When I Burned a Book

 

I was a teenager, and for my birthday a friend gave me a big paper bag with random vintage SF paperbacks, a major treasure. One of the books was The Reassembled Man by Herbert D. Kastle, published in 1960. When I opened it up, I discovered that it was not so much science fiction as soft core porn. As you might guess from the cover, it was a fantasy of having almost unlimited sexual power. An average downtrodden wimp meets some aliens, and makes a deal to have his body and brain reconstructed so that he's big and manly, has a huge and quick-recovering cock, and can think 12 steps ahead of any man in business and poker. Beyond that, he acquires a "near hypnotic" ability to seduce any woman - and goes on to use it like crazy. In exchange, he agrees to sell out the human race (that's a bit witty I guess!).

The sex in this book, though not explicit, went shockingly right to the core of my recently-awakened mind control fetish, and I think I masturbated to it a few times. 

Then, when no one was home, I carefully set it on fire in the living room fireplace, and prodded it with a poker until I was sure it was fully burned up.

Why did I burn it? I can't remember precisely: was it just owning a pornographic novel and knowing I shouldn't, in a year before I learned to get porn on the internet? Was it that it touched my hidden fetish? Was it that the fetish it depicted, of mentally dominating women and making them have sex with you, was deeply wrong? Whichever it was, just owning the book caused an urgently shameful feeling, and I felt relieved when it was gone.

Looking back on it now, I don't think I needed to do that. Yes that book is a grotesque Mad-Men-era fantasy of impenetrable butchness and dominance, of making an object of every woman in sight. But in that it's only a slight exaggeration of other artifacts from its era, such as Charles Atlas, James Bond, the Thomas Crown Affair, or indeed many sleazy hypnosis manuals. In fact as a forgotten trash novel it probably illuminates the poisoned subconscious of that time better than classier art that is studied in colleges. But it's not only of its time: to read it now, even if you chuckle at it, it might speak to ancient, embarrassing, politically repulsive fantasies of extreme gender polarity and forceful conquest you still have inside you - if you're wired a certain way, it might still get you off. And that's ok.

Right now, wave after wave of censorship is scrubbing sexuality and especially dark fantasies like this off the internet, the latest being gruesome quick-moving changes to sites like Patreon and Gumroad:

It may not be as visceral as the image of a burning book, but it has the same effect: to stop adults from accessing information and fantasies involving adults, that are decided to be unacceptable and immoral by the people holding the power.

Let's be super clear: this is external oppression of us by credit card companies and governments, in highly effective conspiracy with ultra right religious pressure groups. When queer people and kinksters gather, we often trade and indulge in super fucked up fantasies. Community standards say content warnings for the fiction, and negotiated consent for when we make the fantasies real. But discussion of common kinky fantasies is now censored on most adults-only spaces - including porn sites - and this is a terrifying development that we need to organize to fight.

It's easy to feel helpless in the face of these top-down forces, though, and there is a real danger: that some of us internalize those rules and build a morality around it. I'm not an expert on this, but I know that some of the attacks on depictions of dark fantasies come from the left, including from young and queer and even kinky people - people whose existence and safety depends on their sexuality not being censored. We can't police each other's fantasies, and most of all we can't police our own.

It's tempting to resurrect the term quisling for people engaged in policing, aka traitor, but I know how easy it can be to slip into that mindset, when you still hold some of that shame in your heart. The same shame that caused me to burn that paperback. 

Right at this moment, everywhere, there are people struggling with their own sexual fantasies, worrying that having those recurring thoughts means they are evil or broken. Some of them are driven to self harm, many more are having a constant inner battle to suppress them. But anyone who's studied mindfulness, or treatment for OCD, knows that's not the way to handle those thoughts, in fact can just make them more powerful. Even if it worked, it could drain so much of your energy, cause real suffering, and cripple your creativity. I tweeted this jokingly:

I was joking (and incidentally pitching a mind control story) because I don't think you can or should try to make yourself only get off to wholesome fantasies. When I burned that book I was trying to shut down or kill that part of myself, and that just never goes well. Even well-intentioned demands to interrogate your kinks (I like this tweet)

I mean sometimes you might go, "Wow, where did that come from?" And that might, or might not, start a journey of introspection. But it should not go down the path of shame or trying to destroy that fantasy. Like nighttime dreams, fantasies tend to come from our deepest, oldest layers of programming, layers we might have carefully paved over in becoming thoughtful, ethical adults. You're responsible for your actions, including where and how you share fantasies, but not for the thoughts that pop into your mind. Sometimes problematic fantasies are the unconscious's way of working through trauma, whether personal or societal; sometimes they're a way of holding those embarrassing desires or problematic tropes up to the light and, by exaggerating them to the point of silliness, making them manageable; sometimes they might just be something that needs to be vented, including into a private notebook, and thereby lose their power even by pure repetition (a standard treatment of Unwanted Thought Syndrome).

But who cares why we have and share these fantasies? It doesn't need a justification. We're adults, and fucked up fantasies are common and don't say a thing about how good a person you are. Academic research has found that nonconsent fantasies are some of the most frequent, across genders and sexual orientations (something Nancy Friday also found in her study of women's sexual fantasies in Her Secret Garden). Having access to extreme fantasies other people have shared, that may or may not resonate with your own, is reassurance that you don't have to fear the monsters in your mind - that you can go into the darkness, and come back, and not be dangerous or unlovable.

Part of a post by Tumblr user @boreal-sea on October 2023:

In literature alone, I think of what was in my local public library, that would be censored from many apps and websites according to their content policies. Explorers of dark and twisted fantasies who added so much to my life: off the top of my head, Clive Barker, H. R. Giger, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Iain Banks, Shirley Jackson, Anthony Burgess, and there's so many more. They excited my imagination, and they made me realize I'm not alone.

Some of the most famous images of books being seized and burned are volumes from the Hirschfeld Institute, files and manuscripts telling gay and trans people that they were not alone, that they had a history, that their deep desires were normal. That was what was the authorities found threatening, and it's the same for kink (and the authorities did not then, and do not now, draw a distinction between different types of "perversion" - LGBT and kink will always be rounded up together). 

They have no right to burn our libraries, even if it's as insidiously quiet as a page that says, "content not found, would you like to try one of our other offerings?" We must fight them wherever they try. (A quick place to start is giving money to the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, or National Coalition for Sexual Freedom) Adults should be able to freely share dark fantasies, about adults, with other adults who want to see them. 

Most of all, we must heal the shame in our hearts, so we don't become the one lighting the match.

Everyone Deserves to be Looked At With Desire

When I was a teenager, I had really bad acne, big square glasses, and braces for longer than seems possible looking back on it. I was very thin, weak, and uncoordinated, which made every gym class an ordeal. I often went to school with hair in a crazy shape, due to taking baths at night and going to bed with wet hair, and I wouldn't even try to tame it. There was overall a feeling like if I tried to do things to improve my appearance, it would only make it worse. With the added embarassment of looking like I was trying.

(by the way, this essay is going to be real specific to where I’m coming from demographics-wise - cis women and others have such different journeys with feeling desirable, that I have some notion of but could never speak to)

So that was going on, and then at a certain age it was like a switch flipped and I was flooded with lust and longing, every day. I would jerk off once or twice a day, and get lost in vivid sexual daydreams, sometimes making a strategically-placed backpack necessary to make a hallway trip.

But I never did anything to try to make sex or romance happen in real life. I was incredibly shy and awkward, and I mostly hung out with either my family, a small circle of nerdy male friends, or myself. If anyone ever had a sexual or romantic thought about me, I never knew it. I didn't feel blue about it, I just set the question aside and went back to my book, ninja movie marathon or programming project.

That went on for a while.

Looking back on me at 20, I think I was objectively kind of beautiful. Lithe, good cheekbones, geekily enthusiastic, non-threatening. If I'd only known how to do my hair, dress, schmooze a bit, and where to meet people, things could have been popping off. I had a lot of the ingredients, but had no idea how to work them. Plus I mostly stayed in, or went to art house theaters, rock concerts, and used bookstores and talked to no one.

Then when I was 22 on a internship, something amazing happened. A beautiful 28 year old woman I met in a science fiction book club, and, in a mad burst of energy, pursued, wanted me back. She said she was attracted to my mind, and to the way I looked. And she proved it, by having sex with me!

This did two things right away:

1. It nourished me, it gave me a deep watering, down to my roots, that I never knew I needed. Previously, I didn't consciously think I'd stay a virgin forever, but I had no concept how it was going to happen, for me. I was going into fourth year undergrad without a whisper of it. Then all of a sudden I felt like my own life would be a story worth telling. A story that would have passion and adventure. And naked breasts.
2. For the first time in my life, I had feedback about what someone found attractive in me. I could ask questions like, when did you first decide you wanted to fuck me? What was good and bad for you in that first date? The first email? Pillow talk was an absolute revelation. Feminine desire suddenly became so real to me, not just a legend. I learned that attraction isn't announced in big flashing letters like it is by professional actors in movies. Sometimes it looks more like shyness, caution, acting weird. Without lots of examples, you can't develop the skill of recognizing it. Or in my case, even believing I could be the target of it.

This affair only lasted a couple of months, and of course I became a clingy disaster - no doubt making this person vow to never fuck a virgin again. Sad mix CDs were made. But it changed everything.

I'm writing about this here because I think of it when I see the daily posts, on Fetlife and elsewhere, about (predominantly) straight cis men's hapless and hopeless attempts at hitting on people. The behaviour of these dudes nags at my mind because I almost get it: If NOTHING EVER WORKS, why not try everything? Why not send a dick pic, putting it all on the table so to speak, and get rejected now rather than later? It's a form of despair, and of learned helplessness. These men might never get a chance to see what's sexy and desirable in themselves, how such small adjustments in their style and communication, and understanding of the world, could make what's fuckable about them shine out.

I came back to campus after that internship with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack playing in my head, and a swagger in my step. It. was. on.

It was not on.

What actually happened then was that I had a dry spell so long, I might have found my virginity again. But for the first time I was willing to make a fool of myself, I was trying. I went to people and books for advice, some of it very bad (e.g. Neil Strauss), but all giving me confidence, however misplaced, to get out there and talk to people.

There were some extremely awkward years in there. Sometimes it seemed like trying, like admitting I wanted something, had been a mistake. There was a lot of simping, a lot of try-hard first messages, a lot of realizing what I thought was going to be a date was clearly not. I hope I wasn’t a creeper, but I was at least visibly thirsty, and all over the place. But I kept working on myself, holding onto that glowing thread of hope, that someone had found me attractive and had been interested in sucking my dick.

I didn’t have my first actual relationship, with regular sex, until my late 20s. Honestly the world of women was spared my early 20s self as a boyfriend. I still have plenty to learn about relationships today, but back then I really had a lot to learn. Like a lot of straight cis nerdy dudes, I thought I was sweet and decent, but actually I was kind of a self-centered ape, not to mention not having any grasp of women’s experience (just for starters) being different from mine. And there was a whole world of boyfriend skills I had no idea of.

But by the end of it I had learned some, and then the next person who was willing to fuck me changed the game again, and the next one again, each time making it easier to believe that I was desirable - and giving me more feedback about what was hot about me. I think a lot of straight guys are starved for compliments, and don't even realize it. I was! It was a wonderful gift that my first few partners were not just willing to bone me, but be openly lustful towards me. I wish I was the type of person who could just organically charged myself up with self confidence, but it really took people telling me they found me sexy. And being specific!

Over time I got to know, whose type am I? (and in real life, rather than media, who's my type?) When is the right time for a first kiss? How to show interest in a non pressury way? All that takes a lot of feedback. Most importantly, things like when is there really a vibe - what's interest rather than polite friendliness? You can't learn that without positive examples, not just a string of failures.

That's the basic story. I learned to talk to people I was into, and found some of them were into me. Not worrying about if I was attractive enough freed me, got me out of my own head so that I could actually see and enjoy the person across from me. My desire became appreciation, not desperation. Which in turn made me more attractive.

Then 10 years ago, almost as a post-script, kink happened.

Unexpectedly my dark, weird, complicated fantasies of mind control and hypnosis, previously a shameful secret, made me really attractive to a really specific crowd. And I learned the skill of hypnotizing - easy to be motivated when that’s my fetish - and it turns out people enjoy that. The amount of interest I got, and sex I've had, broke any meter I might have had for myself. I don't know what to make of this exactly, except that it gave me another piece of the puzzle: learning how to share your desires, in a way that is appealing and respectful, is key. And again it's hard to learn how without some success, not just bloopers. Glad I figured it out somewhat before kink, so I don't feel like people would only be interested in me for the ride I can give - I have some game in the vanilla world.

Anyway there are plenty of people, sinking into self pity and self loathing, that I wish I could gift this to: the experience of being looked at with desire. And for it to happen more than once, because once, you can write off as a fluke (and you get clingy). Lots of weird ideas and bad advice get burned away in an instant. And that in turn makes you sexier, since it really is so much about the vibe, and so little about the looks.

But all I’m saying is that I wish this for people - no one has the right to demand it. I grew up with a guy in my hometown, intellectually brilliant but with weird ideas about how he was owed attention from women. How society should ensure men get sex. He cancelled his eHarmony account after two weeks and demanded his money back, on the basis that no one contacted him first. Following his blog entries over the decades, he’s travelling a very dark and lonely path, one that eventually came to be known as “incel”. (Though he wouldn’t call himself that, because that would be too much like joining a group…) This can be such a spiral, and I wish I could help people who are feeling that hopelessness, because we only get one life to lead. The number one piece of advice I would give is to learn to see women or whoever catches your desire as people with their own stuff going on, and to get truly interested in them, as in this advice about asking questions on dates.

I’m glad I kept trying, kept pushing through the awkwardness, and eventually found myself in a place where I have figured out a bit what’s sexy about me, and have plenty of affection and compliments in my life. If kept feeling undesirable, I might have made the mistake of committing to a long term relationship with someone who showed interest but wasn’t right for me, even someone toxic. Instead, I got to have a lot of experiences, and find love a bit later in life with someone I specifically and emphatically chose, and keep choosing (6 years married!).

I’m sure feeling attractive will still be a problem at times, as I slide into some level of New-Balance-wearing middle age frump. But I know I’ll never have less game than I had back in my 20s, and that I have been looked at with desire. And that feels great.

Beguiled 2023: Cut to the Feeling

Beguiled 2023 was actually my third erotic hypnosis convention since the pandemic started to ease up, but the first one for which I've wanted to do a writeup (though I did discuss an unfortunate incident with silicone lube). The other two (Beguiled 2022 and Charmed 2023) I was basically white knuckling it: just trying to exist, without getting totally overwhelmed by the fact of other people, and ideally without getting sick. khatsha and I had spent a long time fairly locked down, so we were jumpy as hell. And not irrationally: each time, including this one, there was a positive test, and it touched my circle of acquaintances. I guess that's just going to be a fact of life.

But we didn't catch it, and none of those cons were super spreaders, and for that I'm so grateful to the leadership for maintaining the mask mandate in public areas, when almost everyone else has dropped it. This is especially important for making it more possible for people with health risks, including many of my friends. Visa and MasterCard think hypnosis is dangerous, but this community actually cares a lot about safety.

Anyway this was the first con that started to feel like old times, and like Kimmy Schmidt, it was a rush of joy to realize "It's all still here!" 

Not just the classes and hotel room rendezvous's with comet partners but the sleepy breakfasts in the hotel lobby with random tables of hypnokinksters, enscenic's banana bread and cookies, and all the happiness, gossip and emotional chaos. As Warren Zevon sang, back in the high life again!

We flew into O'Hare on Thursday night, and everything went smoothly, with that buzz of excitement as we said our first hellos and tucked in early. Friday I had a hot scene in the morning, and later two killer classes: Ella Enchanting and Inquisition's very creative Hypno-to-Go! Improv techniques for inductions and triggers without props or prompts! class, which included a "warm rising bread dough" suggestion, and the hilarious yet educational combo of Sexobsessedlesbian and Bunbunlittleone, doing Getting In Touch With Kinesthetic Hypnosis where an audience member had the audacity to say, "is the Jessica Rabbit/Roger Rabbit thing you two have going on deliberate?" 

I was part of a five-on-one cotopping scene, which was a beautiful thing not only for how dazed and fucked up we got the object of all the attention, but also for the chance to bond with my fellow hypnotists and observe their amazing technique. This was a new Boston friend in the bottom role, BTW, less than a year into the hypnosis, who, in a dazzling display of confidence, stepped off the plane at their first con with a  plan to recruit a bunch of tops they hadn't yet met for this scene. And it happened by Friday afternoon!

Then in the evening khatsha and I dressed up and I surprised khatsha with a special wedding anniversary trip to the place they always asked to be taken since they landed in the US, and I had always refused: Olive Garden. Just to see them light up was one of the highlights of the whole trip. It was also my first time, and I'll just say, it was truly a slice of the American experience.

Back at the hotel, we took a tour of the dungeon and various evening activities, including hearing some great karaoke by a pro singer we met at lunch. Then khatsha and I went back to our hotel room for some nasty, hypnotic, marital sex.

I felt so connected to my spouse, and so reconnected with the community and who I am as a sexual and kinky person. I wrote in my diary, "One of the best days of my life."

Saturday the toilet overflowed at 6:30 am, cutting into already precarious sleep plans, but even the surging tides of toilet water could not dampen the day! But I was already needing to ease up a bit. I had a very quiet middle of the day, including eating a sad hotel lobby sandwich by myself for lunch, though on either end were very good times with old and new play partners. 

Then khatsha and I had mediterranean food and did our usual Saturday night spruce up, before heading down to the Garden of Living art, which I've written about before but remains one of the most bizarre, fucked up, heartwarming things I've seen under harsh hotel conference room lights: stations of people in latex, frilly dresses, or nearly nothing, typically in a trance state, with signs next to them saying what they'd like to have done to them, or their hypnotic triggers for the event.

We met up with more friends and went to the awkward but fun "masquerade dance" - a kind of a prom for a lot of people who maybe didn't go to prom. There were shufflers and there were people who had serious swing training, and nothing in between (I was a shuffler, though I did have cool Tron glasses). Then some of us played some consent spin the bottle in a hotel room and got a relatively early night.

Sunday morning had a cozy hypnokinkster breakfast and a lovely impromptu scene with a new person to make up for one that was canceled due to the bastard Covid (though it was a false alarm). We went to a super goofy but great Tex Mex place as a group after, the type of place with delicious food but where the waiters literally play pranks. Both me and khatsha ordered jalapeño strawberry mock margaritas. 

We hit another class, Cheating at Hypnosis for Fun and Profit, by Sexobsessedlesbian. The good: being cited by name from the front of the class. The bad: what I was cited for "lazy hypnosis", e.g. suggesting someone feels super fractionated rather than doing all the work to fractionate them. Later in Ella Enchanting's fantastic unconference class about developing scenes inspired by porn, I also got a nod to explain how you can cheat to induce the emotion of a scenario rather than painstakingly simulating the circumstances (what a friend has since referred to as a Jepsen approach, after Carly Rae Jepsen's song "Cut to the Feeling"). Is this what my reputation is becoming?? 

We were able to catch these last couple of classes because there was a storm that made chaos in everyone's Sunday afternoon flights, and for a minute it sure looked like khatsha and I would be flying from Schaumburg, IL to Boston the next day via Minneapolis and Nashville! (the final schedule, through Atlanta, sucked but not quite so hard) The bright side was that we had another night at the hotel, so we could hang out. We swam, and I gave khatsha a new permanent posthypnotic trigger, always an exciting time even though their brain is full of them. And we joined an expedition led by Hypnobunny to a Japanese restaurant where a robot serves your drinks and sushi whizzes out on a tiny table-side train! Echoes of another epic hypnokinkster outing at Charmed 2022 to a Hibachi restaurant.

A last memory is randomly looking into the hotel pool and seeing a couple of mermaids swimming. Presumably, human con attendees. But just one of many moments of being in an utterly mundane setting, and getting to see something strange and magic. 

I was lucky enough to be returning to a city where there's tons of people intrigued with erotic hypnosis, and where my life is rich in love, sex, and other good things. Still I sure missed that concentrated high of a convention, with all the rockiness that comes with it (this writeup is far from the full story - they never are). And now each one is unbearably precious, each time I get to climb up to that peak, so far above the everyday, of excitement and togetherness.

I wanna cut through the clouds, break the ceiling
I wanna dance on the roof, you and me alone
I wanna cut to the feeling

 

Plain Brown Wrapper Book Review: Hypnotism Revealed

 

I picked this one to review next because it appeared in a classic 1971 hypno porn film called She Did What He Wanted. I freeze framed it and found the book! In this film a young man reads this book and through some experimentation discovers he can nonconsensually hypnotize several young women to fuck him. Everyone, honestly including the guy, is kind of charming and hot in an unselfconscious 70s way.

 

 

Why did they pick this book? Maybe because it's the ubiquitous trash mail order hypnosis book. Its history is not a history of a hypnotist, but rather of a salesman. As you can read on the webpage of the Wilshire Book Company, he's a mail order entrepreneur, who started at the age of 16 advertising in the back of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (that name again), first selling how to play chess books published by other people.

His first venture into publishing was a book called Hypnotism Revealed, which he wrote himself. "There's no money in having someone else publish your book," Powers explains. "I was a budding entrepreneur, so instead of getting a small percentage as a royalty from another publisher, I decided I might as well publish the book and sell it myself."

 

This makes me once again reflect on how hypnosis is real, but you'd never think so, based on how scam-adjacent it so often is. He wrote this when he was 26 years old, and judging by the contents, this book is mostly either plagiarized or pulled out of his ass. It's a large type 113 pages, with several chapters towards the end consisting literally of random press clippings about the usefulness of hypnosis, reproduced in full.

Powers sold it continuously through the mail new without changing a single word I'm sure, until at least 1977, almost 30 years, charging $1 almost the whole time.

I did not succeed in finding a full original ad for this book in Popular Mechanics, though I found this fragment with the same typeface:

 

And in the search discovered the oldest one yet, from 1913 - that's at least how long this grift has been running!

And the pitch is so familiar, with a clear lineage to the ads in backs of comics I read in the 80s. But I digress! What about the actual book?

Hypnotism Revealed (1949, but 1975 edition) - Melvin Powers

Tone: Stiffly authoritative, like an insecure substitute teacher working out of the textbook

Valuable for: 

• Some pretty fucking sexy 1940s high femme hypno modelling shots

• As you can see some pretty grabby convincers, including one that is hard to fake where you wave ammonia under their nose after telling them it's french perfume, and another where you stab them in the palm with a hypodermic needle.
  
  
  
  
• Not the worst basic eye fixation script ("the fascination method"), though I was amused that it later appears to suggest self-hypnosis via staring at a point on the ceiling while somehow also reading the script.
  
  
  
  
  
• Another reminder of just how old some and hacky some of our hack concepts are, e.g. the depth scale, "all hypnosis is self-hypnosis", a lot of patter such as "drifting and dreaming" (I'm still going to say that one, I'm the hack, it's me)
  
• Surprisingly decent advice for dealing with difficult cases ("refractory subjects") recommending that you "pattern in to the personality of the individual", focus on the pretalk, use fractionation, try rapid inductions, and try a kind of overload where they lie down and both a metronome and a hypnotic LP is played (only $5, send check or money order) On the other hand, uniquely among the books I've found, suggests "when all methods have failed" sodium pentothol injections! 
  

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 3

This thing is scammy and shoddy, but not as gross as the ones that seem to be about the author's ego. Besides the record, tries to sell you "the Powers hypnodisc spiral" ($1), "the Powers crystal ball" (50 cents), and a "sleep-o-matic" tape recorder that can replay the same snippet of self-suggestions at intervals all night. He encourages you to practice hypnotherapy after about 15 pages of large type insructions, everything from smoking, to alcoholism, to "menstrual irregularities", to speedrunning Freudian analysis. Despite where I heard about it and the photos, a minimal amount of sexism and implied predation, though like a lot of these midcentury books it's easy to imagine the beta-est male in the Mad Men office studying it intently.

Hypnotic language example: "Imagine that every beat of the metronome is saying, 'sleep'"

The bottom line: Spend that $1 on 10 lemon drops instead!

Though this should become a meme format:

 

 

Not Too Slick (a Cautionary Tale from Beguiled 2022)

This happened at our last hypnocon, Beguiled 2022 in Chicago, and let it be a lesson. khatsha and I were negotiating a big Saturday night scene in our hotel room. Because of airline rules against liquids, that day we had to buy an overpriced bottle of lube at the CVS machine in the hotel lobby, and we wouldn't be able to fly back with it. So I proposed a scene that would use it all up.

I hypnotized khatsha, made them strip, and led them blankly to the shower stall, to stand right under the showerhead. I gave them the suggestion that the more lube fell on their body, the more horny and obedient they would become, and the more pleasure they would feel from touch. It was going great, with me lavishly draining the bottle down onto their chest and tits, and smearing it everywhere, while they stared ahead.

Then khatsha called "RED!"

I woke them up and asked what the matter was.

They said, "I. Can't. Move." "What?" "The floor is completely slippery."

I looked down and the lube was puddled all around their feet in every direction. One of us managed to turn on the shower, at which point we remembered that it was SILICONE lube. It would not wash away.

Next realization: the puddle had spread out as far as my feet next to khatsha in the shower stall. I started to back out, one inch at a time, conscious at each moment that I could fall and crack my head. I said, "You stay right there!" "I'm not going anywhere!"

Finally I made it out of the stall, and grabbed all the towels I could find. I laid them down and made kind of a bridge across the shower tiles, which let khatsha escape, both of us wiping off our feet as best we could. We laid down on the bed together, and cracked up.

Somehow we regrouped and had a nice fuck, and some hypnosis too. But the night wasn't over. I then spent the next hour wiping up every trace of lube from the shower floor, using up every container of soap and shampoo, otherwise there was a nonzero chance of killing whoever took a shower next.

Two PhDs and several Master's degrees between us - that was not our smartest moment. Learn ye from our mistakes! Don't try to be so slick!

We've Been Here Forever. We're Not Going Anywhere.

Explicit erotic hypnosis pornography has been widely circulated for at least 142 years.

The year after he bought his first film camera, 1897, Georges Méliès directed a pornographic hypnosis film called Le Magnétiseur. (Yes, cinematic hypnosmut is older than A Trip to the Moon. By five years) That film is lost, but the next year Alice Guy, the first female film director, made the raunchy Chez le Magnétiseur, which you can watch.

One of the most well known stag films that has survived is called The Hypnotist, originating some time in the 1930s and featuring a POC woman hypnotizing and then fucking a woman and a man.

Hypnosis fetishism has been reported in medical journals since at least 1957.

To jump back, in 1784 Benjamin Franklin and other notables investigated mesmerism, and made a secret report for the king's eyes only about their concerns that hypnosis was Too Sexy. (Thanks to @GleefulAbandon for this story)

 

One of the most famous hard core porn movies of all time, Behind the Green Door (1972), prominently features a sexualized hypnosis scene kicking off the action (but first, mimes!)

Among the authors of erotic hypnosis smut: Leonard Cohen, recipient of the Order of Canada, in his 1963 novel The Favourite Game.

One mind control fetish story site, mcstories, has been run continuously for 26 years, apparently by the same person, and as of right now contains 14393 stories.

On the BDSM social networking site FetLife, as of November 2022 almost 20,000 people have added "erotic hypnosis" as a fetish.

Kink negative forces from both the left and the right (but most especially SESTA/FOSTA, and cowardly credit card companies under pressure from religious anti-porn crusaders) are trying very hard right now to scrub hypnosis fetishism from existence. A small flavour of things that are genuinely happening right now: AI being applied on a major pornographic websites to instantly detect and remove videos where someone is completely clothed, but dangling a crystal pendant! And just this week, "hypnosis" and related words have been censored as a search term on FetLife, and many are worried that all groups and posts with those terms in their names will be removed, as they were in 2017 after the search term was similarly banned.

But erotic hypnosis and mind control fetishism is not going anywhere. It is common, has been around since Mesmer (and probably a lot longer), is enjoyed by a wide spectrum of people, and can be practiced ethically and in a risk-aware manner, as much as any sexual or kinky practice, not to mention the fantasy side of it, which can be dark and disturbing but no more than the content of widely streamed entertainments - and is in fact fantasy. 

And someday the tide of censorship and stigma has to turn. And we can think about what each of us can do towards making that happen more quickly. Take comfort from these words of the poet Leonard Cohen: "Hey! My pants!"

Plain Brown Wrapper Book Review: The Secrets of Hypnotizing Women

 

(barely visible: tiny hearts in her eyes)

Magicians have survived by generating notoriously sturdy constitutions, ignoring the shambling, tawdry elements that surround them, and focusing on the tiniest, most glorious achievements. The process is a lifetime of continually panning for gold. 

- Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear

I've run out of erotic hypnosis books. There's the ones I've already reviewed. Then there's Sleepingirl's The Brainwashing Book and Kinky NLP, Chewtoy's Erotic Hypnosis Scripts and Lee Allure and DJ Pynchon's The Amnesia Book, all of which I heartily recommend you read (but haven't figured out how to review since they're all by friends!) After that the pickings get slim - very slim indeed.

Why books though? Although there have been disturbingly accelerated attempts to scrub us from every major website and app, including the porn ones, there's tons of information about erotic hypnosis to read online, not to mention lots of terrific online classes, and now, even better, in-person classes - not to mention peer learning and hands-on experimentation.

But for me there's something about having a paper volume in my hands, concrete evidence that eroticized hypnosis exists and has for a very long time (at least back to Mesmer! As another book coming out someday soon will show!). And so I've accidentally tipped over into being a collector. The embarrassing fantasy is that even if the purge of the internet were to be completed, and all the private hard drives wiped, at least somewhere there's a bookshelf of forbidden material to show we existed - and to reseed the hypno perv community of the future.

So what's left? Mostly what I would call "plain brown wrapper books": sleazy paperbacks sold out of the back of male-targeted magazines, often shipped in brown paper wrappers like pornography. These go back at least as far as 1929, as this discussion of a Popular Mechanics ad mentions. The ads are often pretty sexy to us fetishists, heavily implying that you will gain some kind of nonconsensual influence over women, but they also paint a picture of real sad tragic dudes that they were hoping to sell to: “Don’t be unpopular, lonesome, or unhappy a minute longer. Now you can make your life what you want it to be — now you can win admiration, success and big money — through the strange power of hypnotism." I picture Red Dwarf's Arnold Rimmer, or Adventure Time's Ice King.

Even though hypnosis is real, these books probably delivered on their advertising copy about as much as X-Ray Specs or Sea Monkeys did, but I'm still fascinated, and now that I have my hands on a few, plan to read them and extract any valuable content. (and continue onto the modern, $1 e-book equivalent too)

The one was found by my pal sleepyhead, and has an odd pedigree, being apparently a new edition of a 1950 book by Ormond McGill that was sold out of the back of magazines, with 1999 revisions by Shelley Stockwell. I'd like to get my hands on the original, but it's easy to guess that the changes are mostly awkwardly inserted new paragraphs either about Stockwell's own experiences, or dubious neuroscience (at one point describing endorphins, dopamine and serotonin as "opiates"). 1950 is still strong with this one, e.g. "You're going to awaken in a few seconds full of vim, vitality and pep."  My copy was mailed by the hypnosis society Stockwell runs, apparently from a box in someone's damp basement.

The Secrets of Hypnotizing Women (1999) - Ormond McGill and Shelley Stockwell

Tone: Dated, sexist pickup manual, with some incongruous 90s-style pop neuroscience

Valuable for:

• Unintentional humour. The whole premise of the book, that there are special secrets to hypnotizing women, is goofy, playing out in statements like "Being mesmerized, especially by a charming man, is basic to [women's] nature" and "Women love authority and also to be gently soothed." One chapter notes that women have smaller brains than men and implies this makes them more suggestible, and also that women are all about feeling while men are about thinking ("Ask her what she thinks and you'll usually draw a blank stare"). Sometimes I wondered if the original author had ever met a woman, as when a female orgasm is described thus "She breaks into a warm sweat and then relaxes", or when it says "If she is suffering from PMS, why not hand her a banana and hypnotize her, then suggest that her brain now manufactures more serotonin?" (don't do this)

Then there is some pretty wild hypnosis advice, like that you need to learn to stare for five minutes without blinking, and that you should practice your commanding hypnotic tone on a chair, saying: "You WILL do as I tell you! It's no use, you MUST do as I say!" Here's the book's description of "a non-verbal technique called NLP": "To do this, look into her eyes; look down at her lips, look back into her eyes and smile." Another induction begins with the instructions to lift your arms above your head and stiffen your fingers, which I believe is also the way hypnosis is done by Bugs Bunny.

• Some stale, but valid hypnosis advice and language. There's a basic FAQ, some standard convincers, ok examples of patter in scripts, and an Elman variation. All just hasty sketches. There's a nice scene in one chapter in the form of an "experiment in thought transference" (unfortunately framed as a sneaky way to get women to trance with you). There are some nice phrases some of their subjects used to describe trance: "feeling passive", "placid and mellow", "filled with light or surprised by new perception". There was an interesting induction involving pressing on the fingernails, and I liked the advice to "Make your words delicious so that she wraps her mental lips around them." Another induction is based on eye fixation where you induce trance in yourself, timing it by your own eyes getting tired. However for each good point there's either something silly, or just one of those moldy old ideas that have held us back for years, like that there's a hierarchy of difficulty for suggestions, or some people are "good subjects" and some aren't.
  

• Nothing interesting about sex, that's for sure! Many readers, like me, must have turned to the Sex and Hypnosis section first, only to find hilariously weak-sauce advice like "Do it as she likes it done" and "Warm the pan before you throw the meat on". (how often do I buy a sleazy hypnosis book and find all kinds of filler in the form of tedious advice and observations about everything but hypnosis?) Then there's "taoist" and "tantric" sex advice that's too brief and ridiculous to even be  offensive. The only hypnosis is in the form of general affirmations to give your partner in trance, like "sex is a natural, normal, healthy, friendly, fun, playful and satisfying expression between lovers". It's wild to me that not only is there not a scrap of kinkiness, there's also not even the concept of turning your partner on via hypnosis, or making touch feel better, or making a fantasy more vivid. Those things seem so easy and obvious!

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 4
The first impression is cringe-inducing, a rape joke as a blurb on the inside: "The only trouble is that when the women wake up and find Ormond is not Richard Gere - wow is he in trouble!" It's at least lightly icky throughout, always assuming a straight male reader who wants to influence "delectable damsels". In one section it suggests winning her over by curing her substance abuse problem, or helping her "desire only slimming foods".

The authors make the familiar claim that the subconscious will protect the subject from any harm, so by definition no harm can be done to them in hypnosis. But then they keep going, further than most, to say the subconscious mind is actually better at reacting to threats than the conscious mind, "which often falls victim to to indiscreet reasoning, flattery and the desire for thrills"! Then comes the all-too-revealing warning that "the hypnotist is in far more danger from the sleeping girl than is the girl from the hypnotist", cautioning the aspiring hypnotist of the "unprincipled woman" who will attempt to "compromise you". Hmmm.

In more subtle toxicity, there's explicit endorsement of the patriarchal mode, advocating hypnotists wear high status clothes and "Assume the manner of a physician attending a patient: one of earnest concern and slightly impersonal" Aha, that right there is what we're up against. There's a sad overselling of the first author as a rock star, "The most famous hypnotist on the planet today, the venerable Dean of American Hypnosis", with multiple pictures of McGill hypnotizing forgotten TV hosts and movie stars. The sales tactics continue with a full 20 pages of ads in the back for the second author's tapes and books, including "Hypnosis: How to Put a Smile on Your Face, and Money in Your Pocket" and "Denial is Not a River in Egypt" (though I did enjoy her anecdote about learning hypnosis was real via an encounter with Pat Collins, the Hip Hypnotist!)

If you're wondering why it's not a 5 out of 5 - the bar for scuzziness in hypnosis books is high.

Hypnotic language example: "It is as though a heavy and dark cloth was being draped over and about your body."

The bottom line: Skip it except for history and laughs, or to see how some of the concepts and vibes that still circulate are seriously moldy oldies

The Hypnotist Who Didn't Believe in Hypnosis (An Excursion)

It was 2017, and the call went out to a bunch of us erotic hypnosis friends to check out a stage hypnosis show in Salem.

Khatsha was only a couple of weeks off the plane from Switzerland to live with me for good, and I loved showing them off. We had Thai food at a long table, with lots of laughs, then went to the little theatre nearby. We were there to see one of the most ubiquitous hypnotists in New England, popular at high school lock-ins and union fundraisers among many other appearances a year. For many people in our area he would be their first, maybe only, experience with hypnosis.

We sat in a big block a few rows back, with the scattering of other people in front of us, about 30 in the whole place. We were full of anticipation and nervous snickering. Many of us, including me, had never been to a stage hypnosis show - in my case because I fetishize it too much. Until recently it would have been like going to see a strip show, that people around me were mysteriously treating like it was Oklahoma. I needed the bravery of being in a group.

He came out in a suit and a powerful vibe of let's-get-through-this show business. In a Tony Soprano accent, he asked the audience, "Who's been hypnotized before?"

There was a lot of giggling from our area as we all put up our hands. He squinted out at us: "Was it at one of my shows?" We shook our heads. "Someone else's show?" Nope. Then, making a joke, "So do you people all sit around and hypnotize each other?" We looked at each other and cracked up!

He called for volunteers, and two from our group went up, along with eight other volunteers, all sitting in a line on the stage. He did the steepled-forefinger convincer. He sent down a bunch of people, including one of ours who's great at being hypnotized. If that's your first experience with hypnosis, I bet that experience of being rejected could mess it for you for life.

He was smooth and confident (and he had a DJ!), but not very engaged. He did an super rushed countdown induction, and attempted to make people's shoes stick to the floor. It didn't work for our remaining friend, let's call her Acher, but he kept her up there.

I whispered to khatsha that we could be giving him more targetted heckling than he's ever had before: "You call that an Ericksonian double bind?? My grandma does a better Cerbone Butterfly!" There was definitely a lot of whispering in our area, but, in our defense, it was super awkward. Sure we goof around with hypnosis all the time, not to mention use it for sex, but oddly I feel the community has a lot of reverence underneath that - a respect for the mystery. This felt cheapening.

The act was full of cheesy jokes and well-worn hypnosis routines that were mostly based on humiliation. At one point he suggested the people onstage would smell that he'd made a huge stinky fart. People got bumped from the stage whenever he judged they weren't responding well enough. The exception was when he suggested to Acher that her shoes would feel like they were on the wrong foot, and then asked her, "Now how do they feel??" She shrugged, "They're comfy. They're Docs."

Still he would not send her off! Maybe because she's femme and glamorous. But it was getting painful. It was down to two college freshman-age women and her, and eventually one of us did a rescue, walking right up to the stage with open arms and welcoming Acher off. He smoothed over the moment like it was his idea.

He made it to his big finale, with the remaining two uninhibitedly lipsyncing to Ke$ha. Maybe they were really hypnotized after all. I'm sure it wasn't even close to his worst show - just one with some puzzling reactions from the peanut gallery.

He left the young women with the suggestion that a) as soon as they left the theatre, they'd forget everything that happened during the show, and b) if they ever attended one of his shows again, they'd want to volunteer. This is pretty fucked up, consent-wise, and we wished we could tell them that, and that hypnosis doesn't have to be this thing. Can be more wonderful, more creative, more collaborative, and a lot less problematic.

Still we were in high spirits as we poured out onto the street, and then into the Honey Dew donuts, picking apart what we'd seen, each bit of NLP and social influence. It was good to be all together.

Acher said she had been looking forward to the induction, she wanted to go with it, but it was so quick and uncommitted. Someone said, "You know, the funny thing is I'm not sure he believes in hypnosis himself." And that stuck with me.

What a sad thing! Developing a hypnosis act and hustling every day to book gigs, making it work in the least respected tiers of entertainment. And thinking all he had to sell was a lump of lead covered in shiny gold paint. I wished I could tell him there was gold, precious gold, in there all along.

Thank to friends who were there helped me fill in details, self identify if you would like!

My Erotic Hypnosis Book Reviews

I've written a few of these over the years, and this is the spot where I pull them all together now and in the future.

Mastering Erotic Hypnosis - James Gordon and Rebecca Doll

My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson - Edited and with Commentary by Sidney Rosen

Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation - Richard Bandler

Monsters and Magical Sticks: There is no such thing as hypnosis? - Stephen Heller and Terry Steele

The Complete Idiots Guide to Hypnosis - Roberta Temes

The Easy Way to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr

Hypnotic Realities - Milton Erickson

Mind Play - Mark Wiseman

Look Into My Eyes - Peter Masters

Hypnotize Your Lover - Wendy Friesen

The Secrets of Hypnotizing Women - Ormond McGill and Shelley Stockwell

Hope you enjoy, and that you'll share your thoughts on these and other books with me too!

Don't Delay Pleasure

I keep coming back to this thought during quarantine, which is damn, I'm glad I did all those orgies! Do you know, that my birthday in February turned out to be basically four days of group sex? So much fun that people other than me are looking back fondly on it as the last hurrah (for now)? I tell you that not just to brag, but because it's starting to seem like a dream.

Man did we throw some great just-because hypnotic play parties too. Tons of people, with themed refreshments, and propositions, and lingerie, and cuddle piles. With public hypnosis scenes so hot the room goes quiet to watch, with cries of orgasm or pain coming from two bedrooms at once, with 2 AM group trances. And just as sweet, pancakes and sleepy chitchat on a Sunday, hanging out deep into the afternoon with the overnight guests. Hard to believe it now that it's been 75 days since anyone but me and khatsha has crossed our welcome mat.

And yet before every single party, after five hours of cleaning and preparation, with 20 minutes to go, khatsha and I would always turn to each other and go, "I hate this. This was a bad idea. Is it too late to cancel??"

Lots of types of pleasure are a major pain in the butt to make happen. And even the ones that aren't, I still have a tendency to hesitate and second guess, like I'm going to save this till later, like maybe till I earn it. I'm the type to throw away half a bag of grapes because I let them go soft, saving them, rationing them, for what?

Then I'm thinking about the dorky, anxious, exuberant, creative, bitchy, caring world of erotic hypnosis conventions. I've been going to at least three per year, for years, and expected that to continue indefinitely. Who knows what's going to happen there? But I'm sure glad for every single one I bought plane tickets to, booked hotel rooms, and braved the social anxiety gauntlet to show up.
A lot of this I had to struggle with, maybe from my upbringing that says to beware of self-indulgence and frivolousness. "Don't delay pleasure" isn't a message everyone needs to hear - for example John Belushi had that nailed - but I do.

Because these things are not worthless. They are the very serious substance of a life. Sadness and suffering, they take care of themselves. So do easy, homey pleasures (like most of the ones available right now). But the pleasures that take some effort and risk, I'm so grateful for every single one I went for. Those memories are unbearably precious - they are the sacks of coal that I stored up, that are keeping me warm in the current winter. And will too on through the deeper, harsher winter of old age. ("Yo, hey, Gen Z fella! Did I ever tell you about the six-on-one hypnotic pleasure overload scene we had in '19 or so??" "Only about a hundred times...") I hope there will be many more epic memories of kink and sex to stack alongside those, but right now I'm so glad I didn't put those off, or talk myself out of them.

The more urgent reason not to delay pleasure is that you can't count on things sticking around until you've worked up to it. They can disappear without warning. Often you don't know when your last chance was - I sure would have liked one more pint at the Galway before this all started. Or one more cheesy multiplex film at AMC Boston Commons, and go for the $9 popcorn. And of course where this applies most of all is to the people in our life. And our own health and capabilities.

No matter what choices I made in the past, the COVID 19 pandemic lies across all those alternate branching realities like a thick black Sharpie line. I'm glad for everything I didn't put off before we crossed into that darkness. And most of all for those pleasure-based decisions, all those times I chose something spectacular and scary over something easy and safe, that led me to meet and marry khatsha, so that now I'm quarantined with her in JP.

I'm in an incredibly lucky place in this crisis, and I want to be as useful as I can to others. I'm not just about the hedonism. But also, this is my resolution, as the lockdown eases and even before it eases: absent a good reason, if there's a person in my life I enjoy, or a treat I've been saving for a rainy day, or something great I want to set in motion, don't ration it out! Don't delay! I'll leave it to my mum's favourite quote from Jane Austen written more than 200 years ago, which inspired this: "Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!"

PS: This is not to be used against me in the future by any persons who might be in orgasm denial. You know that delay is for a reason.

Polyamory is Like a Jar of Natural Peanut Butter

A lot of people don't like to buy natural peanut butter. They think that it's too much because it has a layer of oil on the top - they think it's too messy. And the bottom too grainy. They'd prefer something with palm oil, maybe some icing sugar. Premixed.

They don't know how good natural peanut butter can be. All it takes is time, and care.

I start with the kind that's just roasted peanuts and salt, and store it upside down or on its side overnight, in the pantry. Many people make the mistake of refrigerating it at this point. But natural peanut butter doesn't work that way: it will only result in an impassable layer of congealed fat.

The next day, when the oil has migrated from the top a little, I open up the jar and stir it. I do this in the sink, with a knife rather than a spoon. I have paper towels nearby in case it spills into the threads or down the side during stirring. Which happens a lot. But the best things sometimes take a little cleanup.

Then I put it in the fridge. By the next day it has a smooth and consistent texture, that will last almost to the bottom of the jar, and as long as you store it in the fridge, it will never separate again.

And that's how you deal with a jar of natural peanut butter!

...

Polyamory? I don't really have a take on that, why do you ask?

Oh, the title! Man, I can see how that's misleading. I should really change it - I just wanted to tell you about the peanut butter.


In case it's not clear, this is a parody of a certain type of prolific FetLife essayist who loves a simile - if it put you in mind of one, that's probably who it is... or rather one of several I was thinking of. Also I sincerely wanted to share my peanut butter technique!

Class notes for: Once more with Feelings

 These are notes from the first time I presented this class, on January 18, 2020, at Charmed in Annapolis.

o   Content warnings, splash damage warning

o   I won’t be doing emotions from roleplay, and pure emotion

o   Suggestions, but not for me to do with khatsha today

o   Emotions are one of the easier things: they are naturally contagious, and naturally sticky. Also makes them hazardous to play with.

o   More about the what than the how. Only two tricks I know:

o   Visualization (imagining a time when you really felt it)

o   Dialing up intensity (you can always imagine one notch more)

Sheet 1 (least edgy)

·      Fear

o   Less edgy because somewhat understood in BDSM

o    Still needs tons of negotiation and aftercare

o   DEMO: Goggles

·      Submissiveness

o   DEMO: Subspace 10

·      Euphoria

o   Why I like the idea of control with non-sexual pleasure

o   DEMO: Face-slapping induces euphoria

o   Satisfaction of a job well done

·      Never use to modify emotions in a relationship

o   Bubblegum anecdote

·      Gratitude

·      Awe and surprise

o   Magic anecdote

o   Plot twist

o   Startle

·      Cosiness

o   Cosiness bondage story

o   Bedgasm

o   Hygge (Hoo-guh)

·      Calmness/emotionlessness

o   In combination with roleplay, layers of scene (“You are kidnapped, you should feel scared, but you are calm instead”). Making the calm feel natural or artificial.

·      Disgust

o   Special warning

o   DEMO: Slugs

Sheet 2 (edgier)

·      What you consider edgy emotions to play with differs a lot

·      Safer way to do edgy emotions: harmless memory, then magnify that

·      Sadness

o   Story about it going wrong

o   Nostalgia as a safer alternative? (“Come tastes like the best day of summer”)

·      Anger

o   What about defiance instead?

o   DEMO: Angry kissing

·      Cuteness

o   Anecdote of why it’s dangerous

·      Love

o   This seems very fucking edgy

·      Jealousy

o   I don’t know man

Sheet  3 (Weird)

·      Oddly satisfying

·      Enhancing emotions is easy

·      Alien emotions

o   DEMO: An alien emotions by telepathic link with k’s alien friend Jim.

Sheet 4 group brainstorm & storytelling