Mugging for the Audience
May. 11th, 2026 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeThere’s a thing we run into that we call “mugging for the audience.” It’s when you feel compelled to perform whatever you are, whatever you’re doing, as some piece of noble political theater intended to prevent your (unseen, at times entirely hypothetical) audience from coming after you. Anything that fails that performance shows secret evil within you and justifies whatever “they” do to you (whoever “they” are).
Obviously our actions ARE sometimes our core beliefs in action. There’s a reason we warn about dates who are nasty to dogs, children, and waitstaff. The problem comes when EVERYTHING becomes that political performance; there is no longer any personal, only political, and when those politics become totally detached from anything real in the world.
Take the plural slapfight that presumes that a mixed-race roster proves racism of the system involved; a properly antiracist roster, of course, is entirely racially homogenous and matches the vessel. (Ethnicity, of course, may vary. There is nothing problematic whatsoever about having Irish and English headmates in an American vessel, or Korean and Japanese, as long as they’re all racialized the same by American standards.) It doesn’t matter if your roster demographics formed when you were a schoolchild raised in the darkest pits of Hell fifty years ago; your demographics MUST reflect the noblest nowadays politics as an adult! You gotta mug for that audience! (The idea that racism or any other mistaken idea had an influence on your inner workings, only for you to eventually learn and work with it and find a new balance, doesn’t come up. It’s all about appearances, you see, as if we were judging character design choices for fiction and not real-life beings who have to live in the real world.)
Another easy, obvious example is kink or sex. Many of us find things exciting that we’d never want to happen in real life and go through completely avoidable agony over whether enjoying a private fantasy, a piece of fiction, or a consenting, non-lethal version between adults, proves we’re a secret monster inside. Let me tell you guys, as someone who’s lived through all sorts of sexual cruelty, it makes me mad that apparently the “safe for survivors” world of eroticism that people act like I MUST want (without consulting me, of course) requires throwing me out of the market. I love consent; I do not like a landscape that demands constant, unrelenting PERFORMANCE of consent in fiction, even as Epstein’s buddies take our tax money by the billions to bomb school children, kidnap our neighbors, and purchase luxuries for themselves and their cronies. WolfKnot69’s fanfiction is not on the same scale—and it’s logarithmic, like the Richter. Again, it’s all about the appearances, the performance, rather than the reality. Gotta mug to that audience and reassure them that you’re not a rapist just because you want to write a nasty werewolf turning fantasy!
When you constantly mug for the audience, you’re likely to feel fake, hollow, and superficial, because the performance is just that. “They” (whoever they really are) become the imaginary horde reading your blog, just waiting for you to slip up and go “mask off.” Sometimes those people exist (been there, done that)... but sometimes, we CREATE those creepers in our minds to keep ourselves in line. We internalize the creepers’ values so thoroughly that WE DO THEIR WORK FOR THEM. At that point, the creepers themselves almost become superfluous! We can harangue and terrify ourselves 24/7, even offline alone on a private island! Once you become your own audience to constantly mug for, you’ve trapped yourself in a house of mirrors. And once you’re IN that house, it can be so hard to leave, because you’ve convinced yourself that the performance is necessary to your decency as a person! And if that makes you feel fake, then all you know to do is PERFORM EVEN HARDER, and surely that proves there’s a secret monster in you all the while, right? If your “goodness” performance feels fake, it means you must be bad, right?
The disapproving horde is way scarier if you think they might be right. If you just see them as sometimes-violent annoyances, you treat them the way you treat the local bears, COVID, and cops. They become just another damn thing to deal with, not something to hang your identity on. I used to be PETRIFIED that someone would call me a child-molester, I’d lose everything, and then my life would be over. Then it finally happened and hey, the reality was a sad shadow of the nightmare I’d tormented myself with for twelve years! Golly gosh!
I promise, you can build a life where you can leave the house of mirrors, just be a being instead of a dancing puppet for a constant invisible, vicious audience that may not even exist. I promise, nobody I met who left that house magically transformed into a vicious monster. That’s the self-loathing (or loathing from others, same thing) intended to keep you in line. I truly believe that we don’t require a panopticon to be decent people... and that’s what the house of mirrors, the constant invisible audience, is: a panopticon.
And as you might recall, the original panopticon was a jail. It was made to make prisoners police themselves.
Obviously our actions ARE sometimes our core beliefs in action. There’s a reason we warn about dates who are nasty to dogs, children, and waitstaff. The problem comes when EVERYTHING becomes that political performance; there is no longer any personal, only political, and when those politics become totally detached from anything real in the world.
Take the plural slapfight that presumes that a mixed-race roster proves racism of the system involved; a properly antiracist roster, of course, is entirely racially homogenous and matches the vessel. (Ethnicity, of course, may vary. There is nothing problematic whatsoever about having Irish and English headmates in an American vessel, or Korean and Japanese, as long as they’re all racialized the same by American standards.) It doesn’t matter if your roster demographics formed when you were a schoolchild raised in the darkest pits of Hell fifty years ago; your demographics MUST reflect the noblest nowadays politics as an adult! You gotta mug for that audience! (The idea that racism or any other mistaken idea had an influence on your inner workings, only for you to eventually learn and work with it and find a new balance, doesn’t come up. It’s all about appearances, you see, as if we were judging character design choices for fiction and not real-life beings who have to live in the real world.)
Another easy, obvious example is kink or sex. Many of us find things exciting that we’d never want to happen in real life and go through completely avoidable agony over whether enjoying a private fantasy, a piece of fiction, or a consenting, non-lethal version between adults, proves we’re a secret monster inside. Let me tell you guys, as someone who’s lived through all sorts of sexual cruelty, it makes me mad that apparently the “safe for survivors” world of eroticism that people act like I MUST want (without consulting me, of course) requires throwing me out of the market. I love consent; I do not like a landscape that demands constant, unrelenting PERFORMANCE of consent in fiction, even as Epstein’s buddies take our tax money by the billions to bomb school children, kidnap our neighbors, and purchase luxuries for themselves and their cronies. WolfKnot69’s fanfiction is not on the same scale—and it’s logarithmic, like the Richter. Again, it’s all about the appearances, the performance, rather than the reality. Gotta mug to that audience and reassure them that you’re not a rapist just because you want to write a nasty werewolf turning fantasy!
When you constantly mug for the audience, you’re likely to feel fake, hollow, and superficial, because the performance is just that. “They” (whoever they really are) become the imaginary horde reading your blog, just waiting for you to slip up and go “mask off.” Sometimes those people exist (been there, done that)... but sometimes, we CREATE those creepers in our minds to keep ourselves in line. We internalize the creepers’ values so thoroughly that WE DO THEIR WORK FOR THEM. At that point, the creepers themselves almost become superfluous! We can harangue and terrify ourselves 24/7, even offline alone on a private island! Once you become your own audience to constantly mug for, you’ve trapped yourself in a house of mirrors. And once you’re IN that house, it can be so hard to leave, because you’ve convinced yourself that the performance is necessary to your decency as a person! And if that makes you feel fake, then all you know to do is PERFORM EVEN HARDER, and surely that proves there’s a secret monster in you all the while, right? If your “goodness” performance feels fake, it means you must be bad, right?
The disapproving horde is way scarier if you think they might be right. If you just see them as sometimes-violent annoyances, you treat them the way you treat the local bears, COVID, and cops. They become just another damn thing to deal with, not something to hang your identity on. I used to be PETRIFIED that someone would call me a child-molester, I’d lose everything, and then my life would be over. Then it finally happened and hey, the reality was a sad shadow of the nightmare I’d tormented myself with for twelve years! Golly gosh!
I promise, you can build a life where you can leave the house of mirrors, just be a being instead of a dancing puppet for a constant invisible, vicious audience that may not even exist. I promise, nobody I met who left that house magically transformed into a vicious monster. That’s the self-loathing (or loathing from others, same thing) intended to keep you in line. I truly believe that we don’t require a panopticon to be decent people... and that’s what the house of mirrors, the constant invisible audience, is: a panopticon.
And as you might recall, the original panopticon was a jail. It was made to make prisoners police themselves.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-11 11:37 pm (UTC)Yeah, this is one of those things where you can't just treat it as an absolute rule. A lot of nuance is being flattened out.
Yes, this! People have every right to write, read, and enjoy fiction where consent is constantly performed and displayed, but that's a matter of individual tastes, not a moral issue.
Yep. And the real ones are often easier to deal with. You can block them, you can refuse to play along, and they can maybe, if they have a lot of social power, make it so you have to leave the environment. But if you internalize them, you are psychologically torturing yourself 24/7, granting them tremendous power over your ervery action.
Yeah, for a while after my bad experience in therapy, I was terrified around people making pro-therapy statements, and part of the issue was that I had internalized a specific kind of unthinking orthodoxy around therapy. When I got my head straight around a more nuanced "therapy is something that sometimes benefits some people, it doesn't always help and can sometimes make things worse, and I have no moral obligation to go back to therapy ever", I got much better at distinguishing whether someone was being dogmatically pro-therapy or not and how little power the people acting like that actually had over me. (I still don't like people going off about how everyone should get therapy, or "Men will do anything rather than get therapy", but it doesn't terrify me anymore.)
no subject
Date: 2026-05-12 01:17 am (UTC)I feel like a lot of problems could be avoided if people recognized that having "proper" kinks doesn't make them a more ethical person committed to goodness in the world.
"Yep. And the real ones are often easier to deal with. You can block them, you can refuse to play along, and they can maybe, if they have a lot of social power, make it so you have to leave the environment. But if you internalize them, you are psychologically torturing yourself 24/7, granting them tremendous power over your every action."
EXACTLY. Like, when I was most consumed by my "they will think I'm a pedophile and I'LL BE DOOMED," it was like I couldn't imagine life continuing after that; I'd just be erased from the earth like an act of God. When it finally DID happen to me... I just dealt with it. I was mad, and then I got over it and took comfort in knowing I could handle it. A decade plus of agonizing, and in the end, it was just a, "Yeah, I'm taking my bag and leaving now. I don't allow others to treat me this way. Bye."
"When I got my head straight around a more nuanced 'therapy is something that sometimes benefits some people, it doesn't always help and can sometimes make things worse, and I have no moral obligation to go back to therapy ever', I got much better at distinguishing whether someone was being dogmatically pro-therapy or not and how little power the people acting like that actually had over me."
It's true! You never have to go back! Therapy has done TERRIBLE THINGS to people, throughout its entire history and present. (I admit, I sometimes went dogmatically pro-therapy in the past, but... I was wrong. I had reasons for WHY I felt that way, mostly involving seeing friends in intense, awful suffering that I myself could do nothing about... but I was still wrong!) You never have to go back, and I don't begrudge anyone wanting to avoid this whole fucking system I'm pretty deeply embedded in at this point.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-12 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-12 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-13 02:02 am (UTC)