Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.Hypnosis is no longer banned on Fetlife. All our groups that abruptly vanished the night of January 16th, such as Erotic Hypnosis with its 16,000 members and 326 pages of topics, are being restored.
- Stephen Colbert
This is such amazing news!
And we’re better off than ever, because search for “hypnosis” is not blocked. The thing that happened to my beloved @khatsha won’t happen again: searching for her kink on a fetish website and thinking, oh my god, I’m too sick and twisted even for these people (you’re not!).
The erotic hypnosis community doesn’t need Fetlife - and this was a scary wakeup call to just how complacently we’d become in letting one commercial website stitch us together - but on Fetlife we grew and flourished, organized yearly events that spanned the continent and onto other continents, and now, at least for a time, we will continue to grow on that platform. Besides being a nicely designed social network that at least tries to create a safer and less gross atmosphere (despite many failures), Fetlife connects us hypnopervs with the larger kink world, bringing in new people who get intrigued by the connection with other BDSM staples like power exchange, bondage, and roleplay, like the dozens of people who walked into the hypnolounge during the three days of the New England Fetish Flea Market.
Even more important, connection to mainstream BDSM gives us the explicit consent framework that has been critical for the development of the idea of ethical hypnosis play. Without it, it would have been so hard to get to the concepts of thorough negotiation, opposing consent violation, and empowering people who are bottoming to stop and redirect scenes. What else would we have as a model? Mind control porn, stage hypnosis, and the psychology profession, all of which are severely busted in their consent models.
The groups could all vanish overnight again tomorrow, and it wouldn’t change the fact that something good happened. Surviving as a political person means celebrating every single victory, and I intend to celebrate the heck out of this one!
I’m an anxious person who hates to feel out of control (see also: mc fetishist), and so I’m vulnerable to the temptation of cynicism. In fact I am ashamed to think that I fell victim to its sticky indulgence this time. I can remember myself saying to people this would be the end of us on Fetlife, that we wouldn’t find a replacement home for a long time, that there would be more rounds of erasure of our community, which would be less algorithmic and more personal and vicious (in the first round just groups with “hypnosis” in the title or description were nuked, leaving “hypno”, “mind control”, etc).
I was wrong. And the move to despair made me quite useless - I did almost nothing to support my beliefs, because I was so afraid of being disappointed and feeling even more helpless. Meanwhile mephki was organizing the effort to start a new forum, SusanWright of the National Coalition For Sexual Freedom was fighting for us behind and in front of the scenes, and many other people were contributing essays and activism.
Most frustratingly, I was going against years of my own resolutions. In searching for the quotation at the top by Stephen Colbert about cynicism in my notes, I realized that I have been copying similar quotations about it for *12 years*. I must reread them on a regular basis, whenever I feel that temptation.
No one knows what’s going to happen. But victories are going to happen, real ones. Show up, and you can be there for them.
In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live - more musically. How will this come about, and what will we discover?(who knew Van Gogh was an Ericksonian!)
- Vincent Van Gogh
1 comment:
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