Neurological Correlates

Exhibitionism is all about power. Here’s “Bruno” at the other night’s MTV Award:

So, “Bruno” appropriately attired as a winged Angel with backless chaps (le dernier cri?)  swings on guidewires over the MTV audience before announcing the award to Zak Efron.  Oops, mishap! And “Bruno’s” silver lame covered string bikini area is wedged up underneath Eminem’s nostrils.

Entertainment on MTV! Finally. WAIT! IT WAS STAGED? Developing. . .Here’s what I thought was fantabulously interesting: Eminem apparently storms out in a huff.

What a diva! I mean Eminem, not “Bruno”.

“Bruno” couldn’t have picked a better target.  Brilliant! The Daily Mail reported with British understatement:

. . .Eminem, who released Relapse – his first album in five years – last month, is not used to being on the receiving end of jokes.

Eminem’s snit wasn’t about homophobia or anything of the sort. This was about power.   Eminem’s power was upstaged by Mr. Baron-Cohen (aka, Bruno).   And the real reason I found this maybe the most interesting thing on TV in a long time:  This was a real response to a fake power play.

Mr. Baron-Cohen’s “Bruno’s” exhibitionism was used for power, but in such a publicly bizarre way that you have to get the joke to really appreciate how uproaringly hilarious it is, if you enjoy tormenting those totally lack introspection (here, Eminem). It wasn’t a real power play, everyone knew, or was it? Eminem somehow didn’t restrain his synapses.

The score –  Bruno: 1; Eminem: negative 5 zillion.

What Eminem should have done: laugh it off and worry about it later. Of course, then this would have been unfunny (in that it would have been too inside baseball if Eminem laughed and winked like he was in on the joke).

(N.b.,  Men wearing very little silver, or gold,  lamé, is the new normal au Monde du Swivelchair, and I find men in backless silver lame chaps to be, well,  vin ordinaire, after all, I was recently  in close association with my new BFF’s, the Thunder from Down Under while at the Macy’s in Las Vegas. Or was it the American Storm? No matter. The Eminem intemperate outburst was, to me, exciting and outrageous and risque and naughty! Titillating! Relapse? The name of the new album? Of course! It’s sold like 5MM copies. Maybe it’s Eminem who gets the last laugh. See? I’m smitten with the entire episode.)

Here’s a post from last year re: exhibitionism. (This one was getting lots of hits from exhibitionists (or those  iso exhibitionism activities). But no one left a comment. I’m guessing this post sort of deflated any enthusiasm).

Exhibitionists: Flashing your privates is about power, not sex.

May 28th, 2008

So, what possesses anyone to show their genitals to a stranger in public? Research on exhibitionism discussed.

In my youth, there was a flasher in town that everyone knew about. The teenagers just thought he was gross, and sometimes would shake up a can of Fresca to spray at him. But the flasher’s intended targets certainly weren’t disempowered — they would come back with a gang and tell the guy off. (I think the local police just told the guy to knock it off). I don’t think the flashing escalated to anything more than that.

So, again, what exactly, possesses anyone to show their genitals to someone else in public?

Well, now we know: it’s a power trip. As reported by Tuch, flashers are predators, searching for victims they can control. By violating the code of conduct between individuals, the flasher can throw the victim off balance — the victim is disoriented because the social contract is betrayed in flagrante.

Bader et al. also report that among flashers the ones who later rape or molest are the ones with multiple flashing offenses and assaults. Clearly to me, the power trip from flashing can escalate to a power trip from rape and molestation.

What emasculates the power balance? Of course, a cell phone picture up on a web site. Holla Back is the website for posting camera phone photos of your personal flashers — and the public opinion goes a long way toward taking away the power trip — just like a nice cold Fresca sprayed all over you. It says to the flasher, “backatcha – and escalate by a few million.”

As far as female exhibitionism, different premise. Females may like to show off their bodies, and even be (faux gasp) sexual. But that’s not a deliberate attempt to throw the other off balance, I don’t think. Balsam’s recent paper says Freud, who wondered, “what do women want“, didn’t explain exhibitionism properly given incomplete information about women.

Here’s one: A woman stripped totally after wolf whistle (Reuters 05.22.08):

The woman told police she didn’t take too kindly to the whistling from the men repairing the road.

“She said she had thought ‘bugger them, I’ll show them what I’ve got’,” Police Sergeant Peter Masters told NZPA.

“She gave the explanation that she had been … pestered by New Zealand men. She’s not an unattractive looking lady,” Masters said.

“She was taken back to the police station and spoken to and told that was inappropriate in New Zealand. . . .”

It strikes me as inappropriate that the woman was taken into police custody rather than the men — because it was the men who were probably trying to exercise power over her. (I mean, is their behavior good enough for their daughters? I don’t know.)

But, what about celebrities who flash in front of cameras getting out of a limo like here or on a yacht like here? Or on nationwide TV at the Superbowl, like here, even if it was staged? Or those “Girls gone so wild that they are filmed on spring break without their bikini top?”-type gigs? Female exhibitionism demonstrating power? I don’t know, but it seems to have a power component.

You know what they say, men use power for sex, and women use sex for power. So maybe there is the female equivalent.

What about those “secret sex tapes” that mysteriously get released over the internet but really have some kind of licensing deal brokered? OK, so it’s also about publicity, and, setting the cheapening of culture aside, probably a business decision that doesn’t require a lot of work. Or maybe it does. Is using sex to gain power work? This is way too philosophical, so end of post, full stop. I’m in the mood for Fresca.

Full abstracts after the jump.

Shannon M. Bader, Katherine A. Schoeneman-Morris Mario J. Scalora, Thomas K. Casady,  “Exhibitionism, Findings from a Midwestern Police Contact Sample”, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Vol. 52, No. 3, 270-279 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0306624X07307122

This study used a police sample to examine offense characteristics, recidivism rates, and other types of sexual offending among individuals suspected of exhibitionism. The sample consisted of 202 incidents of indecent exposure perpetrated by 106 identified individuals. Demographic information showed that one quarter of the sample had symptoms of a mental illness and one quarter had a history of substance abuse. More than 84% of the sample had other nonsexual criminal charges. Approximately 30% of the perpetrators were charged for more than one exposure incident. Masturbating during the offense, exposing to child victims, and speaking to the victim did not show any relationship to the occurrence of more sexually aggressive behaviors. However, individuals who had subsequent rape or molestation charges (16.9%) were more likely than those who did not to have had multiple exposure incidents and a history of physical assault charges.

Tuch, R.H.,  Unravelling the riddle of exhibitionism: a lesson in the power tactics of perverse interpersonal relationships.Int J Psychoanal. 89: 143-160 (Feb. 2008)

Through an examination of the varied paradoxes embedded within the phenomenon of genital exhibitionism, the author establishes exhibitionism as a paradigm for interpersonal relations whereby one individual entices another to lose himself, to a benign or dangerous degree, in a presented portrayal/enactment. Efforts to entice that cause an extreme loss of the subject’s sense of self–making it exceedingly hard to break free of–are designed to render the subject powerless and take psychic possession of him. The perpetrator accomplishes this feat by interacting with his victim in ways capable of producing a sudden and profound regression with sufficient loss of autonomous ego functioning that the subject finds it hard, if not impossible, to act on his own behalf. The essential feature  of the perpetrator’s efforts is his violation of the unspoken but understood rules of interpersonal engagement that, when violated, cause extreme disorientation and a loss of trust in one’s most basic assumptions about how humans treat one another. When this happens, we would describe the  interaction as having been perverted to serve the exclusive needs of the predator–to gain as complete control over the other as possible.

Balsam RH.Women showing off: notes on female exhibitionism. J Am Psychoanal Assoc.  56: 99-121 (Mar 2008)

The limitations of the phallocentric cast of earlier psychoanalytic formulations of “female exhibitionism” linger into the present. In part this connects to certain historical expectations for women’s social behavior, and to the vicissitudes of Freud’s insufficient knowledge of women in his libidinal psychosexual phasing used as a basis for analytic understanding. The contemporary fade of libido theory contributes to the neglect of such topics as they relate to the biological body. Yet ease and conflict regarding conscious and unconscious female body image representations related to that stepchild of theory-pregnancy and childbirth in particular-play a major role in female body display. Recognition of such body fantasies and female body meanings from early childhood into maturity tends to be marginalized within all of the psychoanalytic theories current today. The focus here on female exhibitionism suggests a normative spectrum for pleasurably active sex seeking and pleasurable procreative desire and fantasy that is present in a female’s use of her body and which (of course, but secondarily) can become caught up in conflict. Two cases accenting analyses of female “showing off” behavior are included.