[GUEST] The Hypothetical Audience
Who judges you when nobody is watching?
Note from Gabe:
This is a Guest Article written by Daniel Clothiaux (remember).
It explains a few concepts introduced in the book “Sadly, Porn”. The book is not well-written, but it deals with a dark type of psychoanalysis with which only a few authors dare engaging.
My friend Daniel decided to review it, in order to distill its essence and package it in a way that is approachable by others.
This is very different from my usual articles, most notably in register, it is much more vulgar than the usual Cognition Cafe article.
Most people feel shame when others judge them negatively. Yet many people feel shame even when nobody is actively judging them.
Others are worried about being judged for their actions, such as talking to strangers or taking a stance outside the mainstream. Yet some of them worry even though they have rarely or never been punished for such actions in the past.
Some people will spend a lot of effort on their physical appearance, from working out to getting plastic surgery, despite living a sexless life while doing nothing in their professional career to benefit from their looks.
Why would any of these be a thing? Why would people feel shame when not being judged?
In the dark psychoanalytic book Sadly, Porn, the author Eduard Teach suggests that we evaluate our actions by imagining a Hypothetical Audience judging us, constantly. It is this Hypothetical Audience that makes us feel shame or judged. When we try to look good, we are trying to look good for this hypothetical audience.
In this essay, I’ll introduce what I think Teach means when he talks about the Hypothetical Audience1 (hereafter, The Audience), give some examples, and finally talk about what use I see for an Audience.
Teach often gives vulgar examples of The Audience. I will be vulgar, here too. I think it is an important element to better convey the vibe of his models. But unlike the book, there won’t be lengthy descriptions of sexual acts in this essay.
What is the Audience?
When Teach argues we judge our actions by imagining a Hypothetical Audience, what does he mean?
It is easy to imagine some coherent thing. A stereotyped view of Freud imagines everyone acting for their mental image of their mother; across Teach’s examples, it is clear he is pointing to something far more fragmented.
Children will build a vibe of how their parents see the world, drawn from what their parents repeatedly tell them. Using this vibe, children may often imagine their parents scolding or praising them. They would then start to judge their actions by what they imagine their parents would tell them. These vibes naturally get corrected by feedback in the form of further praise or criticism from their parents.
Yet there is no guarantee that a child’s mental model of their parents will actually track what their parents think. If they aren’t constantly getting feedback, or at least reflecting on the feedback they get, their imagined parent will start to drift from the real parent.
But even children do not solely imagine their parents giving them feedback. Perhaps they grew up in an at least somewhat religious household, and were told that Jesus was judging them. Tell someone Jesus is judging them enough, and they will learn to have a mental model of Jesus judging them.
Yet these Jesus figures aren’t very high-fidelity. It is not as if children (or adults, even) often imagine Jesus judging them a certain way, then check the Bible to make sure their vibe is accurate, and update their thoughts accordingly. We have a vibe of what Jesus is, from culture, times we read the Bible, what we hear at church, and that vibe becomes Jesus in our heads.
Sometimes the person we are imagining may be a partner, or someone we admire. We have many people we admire and look up to, from friends and acquaintances to celebrities to historical figures, after all. Perhaps for a child, it is Batman.
The Audience then becomes fragments of imaginary characters. Sometimes the reaction from The Audience is true to who it represents, but often it isn’t.
But just as often, Teach seems to point to something even less well defined when referring to The Audience.
Porn and The Audience
One thing Teach constantly argues is that we are completely addicted to what he defines as porn:
Porn in a more general sense is something you consume, in order to replace the work of having a fantasy or having a desire yourself with somebody else’s fantasy about somebody else.
For actual porn, this means rather than fucking someone, or fantasising about yourself fucking someone, you watch other people fuck instead. You’ve completely replaced even the fantasy of fucking with someone else’s fantasy. Outside of porn, consuming fictional stories often involves replacing a fantasy of being a hero yourself with someone else’s fantasy of being a hero.
You begin to see porn as desirable in itself. Lots of people fantasise about being a hero, changing the world or having superpowers. It is also easy to enjoy reading or watching movies about heroes. Yet many people come to enjoy fictional stories of other people being heroes rather than also imagining themselves being a hero. The porn has replaced the fantasy.
Porn is especially pernicious because it is safer than fantasizing. Fantasies and desires come with fears and risks; you might fail to achieve your fantasy.
For someone who consumes porn, what are you to the creators of it? You are a random faceless person in the audience. They do not know you beyond a vague idea of a degenerate online.
If you spend too much time consuming media, on TV, online, and on social media apps, what happens? Teach argues you do not know any other way of relating to the world besides being a faceless person in an audience, or performing as a pornographized subject to a faceless person in the audience.
When you need to do something in the world, you naturally need to be a subject taking action. If porn is all you know, you begin to see yourself in the world in a similar way as the creators of porn.
Your actions become pornified, for some Audience. But this audience isn’t a specific person, it is the faceless audience of modern media; of television and the internet. You come to see yourself as playing a character to an unknown faceless audience.
Teach’s examples of this are often profane. One of them that he talks about is why submissive women want the appearance of being dominated by male power rather than actually being dominated by male power.
The example he gives of this is from Fifty Shades of Grey, where the main character enters a submissive relationship with a dominant billionaire. She has him sign a contract that specifies how she gives up control, and when she maintains it2.
It seems like she wants to be dominated while also staying in control. One possible reason is: being dominated is scary, so people who want to be submissive naturally want to protect themselves while doing it. Teach reads this in a different way:
If it’s male power they want, why are they content with only the appearance of it? Doesn’t the reality of “he’s not actually going to choke me out since I can stop him any time I want to” detract from the eroticism of the “male power?” “It’s just fantasy.” Yes. “The fantasy is the loss of control.” Why are you only interpreting half of it? How is a loss of control a fantasy? “What I want is a guy who wants me so much he’ll do anything to seize me.” Except actually seize you. “It makes me feel desirable to be taken, wanted so much.” But who are you fooling? You know he’s faking it, and he hopes to God you know he’s faking it. The fantasy isn’t the loss of control-- the fantasy is having a loss of control AND full control, simultaneously-- that’s a fantasy because it is impossible to have these things at the same time, they are logically exclusive. The only way for it to be possible is if you are acting for someone-- or something-- who is watching, if it is pornographized: you know you have full control, but to a hypothetical observer, it looks like a loss of control. It looks hot-- so it is hot.
The point of submissiveness isn’t to submit to someone. It's to have the appearance of submission, performed for an audience who doesn't exist.
More generally: this incoherent amalgam of imaginary characters and faceless mass forms “The Audience” by which we judge our actions: when we do good or bad, and nobody sees, it is the judgment of this Audience that we care about.
When do we perform in front of The Audience?
Teach hints that we are almost always performing for this Hypothetical Audience.
This idea was a hard one for me to wrap my mind around. It is very psychoanalytic, there isn’t a great model of why our minds would work this way. I cannot access the inside of other people’s heads and carefully study what their Audience would look like.
Teach doesn’t even give many good grounded examples. Instead, many of his examples are through archetypes and media analysis. I’ll lead with an archetype that isn’t in Teach, but I have personal experience with.
The Shy Nerd
This archetype is the Shy Nerd. The Shy Nerd gets a lot of anxiety when talking with others. Why? Are they worried that they are going to mess up and be judged by them?
This was me when I was younger. At least for me, I wasn’t that worried about actually being judged by people. I was almost never worried about being judged by specific people I needed to interact with. Indeed, I was quite lucky, and almost everyone I interacted with was kind, at least to my face. I never had to learn to fear specific people.
Instead, my fear was a more diffuse worry, of being Seen and Judged in general, but not by the specific person I was interacting with.
Mapping that feeling of being Seen onto an Audience makes sense of this experience to me.
Interestingly, in some circumstances I would be worried about a specific outcome. If I was asking a cute person out, I’d be scared of being turned down. But I had as much trouble talking to strangers with no stake or expectation of any kind of negative interaction. I would struggle with both, and occasionally manage to do both when I pushed myself through my fear. The impact of an imaginary Hypothetical Audience was as great as the impact of someone I liked turning me down!
That is quite strong.
Many Shy Nerds will also speak of one Humiliating Experience, where they were embarrassed in front of a crowd or friends. I never had that, but The Audience helps make sense of why such an experience can be so damaging. If that one experience shifted their Audience to be a judging audience that humiliates them whenever they fail, it no longer is felt as one experience. It becomes an ongoing experience, where they worry the Hypothetical Audience will mock and humiliate them, constantly.
The Looksmaxxer
The next example is another archetype, one I have seen before reading Teach but never had good explanations for.
There is a type of person, both men and women, who puts lots of effort into looking good but doesn’t actually do anything with it: The Looksmaxxer.
The Looksmaxxer puts effort into their hair, their dress, and staying in shape. But they don’t then go try to impress other people they’d be interested in and try to fuck them. Indeed, they seem to have very little sex at all. They don’t even use their appearance to impress people in business or politics.
South Korea has many extreme examples of this, with some of the highest rates of plastic surgery and use of beauty products among both men and women, yet some of the lowest rates of sexual activity or childbearing.
Western Looksmaxxing, where people put a ton of effort into their appearances while also apparently being borderline incel, often seems similar.
Who are they looking beautiful for? Some would say vagaries like “societal expectations” or “their peers”.
Teach would answer “they are playing a Hot Person to the invisible audience in their heads”. This Audience may include fragments of their peers, or what they’d imagine people they admire to say. Or they could be doing porn to the faceless audience of the internet.
Regardless of who exactly it is, looking good to the Audience is the point, not looking good to any specific person they are trying to impress.
Conclusion
Personally, I still have trouble grasping exactly what The Audience is. Many examples Teach gives are media analysis on situations and forms of media I have very little experience with. I cannot look into other people’s minds and check if they are judging themselves by an Audience.
That said, the idea of “An Audience” does give a frame I can consider applying when I don’t understand people’s (or even my own) actions.
I find The Audience most useful when I see behaviour disconnected from outcomes, goals, and judgements.
Why was I afraid to talk to people, despite never actually being shamed? Whose judgement was I afraid of?
The Audience!
The Audience also has another benefit.
Getting feedback on how we are doing is hard.
If we set a goal, we need to work to track our progress over time, and we only get a final success/failure judgement at the end. The work of tracking progress is quite difficult.
If we want to get feedback from people more generally, we need to ask them how we are doing, and then go over their feedback until we integrate it.
Just as we have a vibe of how we are doing at a task before we finish, The Audience serves as a gauge for “how are we doing in terms of these people we care about”.
For his part, Teach is very cynical, and quite negative on the idea. I see him as pointing out when The Audience can become pathological and damaging to us.
That said, this is one of the more psychoanalytic, hard-to-ground models of all of the psychoanalytic, hard-to-ground models in Sadly, Porn.
We’ll be back to ever-so-slightly firmer ground next time :)
If you want another perspective on Teach’s take, Gabe attempts to sketch this idea in his post on human fine-tuning.
There is a cluster of existing ideas in psychology and psychoanalysis that is similar, from Lacan’s other to a slightly different imaginary audience.
Finally, physicist-turned-neuroscientist Steve Byrnes got to a very similar place in the second of a two-part series on social drives from a neurological perspective. I’m not a neuroscientist and cannot evaluate how true his post is, but I found it quite interesting nonetheless.
I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey, and Teach isn’t a reliable narrator. The book may have something slightly different happen, but I think the point around submission is real enough.