Sex, Lies and Arts&Crafts

On February 1st I issued this warning on the Facebook LSPA group:
PLEASE READ THIS:
For my solo performance I am exploring the importance of lies and secrets and as such I’m creating a list of every secret I have ever been told whilst at Uni. Obviously, some of these will be you guys’ secrets, so if you think I know something that for whatever reason you don’t want the world to know, drop us a message or a facebook, and I’ll bear that in mind  I’m not naming and shaming, I’m making art! 

Now, this was not a strictly truthful warning. I was not, am not, creating a list of secrets and lies I have been told at university. It would take far too long, and most of the information although interesting would be largely irrelevant. What I wanted was to find out what people didn’t want me to share. The secrets people thought I knew. The secrets people didn’t want to share. The stories behind secrets.

Since I issued this warning I have received two messages asking not to share anything ‘I think I might know’ and a lot of people afterwards questioning what exactly I was doing. There has also been gossip heard speculating over my idea. I don’t think I’m making many friends!
No one wants me to share information that belongs to them. Why? Because 98% (estimate) of the secrets that surround our group are secrets about sex.
Who had sex with who. When. Why. Were they drunk?
And for some reason, sex is still a great taboo.

Now, sex with someone within a relationship is boring news, no one talks of that. Sex when you’re single and they’re in a relationship, now that is gossip. As is sex between two friends. Or sex between two strangers. Or sex between two people thanks to a bottle of vodka.

But why is this taboo? Why is such a natural act considering so wrong for people to do, so looked down upon? Why can’t people just have sex and not be judged?

I suspect it is somewhat to do with trust. After all, allowing someone to see you naked needs a lot of trust. And why would you trust that stranger, that well-known philanderer, someone who’s not your boyfriend/girlfriend? Trust is a big thing in today’s society. ‘I know I can trust you’ is thrown about so recklessly I wonder how often people do trust, or is that it. Do we tell secrets to people we can’t be trusted, because we kind of want everyone to know? Especially with taboo subjects, do we tell people who can’t be trusted so that everyone knows we do things that are taboo, that we’re a bit ‘exciting’ and ‘fun’?
I don’t know, I’m not going to pretend to know, I’m just speculating. I guess I’ll discover some answers soon enough.

In terms of telling a secret, solo performance as a module is interesting. I know a lot of people are outing their secrets, baring their souls. Monologue is either boasting or confessional, a wise woman once told me. And that is why we tell secrets- because we’re proud, or because we’re ashamed. Yet if we were that ashamed, would we tell those that can’t be trusted? Secrets get spread because not everyone can be trusted.

I feel a touch guilty for the topic of my performance, as a lot of people have told me I’m the most trustworthy person they know. Perhaps I am. This suggests not.
But then that too is interesting. People trusting me is important to me, to everyone, so why am I willing to break trust? Is it because people won’t see me after this performance? Is it because I’m actually terrible at keeping secrets? Is it some kind of revenge against those who have broken my trust? I don’t know.
I will update when I work it out.

Rehearsal note: Studio is booked over the weekend to do some plotting.

With my performance, I want to make the audience unsure of how true my facts are. I’m considering using real stories, real lies, but changing the names, perhaps to humorous celebrity names, or just using initials.
I think it will be more interesting for an audience to watch if they feel there’s something to decipher, or learn. After all, we are all interested in gossip, in discovering other people’s lies and secrets.

Why We Lie- Dorothy Rowe

A psychological exploration of why we lie, and the effects it can have. Suggests that we lie to protect ourselves, that society tells us to be one way so we lie to agree with the concept of society we are given. We lie so as not to upset someone, so we do not have to deal with them being upset. Essentially, we lie because we are selfish.

Hard Love- Ellen Wittlenger

“It’s a lie, you know, to pretend that nothing is important to you. It’s hiding. Believe me, I know because I hid for a long time. But now I won’t do it anymore. The truth is bioluminescent. I don’t lie, and I don’t waste time on people who do.”

In the story, the girl Marisol claims to never lie, and makes John promise to never lie to her. Of course, the first thing he says to her is a lie about her name, and so one lie becomes many. How difficult is it to not lie about anything? Even if we tell the truth to a question we are asked, what other little lies do we tell during the day?

The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

There must have been moments even that Gatsby doubted….

Nick claims he is honest, yet he tells lie after lie. Jordan is a perpetual liar. Daisy lies first to her husband, and then to Gatsby. Gatsby is shrouded in lies. All these lies, webs of deceit, and it is all okay because everyone lies.

Psychologists have tested over 20,000 subjects, showing them videos of people telling the truth and lying, and found that they performed no better than chance. A subgroup of so-called experts including polygraph operators, police investigators, judges and psychiatrists returned the same results. The truth is that liars don’t, as a rule, shift around uncomfortably, nervously play with their hands or avoid eye-contact. We fail to detect lies because we are basing our judgements on behaviours unrelated to deception.

More reliable signals are found in language. When Lying;
- Liars tend to say less and provide fewer details.
- Liars often try to psychologically distance themselves from their lies by including fewer references to themselves and their feelings.
- Liars tend not to admit memory lapse when it comes to relatively unimportant information. Instead they appear to develop incredible memories for made-up minutiae.
- Liars often pause and are more hesitant in speech.

In a 1994 British study, participants listening to lies and truths scored an impressive 73% accuracy rate in detection.

Dr Paul Ekman, a leading researcher into lie detection, believes that a select few (he found 50 out of 20,000 tested) have a natural ability to detect lies with an accuracy rate of at least 80%. He puts this down to the detection of involuntary facial ‘microexpressions’ that can last milliseconds. He has named these few, ‘Truth Wizards’, and hopes that by studying them we will learn more about lie-detection that can be transferred to fields such as airport security. At present, more conventional ‘behaviour detection’ is used in airport security and customs but it is a controversial practice that is subject to bias.

Source

Ani Difranco’s True Story of What Was suggests that reality and the stories we tell are two different things; ‘Real is real regardless
Of what you try to say;,  and also that we are no more than a ‘collection of recollections‘. This concept that history is only as accurate as the memory of it, perhaps the chosen memory of it is something that has interested me, and no doubt many others, for years. Whether by history we mean that which we learn in school of the wars and great global changes that have occurred over thousands of years, or we mean the memory of what we did last week, where we went and who said what, memory and our own opinion provides bias.
If two friends argue, and tell another friend their story, that third person will no doubt discover several discrepancies amongst the stories. Even if only one person is present at an event, more often than not stories are edited to make the teller seem better, or provide an excuse, a reason, for a specific action. In many ways, every story we tell is somewhat of a lie, the truth known only to oneself and often not even them. Haven’t you ever told a story, adapted slightly to show yourself in a better light, only to discover that after a number of tellings you can’t quite work out what actually happened? I have a friend who told people he’d been ski-diving so many times, he started to believe it himself, and the line between truth and a lie became blurred. This happens a lot more than people are willing to admit, I know myself that my memory of a  relationship I had at the age of 17 is wrong, because I chose to forget things that hurt me, and also, after telling the story of one particularly painful incident towards the end of the relationship many times, I can’t quite remember the other parts, and I’m almost certain the bits I can I remember wrong.
Lies and secrets fuel our lives, people bond over them, and even secrets about people you’ve never met can be intriguing and interesting, hence why I think it’s a suitable subject for a performance.