There's a very young woman who has a fetish for hypnosis. She really lives and breathes it. There's a busy online community of hypnosis enthusiasts, and although she can be shy and awkward in her daily life, especially with people she's into, she is fierce and outspoken online, with a large network of friends and plenty of opinions on the record. The thing she reserves particular contempt for are the various types of lame hypnotists she meets all the time (she only trances with a few select people), especially the would-be predators. She and her inner circle of other subjects have numerous rules for staying safe, and she can't help but feel a little superior to the careless and naive people who fall under some hypnotists' spell. Then one day she sees hints that a close friend has been compromised. Then another. They're going down like dominoes. They've voluntarily lowered their defences, and are becoming the sexual playthings of...something. From the very invisibility of the threat, she gradually infers that there is a predator in the environment, but one who is much slicker and more cunning than any unethical hypnotist she's ever come across. And then she starts to see little signs that she might be compromised. Will she be able to track down the evil hypnotist before she loses her will? Is she fighting a part of herself that wants to lose her will?I wrote notes for that story on Jan. 3, 2013. When I wrote them, I did not know for sure there was such a thing as a female hypnosis fetishist. I had never seen hypnosis in person, and wasn't sure it was real. The idea of a thriving online community of hypnotists and subjects was pure alternate-reality invention on my part.
Of course, now I know it's all real. So much so that at least three people who might read this could have thought it was about them, for at least part of it. And would have a right to be mad!
So I'll never publish that story (or finish it), or most of the twenty other mc-themed stories that I finished around that time. It really changes the situation that I now know there is such a thing as a hypnotic predator in real life. They're not common, but common enough that they have harmed friends of mine in the Boston scene. It makes it harder to enjoy such stories, and much, much harder for me to write them.
Here's one that I actually finished: a woman attends a stage hypnosis show and is so alarmed by the hypnotic obedience she sees in her work friend that she starts a blog to give shrill warnings against hypnotists, and imagines they're lurking everywhere, wanting to snatch her up and turn her into a hypnotic slave. She perceives that someone rigged the air conditioner in the changing room to pump mind-melting arousal gas into the air, and is forced to masturbate to clear her thoughts enough to escape. She makes out with a guy on the subway because she convinces herself that he's enraptured her with his eyes alone. Finally she can't take it any more and confesses to her blog that she has submitted her body and mind to the next hypnotist she meets (who was of course the one hypnotizing her into all this). Not going to publish that.
In fact almost all the stories I wrote were in the realm of "dub-con" (dubious consent). I even wrote a story called "DubCon", about a convention of mind controllers where they brought their brainwashed slaves from all over the country for reconditioning and play. (it was from the perspective of a desk clerk trying to figure out what the hell is going on with all the gorgeous spacy women walking around and accidentally giving each other hypnotic triggers! Shades of the NEEHU hotel...)
Probably 99% of the stories on mcstories.com involve at least dubious consent, often in the form of predatory hypnosis. Lots of them on tumblr too. And in my brain. How do I reconcile this? With my desire to present hypnosis as no more creepy or dangerous than any other type of intense play kinksters do? And to present myself as an ethical person, who in real life is not interested in pushing on partners' boundaries? This isn't exactly a unique dilemma, but one I'm still wrestling with.
Here's another reason I'm not going to share some of the stories I wrote: they're racist! When I'm writing from what genuinely turns me on, and trying to let the story follow its own course, to my surprise, sometimes they come out that way. Like in the first draft of one story, a woman's extreme licentiousness is represented by her grinding on a bunch of guys in a black dance club. In another first draft, I introduce magical artifact by means of a magical Asian shopkeeper. Which I guess I have movies from my childhood to thank, from Gremlins to Hellraiser to Aladdin. I don't think my brain has more of this crap in it than the average person of my combination of privileged identities, but it's still not cool to see it on the page.
And it's not trivial to de-racist a story. Often fixing it would require major surgery, i.e. burning calories to rethink the parts that are not the sexy parts. It doesn't suffice to change it to a magical white shopkeeper - it needs something. Finding a clever solution would no doubt make my story better, as in Joss Whedon's invention of magical (white) shopkeeper Ethan Rayne, but it would also make my draft take longer to finish, and not make it any sexier (except of course in reducing the anti-sexy racism) And so there those drafts stay.
All that said, I don't think there's anything wrong with the way I wrote those stories. I think it's harmful to edit while you're writing, to fight your instincts as you get words down. Sitting on an encrypted disk image, those story drafts are not hurting anyone. My responsibility begins when I plan to share them. Even on Fetlife, where many private joys and struggles are shared, I still believe it's so important to have a "backstage" for one's private thoughts and feelings, where everything is ok to say to yourself, and then to pick and choose what you express.
A last, selfish reason not to share stories: my fantasies are embarassing. In my published 50 Shades parody, there's a scene with hundreds of hot women chasing our hero, Beatles-style. A more extreme version of that is in a story I wrote in the form of a parody TED talk, where the mind-controller speaker had the women in the audience literally lining up to blow him. Obviously at the time I was feeling a teensy bit lacking in sexual attention! And that wasn't something I wanted people to know.
Basically, publishing any kind of writing makes me vulnerable: it exposes my limitations and crappy preconceptions, and my weird fixations and impoverishments. Why take that risk? Especially since I never considered I'd have friends who might be interested to read them?
Well, it's fun. Some of the best, hardest working fun I've ever had.
It unleashed my creativity. For someone like me, it was so liberating to write things that my parents or my high school english teacher will never read and give me approval for. I wrote those twenty stories in 8 months, about 76,000 words worth. That's what URNMyPower might call "a solid afternoon's output," but it was a big deal for me! As someone who had literally never finished a piece of writing or artwork that wasn't an assigment. Several of them I rewrote twice, three times or more.
Most importantly, it brought my fantasy life into focus. It taught me about myself so that when someone stands in front of me and says, "I want to do whatever you want" - which is a thing that has happened and will happen - I'll have a better idea what to say. I can't put it better than this writing by FL user Heather against kinksters buying into the idea of "one twue way":
Sit quietly with yourself and think about what makes you harden, what makes you soften, what makes you wet and what fuels your lust....Learn where you draw your power from and tap into that before each encounter.I'll probably tidy up a few more stories from that set, and I'm going to write more soon, once my fantasy life settles down in its new form after the glorious Etch-a-sketch shakeup it got from contact with the real-life scene. And they'll come out different. Maybe I'll even write and share evil hypnotist stories, but they will be different evil hypnotist stories, that are evil in a fun way that shows an awareness of where the readers are coming from and how to fall on the side of hotness rather than upsetting, like DJ Pynchon's current tumblr rampage of awesome.
I want to cheerlead you to dive into your sexual fantasies and write them down, no matter how dark or embarassing or bizarre or seemingly trivial. Keep them secret, for example (on a mac) using an encrypted disk image or a Google Doc on a special account, and don't publish stuff that you know is likely to hurt people.
And my obvious other purpose here is to burn off story ideas that I was fond of, but won't be using. Maybe someone else could write the "hypno fan" story I outlined at the beginning, but it's not for me.
(Originally this post, which I started many weeks ago, was going to end with something like, "And one day I'll fuck up in my writing, and I hope people will be patient with me and give me the benefit of the doubt." Since then, a friend pointed out that my second ever shared story contains a crappy ethnic stereotype, that made her feel gross. I'm sorry, and I'll do better next time. Hold me to that. Every writer I admire, literally every one, has written something that was fucked up in some way, big or small. Just try to watch the Buffy thanksgiving episode featuring a native american ghost and not cringe. The serious thing is making the same mistake over and over. I pledge to keep creating, and to make only new and different mistakes!)
