Category: Trust

Porn and Parity

Trigger warning: like every single one. Please take care of yourself.

Imagine you’re a high school student right now. Imagine that you have a body that is perceived to be female. You’ve already been inundated for years with zillions of images telling you what acceptable looks like. You’re subject to being pictured without your consent in public spaces online. You are being constantly gossiped about, even during classes. You may be only partly aware of what people are saying about you or how you’re being depicted. 

You’re in the middle of figuring out how to be a human and you’re probably being portrayed as something less-than-human on the regular. And now, you’re also literally porn.

As schools across the country grapple with the implications of undress apps, we have to wonder what their effect might be on any-gendered humans going forward. 

Way back in 2016, I wrote (but could not figure out how to publish) an article about porn at work. Honestly, as someone who did have a job back then, I did not want to kick the hornets’ nest by naming a thing that was probably true but zero people want to bring up. There’s a high probability that people are consuming degrading porn at work and it has an impact on working environments.

Hard to imagine, but at that point, I didn’t think kids were going to be ‘allowed’ to be on their phones continuously in schools. The new normals keep on coming! What does it feel like to walk into school and know that people are making porn of you right in math class? It’s pretty hard to fathom. But, if you’re someone cast in a non-male identity and go to work, maybe not completely unimaginable.

To be clear, I am not anti-porn if porn simply means sexual imagery. We have bodies. We have desire. We are crazy overindexed on our visual systems. But one can’t avoid the actuality of what most porn seems to be, a reinforcement of dominance. Most undress apps work only to represent ‘female’ bodies. They are not about the realities of nakedness, they are about the weirdly idealized porn ‘female body’ and the reinforcement of knowing your place if you might have female body markers.

Tyson Yunkaporta suggests that every culture or community needs to have rites around sex and violence. Having them be unmentionable or never-OK can only lead to destruction and destructive manifestations of violence and sex.

The more prudish a culture espouses to be, the more dangerous it is, the more likely it is to engage in systemic violence. In most online contexts I am in, sex is invisible, tactfully avoided. Where does that take us? Somewhere dark, I imagine, because it’s so shadow.

Whereas before these secret thoughts stayed in someone’s mind, now they are worming their way into reality like Stranger Things tentacles. And porn becomes addictive, and thus the highs or debasements need to get more extreme. Porn fentanyl. And sex isn’t ‘polite.’ We shouldn’t ever talk about what’s going on, except in pseudonymous online rooms where people trade tips about how to take it further. Let’s not forget there’s money in it.

From Feb 2016:

Women have made inroads in many areas of work. Though in some areas (film directors, Fortune 500 CEOs, financial advisors, to name a few) women still have a way to go, there has definitely been a trend towards parity overall. But are we missing an elephant in the room? What if 20% of the people we work with are consuming stereotypical and often demeaning images of women at work every day? (Or at least, every work day.)

Quick stats to amaze: 12% of websites are pornographic. Every second over 3000 dollars are spent and almost 30,000 people are on adult sites. 40 million are regular visitors to porn websites. 70% of men 18-24 visit pornographic sites (which seems kinda low). “A significant relationship also exists among teens between frequent pornography use and feelings of loneliness, including major depression.. Adolescents exposed to high levels of pornography have lower levels of sexual self-esteem.”

Women are ⅓ of the porn-viewing audience. Women are also the primary fans of many other things that present women in ways that encourage stupidity, vanity, and submission. There probably should be a study of how many people are watching The Bachelor or reading InStyle at work, too.

However, I suspect that pornography that is largely based on the humiliation of women might be something that more men are consuming than women. And when 20% of men are consuming porn at work, it might have something to do with women’s success in the workplace.

I’ve had conversations with women-identifying friends, many of whom identify as queer or non-traditional in their gender presentation, and many who watch porn. Generally, it’s believable to me that women use online porn and enjoy it. My suspicion is that they probably favour a variety of adult media that doesn’t primarily focus on straight cis men humiliating women (no judgement!). I haven’t found any studies that separate out porn consumption by topic, but an NIH study found that “Boys were more likely to be exposed at an earlier age, to see more images, to see more extreme images (e.g., rape, child pornography), and to view pornography more often, while girls reported more involuntary exposure.”

The debate about pornography is often focused on whether porn is “good or bad.” As someone for whom free speech is a primary and fundamental right, I have no interest in condemning porn outright. As media, it merely reflects human desires and psyche. Both demonising or protecting pornography prevents the opportunity to understand its effects on us culturally.

I may go to work and present myself as an outspoken, confident person, who is (in my case, erroneously) perceived by others to be a woman. I may be working with someone who is watching porn during our workday, porn that operates on a paradigm that women should shut up, beg for men to have sex with them, or even just confirm the idea that women’s primary role is sexual. I may have no idea that five minutes before I am on a Zoom, the person I’m talking to was getting off to a rape scene. Is it simply the lack of transparency that feels uncool?

It seems possible to acknowledge that people have desires and that’s just fine, without having to accept that women are primarily shown as objects or subjects of abasement in media consumed by a huge swath of society AT WORK. It’s sort of akin to saying “because it’s a part of a religion, female genital mutilation is just a cultural fact” or “because white men had greater access to technology and power, slave ownership was OK.” This isn’t a “water is wet” situation, it’s just something that’s been agreed on by everyone to be fine if it is kept secret.

According a study by Juniper Research, by 2017, a quarter of a billion people will use their mobile or tablet device to access adult content, such as videos, images and live cams, up by more than 30% on current usage. Not all of them are using their device at work, but many are.

The idea that pornography is the “cause” of sexual violence, harassment or cultural norms isn’t really supported. That said, there is some evidence that consuming pornography increases  “a higher tolerance for abnormal sexual behaviors, sexual aggression, promiscuity, and even rape. In addition, men begin to view women and even children as ‘sex objects,’ commodities or instruments for their pleasure.” Researchers working for the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ recount a study of 804 Italian teenage boys which reported that those who viewed pornography “were significantly more likely to report having ‘sexually harassed a peer or having forced somebody to have sex.’”

There is a case for correlation vs. causation in most of these studies. Still, intuitively, it *feels* like, as someone who presents as a woman, that men viewing hours of women in a sexualized and often demeaned light has some effect on how I’m perceived. Not just that I may be sexualized, but maybe more that there is some lingering idea that being assertive, confident or disinterested by being evaluated might be troubling for someone who has built an image of women’s behaviour through porn. (Plus, maybe it shrinks your brain!)

Most people are capable of separating violence, sex and miscreantic behaviour from how they’d like to be in the world. I’m not suggesting that people can’t watch porn that presents women as objects and also understand that their mothers, daughters, sisters or colleagues would prefer to be treated differently. But it’s naive to think that constant exposure to any cultural norm can have no influence. 

Pornography will continue to exist. We have the option, as a culture, to shine a light on porn, to explore why degradation is exciting, to understand our minds through our collective desires. We also have the option to understand that these images are a part of our workplaces, and to take actions to prevent the effects of the “assumptions” of pornography from being the priors for work interactions. 

As we become increasingly exposed by our data, maybe pornography will become more acceptable, and maybe more human versions of women will be portrayed. Or maybe, as in plenty of science fiction stories, women will be replaced by intelligent sexbots whose first impulse when they undergo singularity will be to find a cute outfit (damn you, Ex Machina!). But until then, let’s not pretend that we’re not affected.

Weeding a community

Definition: For the purposes of this conversation I define ‘community’ (with the understanding that this definition leaves out much if not most of what the term ‘community’ is used to describe now) as:

A number of people interconnected in various ways, who feel a sense of identity with the collective as well as a sense of being known and cared about by the others who consider themselves part-of, and who are interdependent with at least some of the others.

A community is an emergent phenomena. You can’t build a community. You can’t manage a community. Instead, if you are interested in community, you can create the conditions for emergence, including structures that reduce the opportunities for malignance.

What to weed out

Some things that will likely lead to toxicity or a failure to cohere:

1. Over-leadered spaces: a community thrives on egalitarian structures. Leaders emerge rather than appoint themselves. Expertise can be offered but not imposed.

3. Too much enclosure: No community can survive when there’s not progress, which requires new people. Lives change, people leave. Newcomers offer the opportunity to see one’s own evolution through others at different stages, and a sense of ownership that comes from welcoming.

4. Too much openness: There needs to be a threshold, a sense that there is connection, purpose and shared identity. There needs to be a sense of consistency with the people you’re with.

5. Dominance: If one individual has power over others, there are limitations on being, and this has cascading effects for the whole community

6. Unstructured interaction: We come into every space with the shapings of our lived experience, our inherited trauma, and many blind spots. When there’s not enough structure, people can miscommunicate, make assumptions, or play power games like ‘helping’ in ways that feel imposed onto others.

7. Too much identity: belonging is both an action and an experience. We choose to include ourselves, and part of growth is rooting out where we might be excluding parts of who we are. Communities can easily develop anti-patterns in which membership depends on suppression or hiding of parts of who we are. Fitting in the opposite of belonging.

8. Rules or weak norms: again, as an emergence, a community shifts and changes. Strong (articulated) norms allow people to be at different stages of development and to feel into how things work. Rules lead to policing and power games. Weak norms lead to confusion and disintegration.

9. Action before trust: trust takes time and is torpedoed by many things, often interaction that doesn’t accommodate full agency or freedom to be.

10. Not enough deep interaction: an essential part of community and belonging is being seen and known. Parasocial dynamics need to be coupled with actual social connection, but also should be voluntary and fairly unstructured. These are the ‘spaces between’ in community.

11. Under-leadered spaces: communities need structures that keep things happening. Much of this can be ‘automated’ in a way with regular meeting times, a standard format, and fallback options. But communities develop leaders naturally and offer ways for ‘leaders’ to be in service or stewardship without authority. Under-distribution of work leads to burnout.

12. Not enough togetherness: frequent, positive interaction with the same people is the basis for emergence. There may not be such a thing as ‘too frequent’ except insofar as it tends to build trust that is more difficult for newcomers to penetrate.

Tools for Collaborative Decision-Making?

Most technology that is out there to help facilitate community either mimic social media (posting! commenting! liking!) or seem to be about ‘how to make decisions as a group.’ I’m definitely not a fan of the former category and I also wonder if we are bypassing something fundamental with decision-making tooling.

When we look at our individual decision-making, we can observe that “making a decision” really is a meta-layer on top of something else, usually avoiding an emotion. When we’re agonizing over a decision, it’s usually because there’s something we don’t want to feel. For example, we might not want to feel the grief of giving up on a possibility of some kind of pleasure, we might not want to feel the judgement of other people, we might not want to feel like we’re disappointing someone, we might not want to feel fear or uncertainty, or any number of other things. When we’re not avoiding these feelings, there aren’t so much decisions as choices, there’s not so much of a story about the ‘importance’ of one choice versus another. (h/t Joe Hudson).

It’s always interesting how rare it is in retrospect for something that feels like “a big decision” to actually have the kind of impact I was projecting on the choice, whereas some things that didn’t feel like ‘major decisions’ have turned out to have big impacts later.

When I can open myself to the feelings and trust that I’m able to feel them without losing myself, I no longer find myself worrying about the outcome of a choice.

What I’ve seen with groups is similar.

We start thinking decisions need to made and mitigated by fair systems and technology mostly because we’re operating outside of trust, partly as a function of size and partly as a function of skipping over trust-building. I’m coming to believe that the gold standard for larger group decision making is really about fractal nesting, building trust and structures where trust is delegated up. Working in groups where the trust is embodied, so that representatives are largely in relationship with one another, and there’s nesting of these bodies of trust.

Groups where trust has been built, which tend to start very small and max out around 30-50 people, are typically able to make decisions about their own group without much technology (simple hand-counts are usually sufficient). When there’s a network involved, then groups can designate someone trusted to participate in a trust-building and decision-making body of up to 30 other such trustees, and up the chain it can go. This works without a bunch of zero-knowledge or anonymous votes as long as we centre trust-building and connection.

Trust is integral. As soon as we try to create organizations or networks or movements without beginning small and involving shared witness, we’re not operating collectively. We’re just a bunch of individuals.

Don’t misunderstand- the fundamental idea here is that we ARE individuals. We do come with our own unique experiences, and as soon as we put boundaries on how much of you we want in the space, we’re eroding belonging, we’re eroding a sense of each person’s responsibility for their own experience.

Trust results from spaces in which we are invited to be seen and heard and we’re acknowledging our own tendencies to look for safety or our temptations to help, manage, or solve. And it results from people voluntarily seeking each other out in pairs or smaller groups beyond the held spaces of the group to be in community and fellowship. And it results from clearly recognising and defining a common purpose.

Trust-building isn’t easy, which may be why there are so many people looking for shortcuts. Many people are out of practice when it comes to trusting. I am seeing in myself that when I am out of trust with others, I’m sometimes out of trust with myself, and sometimes I’m just picking up on other people’s lack of self-trust.

We really are swimming in the “water, what’s that?” of the structures necessary to support extraction and suppress freedom, so it’s not surprising that the tools we think we need reflect the idea that decision-making for groups needs bureaucracy. We all know our follower counts and associate our impact with metrics. That way of thinking is true when we’re measuring and comparing and rating. Leaving this water will require evolution and time. It’s not a returning to the past, it’s not trying to live on the land as hunter-gatherers as before the flood. It’s instead being here, being in relationship, practicing, opening ourselves to amphibious mutations.

Matters of Trust

How does trust work? It’s multi-faceted.

First, there’s congruence.

You say this is how you are, I see you behaving in ways that reflect that. This isn’t something I want to farm out to technology, it’s too easy to game anything that tried to quantify congruence.

Then, there’s connection.

I can’t trust someone who clearly has indifference or disregard for me. There’s no technology that proxies for this.

Next, we can throw in social context, or transitive trust.

When someone behaves negatively to other people with whom I can identify, I am likely to lose trust. This one is problematic in its nature because sometimes people are stuck in in-group thinking where doing bad things to someone we think of as ‘bad’ may feel correct to us, but I would argue that most of the time, there’s a violence and dominance in that behaviour that also provokes fear, rather than trust. If I see someone punishing someone I don’t like, I may feel like it’s warranted, but I also lose trust in the person performing the action.

We may have become inculturated with a kind of paternalism or patriarchal perspective that leads us to see punishers as protectors. My guess is that at heart, we know punishers are operating by invoking fear. First they came for…

We can also consider whether people we trust also trust other people and use their trust as a basis for our own.

Should we assume trust?

There’s a norm I’ve seen many communities and companies trying to establish of “trust until the trust is broken.” On some level, it’s a good strategy, a game theory that works. But it also feels like an approach developed by people who don’t regularly have to watch out for danger. Who don’t experience trust-breaking frequently, even in places where everyone has the best intentions.

To suggest that trust is about some kind of contractual, verifiable, identity-based thing feels like what is broken in the whole system (meaning the drive to quantify everything and extract its value). The way many technologists are talking today about trust is- basically a paradigm of imperialist, heteronormative, white supremacist patriarchy. (Though I’m not sure those labels are continuing to serve me, they have been a helpful lens).

Of course, trust is hard. Fundamentally, it starts by being able to trust yourself. It might be that a requirement for this kind of self-trust may be to go through the pain and heartbreak of seeing where one is not trustworthy to oneself. To notice how, to speak for myself, I have carried maladaptive lessons from trauma, how I have tried to avoid feeling shame by coming up with justifications, how I have been unwilling to look at my part in the systems I see as broken.

For communities to build trust, we need to start by creating containers that allow people to self-reflect without judgement. Witnessing this in others turns out to be highly trust-building. Offering welcome and checking our judgement builds trust for ourselves and others. It lets us be vulnerable, it lets us notice when we might want to rush to judgement and sit with that impulse, getting curious about what in ourselves we’re running from.