Exhibitionism and histrionism OR modelling and acting

Exhibitionism
Scene one
I was having dinner with a friend, a film maker who also takes photographs from time to time. I told him about me being a nude model, he said he had not done nudes in a long time. We discussed a possible shoot and then he asked me why I modelled nude. 'In my experience all nude models are exhibitionists at heart'. I disagreed, somehow I did not like the label. We left it at that. He was not being judgmental, in fact I will probably work with him at some point. But the labelling set me thinking.

Scene two
In the car with a photographer, leaving the studio after a shoot and getting a lift back. We discuss exhibitionism and he says, at some point,  that models are exhibitionists. 'And that's fine, that's healthy'. I was still unconvinced. Why did the word make me feel so uncomfortable? Later I picked up a copy of the book by Brett Kahr on exhibitionism, part of the series Ideas in Psychoanalysis. 

So here are my thoughts, having had a chance to mull things over. Nothing profound, but depth is not exactly what you would expect from a blog.
From a psychiatric point of view exhibitionism  is the compulsion to display one's genitals in public, usually to an unsuspecting stranger  (more commonly known as flashing). Kahr discusses this behaviour in men. Women can flash too, usually  they flash  breasts, but the flashing is not always sexually motivated.  For exhibitionism to be a psychiatric disorder  there has to be an element of reoccurring sexual fantasies that culminate in  the act of flashing and there should be an element of distress in the general behaviour of the flasher.

Clearly this does not apply to me as a nude model. Speaking for myself, I feel no distress when removing my clothes and am not motivated by a sexual urge.
But this is only one type of exhibitionism and a very specific sexual deviance. More broadly, an exhibitionist behaviour is anything that is aimed at making oneself  the centre of the attention. Here I have to  interpolate a cultural observation: in some societies exhibitionist behaviour is to some extent part of the culture i.e. I am Italian and flamboyance, akin to exhibitionism, is generally regarded as highly desirable in my home country. Italy is after all the birth place  of 'divismo'. The English, on the other hand, especially if  middle class, are drilled from early childhood that 'attracting attention to oneself' is a deadly sin.

Being a show off is a big no no and quite 'vulgar' (or 'foreign', which often means the same thing in the code of the English middle classes). 'Don't boast' 'Dont be clever' 'Dont be pushy' are key phrases routinely heard in English nursery schools, playgrounds and wherever children can be found. One of the books I have most enjoyed reading is the one by Oxford academic  Kate Fox on Englishness (Watching the English. The Hidden rules of English behaviour, 2004). It has helped me to make sense of all these peculiarities, especially the art of understatement i.e someone tells you they 'do a little sport', it turns out they have won an Olympic medal.   You can well understand that when modesty (or false modesty?) is regarded as a national virtue, the idea of exhibiting oneself is most abhorrent.

Confidence and feeling good about myself are what have made me embrace nude modelling and with it the desire to use my body for artistic expression. All performers are happy to be on show, to be seen, and modelling is a form of performance.  I love the camera, I love my body, I feel good about it. If that makes me an exhibitionist, so what? The discomfort I felt when the word 'exhibitionist' was uttered may well have come from having acculturated myself and acquired a veneer of Englishness, after a couple of decades living in  Blighty - oh no, I thought, how gross, do I really want to put myself on display?

 Histrionism

The OED gives a few definitions for histrionism:

• excessively theatrical or dramatic in character or style e.g. a histrionic outburst.
•  concerning actors or acting e.g  histrionic talents.
•  In psychiatry,  it denotes a personality disorder marked by shallow volatile emotions and attention-seeking behaviour.

Histrionism is from the Latin histrio, -onis, actor. In English the word has acquired a negative meaning with reference to acting, when this is perceived to be melodramatic and exaggerated, and by extension an histrionic behaviour can sometimes mean hypocritical. In Romance languages, such as French, Italian and Spanish the word does not necessarily have such a negative shade of meaning, but refers more generally to  acting, as it did in English until the 19th century.  When Stanislavsky in the 20th century developed The Method this was to counter the highly melodramatic 19th century stylised acting style.

In silent movies acting tended to be histrionic. Without sound, gestures and bodily expression had to be emphasised  often with exaggerated facial expressions. I find that in certain styles of modelling an histrionic element is called for, for effect.

As to the psychiatric meaning of histrionic, this is beyond the purview of this post. All I can do here is repeat a caveat I give to those students of mine who feel the urge to write their undergraduate dissertations on eating disorders and the dance profession - a very popular topic.  I have noticed  a certain disturbing trend.  Often people attribute personality disorders to others or to themselves  simply on the basis of their having googled Wikipedia, without fully grasping the complexity of a psychiatric diagnosis. It has almost become a social past time of sort. "Oh so and so must have Histrionic Personality Disorder and so and so exhibits symptoms of  a Borderline Personality Disorder".

Personality disorders are  complex, particularly because the very notion of personality is subject to interpretation and is complicated by the way a psychiatric understanding of 'personality' intersects with 'personality' in a psychological and legal sense.  Only a qualified member of the psychiatric profession can diagnose a personality disorder.  As I always remind my students, in the UK it takes five years at  university to qualify as a MD and a further six years from start to finish to become a consultant psychiatrist.  Something to bear in mind next time you feel tempted to offer  a psychiatric diagnosis, if only in jest.
(All photos modelled by Alex B. and taken by John Erik Setsaas)