Why Do I Perform Pleasure?
The Pattern
You are with someone you like. The closeness is good. Your body is feeling some things and not feeling other things. None of this is being communicated. What is being communicated is a performance, mostly through sound and facial expression, that is calibrated to what you have been taught the act is supposed to look like from the outside. You are performing pleasure rather than reporting it. You wonder when this became automatic. It became automatic the first time you understood that your body's job in the bed was to make the other person feel skilled and desired. The performance is the body's solution to the impossible demand of being a sexual subject while also being a sexual object.
Origins & Context
Naomi Wolf, in her work on female sexuality and culture, described the specific way that women's bodies have been trained to perform desire as a form of social labor. Wolf noted that the performance is so deeply rehearsed that many women cannot, even alone, identify the difference between an authentic response and a learned one.
Emily Nagoski's research on female sexual response identifies the gap between physiological arousal and subjective arousal, and notes that this gap is exacerbated by cultural conditioning to perform on cue. The performance becomes a habit that the body executes automatically, even in the absence of any audience.
Pete Walker's work on the fawn response provides the trauma-specific context. The fawn-trained adult performs whatever response the partner needs, because the body has learned that providing the needed response is the way to remain safe and remain loved. The performance of pleasure is the sexual version of the lifelong fawn.
You are performing pleasure rather than reporting it. You wonder when this became automatic.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the volume. You know what volume the partner expects. You produce it. You hear yourself doing it. You wonder when you started.
It shows up in the body positions you take that look right rather than feel right. The arched back. The thrown-back head. The hand placement that mimics what you have seen on screens. None of these positions are about your sensation. They are about the visual.
It shows up most painfully in the moments you are alone, in your own body, and you realize you do not actually know what you want. The performance has been so chronic that the underneath is not available to you. You have lost the channel to your own sensation, not because the channel does not exist, but because you have spent so long broadcasting on someone else's frequency.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Performed Desire (Naomi Wolf), the cultural training of women's bodies to enact sexual response as social labor. It is also named as Arousal Non-Concordance (Emily Nagoski), the gap between physiological and subjective arousal that performance widens. Pete Walker's framework names this Sexual Fawning.
Related entries in this library: Fawn Response, Self-Abandonment, Codependency.
Nikita's Note
The performance is not your fault. The performance was given to you before you had the equipment to refuse it. The repair is not telling yourself to stop performing. The repair is rebuilding the channel to your own sensation, slowly, often outside of partnered sex.
The practice is solo and unhurried. Touch yourself with no goal. Notice what is actually happening in your body when no one is watching and no one is being managed. The channel comes back in small increments. Over time, what you discover alone becomes available in the bed with a partner. You stop performing because you finally have access to the truth.
From the work
You are performing pleasure rather than reporting it. You wonder when this became automatic.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.