Another fascinating facet of this type of behaviour is sexual role-playing where people act out a very different sort of self from that they exhibit in their daily lives. For the most part, members of repressed societies have to maintain dignity and decorum, no more so than our leaders. For example, they have to be dominant and yet how often do we hear about captains of industry or politicians engaging in submissive sexual fantasies where they pay to be dominated and subjected to humiliation? In 2010, three Long Island lawyers teamed up with a New York dominatrix to run a $50 million mortgage scam. Their victims were the many willing and wealthy clients who attended the dominatrix’s private dungeon in Manhattan. Paying for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) appears to be fairly common in the corridors of power. But why?
For obvious reasons, getting people to talk about their sexual behaviour is very difficult. Luckily there are some who ask the sort of questions about sexual behaviours that the rest of us would shy away from. Katherine Morris, a psychologist from the United States, interviewed 460 heterosexual men who regularly engaged in BDSM. The majority of the men she interviewed were high-level professionals, including a fair number of corporate executives, including several chief executives of corporations. Her interviewees also included psychiatrists, attorneys, engineers, scientists, and other professionals who spend a great deal of time in high-pressure intellectual pursuits on a daily basis.38
Morris detected a pattern where their emotions during these private BDSM sessions were ones that they did not feel they could express as part of their daily public lives. It was as if something was missing in their lives that needed addressing for total satisfaction. These men felt forced to reintegrate the missing components in privacy as part of a sexual ritual. Morris described how many of the high-level corporate executives felt that they were frauds and that in her view, ‘humans seek balance’ between their public and private lives.
It is not only due to inadequate fulfilment that people seek out such role-playing. BDSM also allows the individual to lose their identity and adopt a role that they find sexually gratifying by being someone else.39 For the most part, our sexual activities are private compared to our public behaviour. It is almost as if we are allowed to become a different person in the bedroom. The cliché is the shy and demure wallflower in public who transforms into a sexual demon behind closed doors. It’s as if the persona we portray in public is just a front for the real person in private. Certainly, we are all expected to control our sexual behaviours in public – something that we are taught from a very early age. Those who cannot are regarded as perverts or mentally ill. In some societies there are very strict codes of conduct, very often based on religion, but all societies have some rules about what sexual behaviours are permitted in public. Members of these societies must conform to these rules but, ultimately, one consequence is to suppress thoughts and behaviours that do not go away but may eventually need to be vented, like the Tourette’s patients who lack the ability to suppress screaming profanities. The more they try to stop themselves, the stronger the compulsion becomes. This is the ego-depletion effect again. The illusion is that we have the self-control to decide whether we give in to our urges or not. The problem is that abstinence may lead to pent-up frustration to do exactly the things we are trying to avoid. That’s when the mighty fall down in such a spectacular way.
Technology may provide us with a way out. One place where we may be able to play out these fantasies and urges without exposure is on the internet. The next chapter considers how the Internet is changing the way we interact and share stories and ultimately how the web is going to play a major role in the self illusion we construct. This is because storytelling on the Internet flows in two directions with everyone having the capability to contribute to receiving, generating and sending information to others. If our looking glass self is a reflection of those with whom we surround our selves, then there are inevitably going to be implications for our self illusion in the way new media change, open up or restrict the others with whom we come into contact.
8
Caught in the Web
It started with a man shouting in the crowd. Why was he shouting? Did someone say, ‘Bomb?’ No one was certain but no one stuck around to check. Within seconds there was a mass stampede. It was the Second World War remembrance ceremony in Amsterdam in May 2010. One witness reported,
Just after the moment of silence, a very loud shriek could be heard not that far away from where I was standing. Immediately, a huge amount of people started to move away from where the sound had come from. It was scary when this mass of people attempted to run away from the shout.1
This is an example of stampeding – a common phenomenon found among animals that live in groups. It occurs whenever something triggers a sudden movement of a small number that causes the whole to respond en masse. This is the herd mentality, the hive mind. When someone in a crowd starts to run, we instinctively follow. In the same way, we tend automatically to copy and mimic others. This makes a lot of sense. Like meerkats, we can benefit from the collective wisdom and awareness of others when some threat arises. Because we instinctively respond to other humans, a simple action in one individual can rapidly spread and escalate to complex group activity. The problems occur when large numbers gather in limited spaces and the threat is disproportionate to the danger of the moving crowd. Over sixty people were injured in the Amsterdam stampede but they were lucky. Every year, hundreds of people are killed when large crowds gather in confined spaces and panic breaks out.
It is in our nature to assemble in groups. Many of us seek out crowds and groups to satisfy a deep need to belong. In doing so we cluster with like-minded individuals who share common interests (this is why most stampedes occur at religious festivals and sporting events). This is because we substantiate our self in the crowd. Sometimes others feel their individual self is lost in the crowd as they become one with the others around. Whether we feel lost or found, our self is ultimately influenced by the collective properties of the groups we join. As soon as we join others, our self is reflected in the crowd.
This relationship between the individual and the crowd is a key interest in the field of social networking where scientists try to understand the nature of groups in terms of how they form, how they operate, how they change and how they influence the individual. Some of the most dramatic examples are the riots that periodically erupt in otherwise civilized societies. In 2011, the police shooting of a black man set a London mob burning and smashing their way through the capital. Although the killing was in London, copycat rioting broke out in other English cities. Commentators were quick to look for culprit causes – social class, education, ethnic group, poor parenting, unemployment, boredom and so on. When they started to look at the profiles of those arrested in the London disturbances, however, it soon became apparent that there was not just one type of rioter but a variety from different backgrounds, ages and opportunities. Many were disaffected youths from deprived backgrounds but there was an Oxford law graduate, a primary school teacher, an organic chef, children of a pastor and other unlikely ‘criminals’. In attempting to categorize the typical looter, the authorities had failed to understand that coherent groups emerge out of very different individuals.