opinions on whether this social platform is ultimately valuable or detrimental), and I don’t write this as an indictment of that kind of play or preference at all. I also want to address the exhibitionism question. Some of us, play and exist in public because it adds to the experience or sometimes, it is the central component of the experience, it is not just about what we are doing but that we are being seen in what we are doing. Personally, I am deeply into being watched, and more broadly, into performance. It does add to the experience and it can sometimes mean that you’re more into something or can “take” more because you are being watched, but my earlier point was not addressing the exhibitionism of sexuality (and we’ll get into that more deeply but for now, lets discuss the exhibitionism of kink and sexuality). I think, the kink community, is the most public-facing sexual or fetishistic community I have ever encountered. We have kinky social media, we have play parties, we discuss our relationships and what we do in them quite explicitly, we see each other naked a lot, we know exactly what makes our friends hot and bothered and we have enough conventions around our social platforms for certain types of play, posts and interests to be currency. This environment is kinda ideal for exhibitionism, no?

Personally, I would call myself an exhibitionist (and often, I say, emotional exhibitionist) but what I really mean is that I get off on performance. When I write non-fictional erotica, for instance, one of the reasons is that I love to write, of course, but the reason I am writing about the intimate details of my sexual self is because I get off to the idea of people seeing that—the debasement, the vulnerability, the intimacy, the emotion—but perhaps most importantly, the crafted rendition of my sexual self, and it is crafted, that is why I call it performance. Even in its raw, gritted, messy presentation, that presentation is a deliberate choice of performance. The problem with the word performance is that people often read it and think it means faked. I loathe the idea that authenticity and performance are somehow seen as antithetical and at odds with each other. The idea is that if you perform it, it’s not your true self and honestly, true self is such an adorable concept, because, really, you have just one, distilled and exact true version of yourself? How fucking fortunate. The eighteen versions of my true-self are roiling in envy. To me, performance is true because it takes me, exactly as I am being in a scenario, it adds context, art, desire and skill to how I am presented and it presumes the awareness of an audience. Experience is how I live my live and performance is how I share it. It’s storytelling. Exhibitionism is storytelling that makes me horny.

Even with public play, I only ever do it to be watched. I don’t like playing in a space where we all coexist to play in relative privacy but around each other, I don’t get that and would much rather play in actual privacy, but I will play publicly if you are there to watch me (and alternately, I will share publicly). I’ll do it if I am the show, the spectacle and the performance. That excites me. Playing around other people so we may share space, toys and interests does very little for me but playing for the audience is delicious. In that space the audience does contribute to my experience (and hopefully, I to theirs) and sometimes it also means that I play a little bit differently, the best way to explain the difference is through the theatre. The characters are who they are, they do what they do but, in their blocking, they do always ensure they are turned outward, towards the fourth wall where they can be seen and every once in a while, they step aside into soliloquy and explain themselves to you.

That is the most vital aspect of performance to me, to put myself and my life into aesthetically enjoyable, comprehensible and (sometimes) complex structure, to stop being a person and become an abstract noun, a story, an object of performance like sheet-music or a book. It’s not the same as being performative. To me the difference between performance and performative hinges on what I want from the audience. When I am performing, I do it to my own specifications, to the tune of the story I craft and want to tell, to the goal of my own joy and pleasure (of which the audience may be a part), but crafted to be comprehended and enjoyed by an audience, any audience which is free to take whatever they want and think whatever they wish of it, that is performance. When I am doing it to the specification of exactly what I want the audience to think about me, or sometimes, what I don’t want them to think about me, when I am crafting my being to be viewed a specific way by them and come to a specific conclusion about me, that to me is performative. Playing with the awareness of an audience is performance, playing to the expectation of an audience is performative (and either can be thrilling, I suppose, but I vastly prefer the first).

The second is what I was talking about when I opened this essay. My friend went ahead with all her scenes at the play party because she didn’t want people to think of her as a loser who couldn’t take it. I know other people like that. I know people who only do intense impact in public (or deferred public) settings either because they know they will post pictures of it or if they are at a party because the failure to perform in front of the audience is far more uncomfortable than the inherent discomfort of the thing they are doing, the thing they maybe even want to do, but not to the extent to which they are doing it. I know people who do public scenes specifically because something approaches a limit or a fearful space because they know that in front of people they wouldn’t let their tops down. I know people who believe they are not as kinky as or fit in with community because they don’t want to play in public (or even post their play) and I know people who feel so deeply competitive they play in public (or post) to outdo another person (and this one, I suppose, is extra common with masochists). Then there are people whose public personas are on trend, in keeping with the achievement of the currency I referred to earlier.

This is very interesting to me. The existence of a social media of fetish is interesting because it’s not like Pornhub (as in we are not all here to wank it and leave) and it’s not like Literotica (as in it does not have a singular focus and purpose) and it’s not like TikTok (as in it does not have a mass, mainstream appeal and adaptability), it is intended to be a social platform with a singular uniting factor (ie: it’s for kinky people) but it does not have a singular purpose. It has its own norms, its own issues, it evolves and, come on, social media is the centre of the attention economy, so it has its own trends, “virality”, popularity metrics and currency, but because it’s about fetish, it also isn’t as publicly discussed, widespread, appealing to credit-card processors, it’s easily relegated to the porn-corners of the internet and most people aren’t discussing their existence on it as loudly as they would their existence on a mainstream social platform. It’s pretty self-contained currency and unless you work in the industry of sex/fetish, you can hardly put your fet-following on a resume. All of that combines to create a fascinating atmosphere of attention, performance and performative sexuality. I have no value judgement for this, use it all how you will, but I am often amused by it.

For instance, I am endlessly amused by the currency of bruise-pictures. Like, okay, I don’t use socials, like Insta or TikTok very much, right? So those “Get Ready With Me” videos seem absolutely fucking nuts to me and most out-of-context trend-reels make me feel like my brain-broke or the world did, and I try to look at the currency of Fetlife through the same lens. Look, obviously, I’m a masochist and I totally get why bruises are sexy, just like I am a lover of nature and I get why it’s nice to take a picture of yourself by a waterfall, but there is inherent fondness for things, and then there is the need to do them because it’s how you get social-media points (and maybe when we all die, there’s some kind of report-card and all our likes will be tallied and it will determine the filter we get in the afterlife). When I look at bruise-pics from the same perspective as I do vacay-pics of influencers on Insta, it’s surreal. I stop seeing the I-love-pain people and start seeing the others. The apologies for not bruising, the explanations for why you don’t bruise anymore, the aspiration to bruise like another (or how you used to), the measurement of self-worth and masochistic mettle in terms of how much bruising, the touching up of pictures and the worry about how people will see you if you don’t have your stripes. It feels very similar to my friend bringing the confidence to replace the lack of desire.

At that point, it stops being amusing and it starts being concerning. Just like with mainstream socials, we see how aspirational influencer living and staying on trend (or the inability to do so) depresses people, makes them feel excluded and makes them want to touch-up their lives (and relationships) to make them seem more on point, I think that happens here too. There are the useful and valuable aspects of attempted community and then there are the detrimental and dangerous aspects of the fact that this is social media and social media seems to encourage performative behaviour of all kinds. Some degree of performance is inherent to social platforms, it’s almost the same online as it may be within a book-club or a church community, and that feels alright to me, maybe some do not view it as necessary, but for me, it’s how I feel comprehensible, whereas the performative aspects feel more sinister and much harder to get identify even in ourselves.