The Field

I am at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in January 2005. At one of the 300 exhibitors booths on the floor of the Sands Expo Center is Tiffany Holiday, a woman who performs in pornographic movies. She is kissing and touching another female performer, and a crowd of men gathers around. There are rules for how much sexual activity can take place on the convention floor, and the two women are pushing the boundary. The crowd engages them to go further.

The other woman leaves, and Tiffany begins to simulate masturbation, all the while talking dirty to the men gathered around her. The crowd swells to about 50 men. I'm stuck in the middle holding a microphone for a documentary film crew. Emboldened by the size of the crowd, the men's chants for more explicit sex grow louder and more boisterous. Holiday responds in kind, encouraging the men to tell her what they like. The exchange continues, intensifying to the point where the men are moving as a unit-like a mob.

Men's bodies are pressed against each other as each one vies for the best view of the woman's breasts, vagina, and anus. Many of the men are using cameras, camcorders, or cell phones to record the scene. It's difficult not to notice- not to feel- that the men pressed against me have erections. It's difficult not to conclude that if there weren't security guards on the floor, these men would likely gang-rape Tiffany Holiday.
(Robert Jensen, Getting Off Pornography and the End of Masculinity.)

Robert Jensen experienced this scene and referred to the excited crowd as mob. Yet, reading about this experience it felt more like a trance. It was as if all the male spectators were caught in a massive dark energy field, and, as the author alluded to, things could have gotten out of control very fast. History is full of scary field stories, like the lynching of presumed criminals or even genocides. Adolf Hitler deliberately created these dark power fields during rallies. The crowd had to gather late at night in massive stadiums, at a time when the will power of the spectator was naturally weakened from the fatigue of standing for hours. After a passionate nationalistic speech he cried "Do you want the total war?" and all they could cry in unison was "yes!"

All these examples are of course dark ones, even though the idea of an energy field of like-minded people doesn't have to. When you go to a rock concert you are caught in an energy field. The experienced artists know that and deliberately manipulate this field. So you could say that whenever like-minded people gather they create a field. You can have economic ones like housing or equity market bubbles, a fashion fad, a shared corporate culture or a community. You could even think of positive fields like a spiritual community, a church or a school.

The field is something you can observe when you are very sensitive and silent.  You can observe the trigger when it touches you and you can feel that your behavior changes as you join a different set of people or go to different kind of place.  When you join a field totally, you can observe that your behavior changes accordingly.  Sometimes you get completely transformed by this field to the degree that you cannot recognize yourself any more.

Say you go to the shopping mall. You feel that impulse to buy, so you end up buying more than you ever need.  When you go home and when you don't look at your shopping bags for a couple of days and open them later, you are in amazed and wonder how you could have purchased so much stuff. As you join the mall you get sucked in by the mood of the like-minded shoppers and the clever store and mall arrangements of the advertisers. Being part of the field happens to all of us. We think we are doing things  out of our own free will but actually are under some kind of spell.  When you are carried away, it is like you are being hypnotized.  No one can force you against your will to join a field but you can be lulled into something in the same  way the guys at the LA Adult Entertainment Expo were.

By Christian and Su Zhen