“You Enjoy Talking about It More than Doing It”: Fake Narratives in Disdainful Relationships

Abstract

Research has found that the coercive dominant discourse (CDD) can have a negative impact on girls’ sexual pleasure. In this vein, a previous study found that girls who described relationships under the CDD as exciting also recognized a lack of sexual pleasure in these. One of the elements underlying this apparent contradiction was an identified mismatch between what the participants had experienced in such relationships, characterized for being disdainful, and what they had told their friends. Nonetheless, more research is needed in order to better understand how girls’ narratives about their sexual-affective relationships differ from the ways in which they experienced them. The current study aims at identifying and analysing the presence of fake narratives in the interactions girls have with their peers regarding sexual-affective relationships. To this end, 10 communicative interviews were conducted with girls between 18 and 21 years of age. Results show that while participants recognize feeling a lack of pleasure in those disdainful relationships, they portrayed these as exciting when telling their peers about them, suppressing the negative feelings around them. These findings corroborate the presence of fake narratives in relation to disdainful relationships and bring new insights into the aspects these fabricated stories are built around.

Defying Predatory Capital: Embracing Beauty, Resisting Ugliness, and Striving for Freedom

“…Ugliness, linked to disdain, humiliation and lack of consent, is present in these casual relationships, as reported in the article. Similarly, in the examined studies, participants reported a relationship between the likelihood of hooking up and owning a car, with participant women confirming their interest in men with such possession (Pedersen et al, 2017;Torras-Gómez et al, 2022). This perception has been cultivated and perpetuated by predatory capital, compelling certain men to view the acquisition of a car as an economic investment aimed at bolstering their desirability.…”

Evidence-Based Reconstruction of Memories of a Disdainful Hookup: Identifying Risk Factors and Preventing Further Victimization

“…Eric Kandel [32] stated that simply reading a book can change the anatomy of the brain if we can recall something about the reading afterwards, that is, if we have created a memory. Our results show that the specific scientific evidence read and discussed, which included, among others, the dominant coercive discourse [31], peer group pressure to have disdainful hookups [17], and the characteristics and consequences of disdainful hookups [1], led to Simonetta's recollection of new semantic and emotional details of the episode that were related to what had been read and discussed.…”

“…Such discourse presents men who have aggressive attitudes and behaviors as most sexually attractive [1]. Studies have shown that such men are preferred for hookups more than for stable relationships [17]. The coercive dominant discourse is boosted and reproduced in interactions in the peer group [17], with some female friends pushing others to engage in such kinds of hookups, presenting them as "cool", while sexual-affective relationships that are egalitarian are presented as boring.…”

“…Such pressure can also translate into a storytelling of the violent sexual experience that does not correspond with what actually occurred but that adapts to what the audience, the peer group, pushes the young woman to explain and what they want to hear, which is that the sexual experience was sexually satisfying and exciting, when research says the opposite [17]. This phenomenon of reconstruction and falsification can be explained by the influence of social interactions (also influenced by the coercive dominant discourse) in shaping autobiographical memories [18][19][20].…”

“…Given the prospective functions of autobiographical memories [21,22], how episodes of sexual violence in hookups are stored in the young woman's memory is central. A memory that is imprisoned by the coercive dominant discourse would keep the violent episode as attractive or cool [17], and such memory might well impel the young woman to project future sexual-affective relationships along similar lines and even to shape her future sexual-affective relationships similarly. If this occurs, the young woman is prone to revictimization.…”