The Koala Box: Why People Play A Lot at Our Events

I remember the Time Before the Koala Box. BEHIVE, then known as NEHG, had our first post-munch practice at a Panera Bread back in 2013, thanks to Lee Allure - the motivation being, we've talked about hypnosis for two hours, now we want to see some shit!!

Since then a post-munch practice has been a tradition, but it was usually pretty flat. There were a few awkward propositions, there would be a couple of trances - usually between existing partners - but for the most part we kept talking about Doctor Who or whatever 90% of the time.

Then about 6 months ago we introduced the koala box - which is a short Pringles can, sour cream and onion variety - and

It.

Went.

Bananas.

Every time since then the post-munch has had around a dozen trances or more. In many rounds there is a sea of hands of people volunteering - people I never saw volunteer before the change.

What's the secret? I think the koala box gives people a chance to

1) Easily volunteer to do the hypnosis they want
2) Invisibly avoid playing with people or suggestions they don't want

Here are the rules of the koala box.

• Pieces of paper and pens are passed to different parts of the table. While the dinner check is being settled, the koala box is passed around, and people fill it with ideas for Hypnotic things they would like to see demonstrated. More suggestions can be stuffed in the box continuously over the evening.

• One person, the Koala Wrangler, explains the rules and has someone (traditionally a first-time attendee), draw the first suggestion and read it out loud.

• The Wrangler then calls for a volunteer to either bottom or top that suggestion, alternating with each round. If the suggestion requires multiple tops or multiple bottoms, the wrangler says so.

• The Wrangler counts to five ("One koala, two koala..."). If no one has raised their hand, the box is passed one person to the left and the next suggestion is quickly read out.

• If more than one person has raised their hand, the Wrangler selects among them (emphasizing people who haven't had a turn yet). Otherwise they select the person who raised their hand.

• The Wrangler then counts to five again, and people can volunteer to either top or bottom (depending on the round) with that person for that suggestion. Again, if no one raises their hand, the box is passed and we swiftly move on to the next round.

• The first person selected chooses among the second set of volunteers.

• The Wrangler emphasizes that the selected people will now negotiate exactly what it means to do that suggestion, and that discovering that one or both doesn't want to do it is a perfectly normal and acceptable outcome for the negotiation.

• We all watch the resulting scene, and usually applaud!

• Then the box gets passed to the left, and we continue drawing pieces of paper from the box, with the Wrangler now calling for top volunteers first if the last round had bottom first, or vice versa.

After the immediate huge success of the koala box - seriously, trances were going on all over the place - I was thinking we should develop more games like this for the post-munch. Then I realized that it's all we need, because anything can go in that box. Here's a list of what got pulled out at our two most recent munches:

• Five stroke induction
• 6 inductions in 60 seconds
• Vibrating chair that gradually increases in intensity
• In your vision white and black are inverted
• Co-topping
• Posable mannequin
• Hyperempiria
• First time top
• Make something cuter
• Use magnetic beads in an induction without it being a pendulum
• Resisted control
• Deja vu
• In trance, recite the alphabet, each letter takes you deeper
• Defragmentation
• Leave a trigger for the rest of the night
• Induction with no talking
• 5 sense overloaded
• First time hypnotee

Last time there were at least 6 distinct tops, out of 18 people, all figuring out what kind of spin to put on these suggestions. And one first time top, which is absolutely typical.

Because it lowers the bar for people to jump in. After all, it's for educational purposes! Someone wants to see it demonstrated! My favourite is how in the very last second of the count, people will muster up the courage to shoot up their hands. We want to facilitate courage.

Other groups work well structuring their "let's see the thing!" time like classes, but the koala box fits the vibe of BEHIVE, in its non-hierarchy: we are Initiates, Virtuosos and Enthusiasts because we are all growing and developing, we are all figuring out our taste, sexually and hypnotically, and we are all creating.

These rules do a lot to help anyone, top or bottom, freely volunteer without pressure to trance in a way or with a person they don't want to - particularly important to someone like me, who sexualizes hypnosis a lot. But possible bugs still exist. For example if someone volunteers, and then the only volunteer for the other side is someone they don't want to scene with. We are thinking of ways to make it absolutely normal to back out at that stage, but it's a tricky one.

So the Koala box will probably evolve more, and we're always looking for ideas and feedback, but it has already evolved a lot. That's why you shouldn't change or drop rules before trying it out! Even though it might be tempting to simplify. We gradually added these aspects to solve specific problems:

• The 5 count. If you don't count to five, the person who is fastest at putting their hand up (and has english as their native language, doesn't have auditory processing issues etc) will always get picked. It also helps to avoid a long awkward pause deciding whether to move onto the next one.

• The koala wrangler. For a long time we just had everyone who raised their hand find each other and negotiate scenes. This was enjoyably chaotic, but led to some people feeling "invisible" when they raised their hand but didn't manage to connect - of course they may just have been experiencing soft no's, but with the Wrangler, everyone is acknowledged without necessarily getting to play. It also led to a lot of multiples of suggestions, which was fun but made us cover less suggestions. And there was always someone hustling along the box and giving the instructions, so having a wrangler formalizes that work.

• Alternating tops first and bottoms first. It's easier to be in the second group, because you know exactly who you're potentially playing with, so this way we don't favour tops or bottoms.

• The first person chooses the second. If the koala wrangler chose the second person, there would be pressure for them to play.

• The name. It contains a kind of magic that I frankly wouldn't tinker with.

If you try out koala boxing, let me know! (and I would be interested to see if it translates to any other kink communities, such as rope) There other games I like for groups of hypno people who are quite experienced and have a lot of trust with each other, but for a mixed experience group, in a munch-like setting, I'm going for this one every time.

Feb 2020 updates

A few amendments BEHIVE has made to the koala box since I first published this, based on the last year of experience with it:

• The koala wrangler now keeps hold of the box, rather than people passing it along, and prompts specific people to draw and read, usually focusing on first-timers. (the "box" is also now a sizeable Bob's Sweet Stripes Soft Peppermint Candy Tub, rather than a pringles can!)
• We now require volunteers to pass a note to each other before beginning the negotiation, to give people a chance to pass on things they want their partner to know but not the whole room. This only seems to be needed in about 1 time in 10, but then it is very needed and appreciated.
• Now one of the exec members acts as the "koala observer", whose job is to listen carefully to the negotiation, gently prompt if there's something missing, and watch the scene carefully to make sure the scene matches the negotiation. We don't particularly point this person out. This was added because of the fact that though the negotiation and scene are observed by the whole room, it's surprisingly easy to not remember whether something was actually part of the negotiation, which then makes it hard to intervene confidently in the moment. Very small consent violations are common, especially when people are new, and we want to normalize both calling those out and responding well to having your action called out. Observing is a tiring and intense job, so we rotate it each event.

We have also written out some koala wrangler's instructions, since there's a lot to remember, feel free to use these as a starting point:

• Starting in this part of the evening there's going to be hypnosis demonstrations, so please feel free to leave if you don't want to see that.
• Notice the koala box going around. (point to it) You can stuff it with ideas for Hypnotic things you would like to see demonstrated. Anything you can think of, as long as it's acceptable in a restaurant environment, and doesn't have effects that last beyond the munch.
• When you're watching trances, keep in mind that "splash damage" can be a factor, and you might start feeling trancy. Feel free to step out at any point.
• I'm going to ask people to draw slips of paper from the box at random and read them out.
• On the first draw, I'm going to ask for volunteers to be the hypnotist for this suggestion. Raise your hand AND KEEP IT UP.
• I will pick one, and then I'll ask for volunteers to be hypnotized for this suggestion. Raise your hand AND KEEP IT UP. If there's at least two, the hypnotist will choose among them. The hypnotist can choose more than one!
• Either participant can withdraw at any time.
• If there's no match, we just move onto the next draw.
• When there's a match, the two will sit together, and begin by passing a piece of paper to the other person, which may contain important information for their partner that they don't want to share with the group, or it can be blank or a nice message like, "excited to trance with you!" Each person reads it and then passes it back.
• Then they will negotiate the trance, including how they interpret the suggestion. We expect to see a thorough negotiation for everything that happens in the scene, in particular any touching and any hypnotic suggestions (including suggestions to feel especially good after the trance). If they decide not to do the scene, we call that a successful negotiation, and move onto the next draw. Please also negotiate aftercare. We ask the top not to initiate anything not negotiated, including a hug, after the start of the first trance.
• We also ask that if you have had any substances today, like alcohol or pot, that may affect your responses or ability to consent, you simply disclose it to your partner so they can make an informed decision if they're comfortable with it.
• For the second draw, the hypnotee will be chosen first, and will choose the hypnotist, and then we'll alternate back and forth like that.
• Now will a first time attendee please make the first draw?

As a last note, we make no claim of ownership over koala boxing (or whatever you want to call it), and fully expect it to evolve and mutate as needed whereever it is used. We'd be pleased to hear if you try something like this, including variations you tried and what did or didn't work for you, but consider these ideas public domain and do whatever you like with them.

A Serious Reality Fuck: Hypnotic Adversarial Memories

I sat down on the couch and had khatsha kneel between my legs. I dropped her into trance and had her vividly imagine unbuckling my belt, unzipping my jeans, putting my cock in her mouth and getting me fully hard. I walked her through every step, and told her to make it as real as possible in her mind.

Then I woke her up, and told her to open my pants, put my cock in her mouth, and get me fully hard.
Then I dropped her again. And had her imagine the same thing again, while I fastened my pants and rebuckled my belt.

I suggested that she make the fantasy more and more real, and when I woke her up again, I told her it would feel more dreamlike when she did the same action again.

I explicitly suggested that she would make the hypnotic fantasy and the reality closer and closer in her mind, and, in particular, to adjust the memories of the fantasy and reality closer and closer to each other each time.

I repeated this cycle three and a half times in total, the half time because she communicated that she had to switch into a sitting position. I told her to overwrite the stored memories with the sensation of sitting instead of kneeling.

This scene was inspired by the recent AI innovation of Generative Adversarial Networks. One neural network generates images, for example, and another neural network takes in real images alongside them and judges which ones are fake. The first one adjusts and learns until the second one can’t tell which is real. The two networks are called the Generator and the Discriminator, and are often located on the same CPUs and GPUs - I picture a black tower with blinking lights getting warm as it silently struggles with itself through the night.

Once this Generative Adversarial Network has been trained, it can be used to output new images, like a brand new Picasso, or a morph of two faces, that can fool a neural network. Or a human.
That’s what I was doing to khatsha. I was also exploiting the fact that our memory is a lossy compression and isn’t good at storing repeated events distinctly, and that every time we take out a memory to examine it gets distorted a little.

The waking stage of the last cycle, I walked khatsha through what she was really doing as if I was prompting a hypnotic fantasy: “You’re imagining, so vividly, that you’re opening my pants…”

Then I dropped her and suggested one last time that she would adjust all those memories, so that reality and fantasy would seem the same. “And you don’t know if it happened once, or 50 times.”

Then I broke the cycle. I dropped her and woke her up as definitively as I could, and checked in. When she seemed relatively back to reality, I asked her to kneel between my legs and open my pants. When she was down there, she paused for a long time, and got a very puzzled, frowny expression on her face.

“What’s wrong? Deja vu?”

She gave her head a quick toss like she was trying to shake something off.

“You don’t have to figure it out. You don’t have to sort out what was real and what wasn’t. You just have to suck.”

And she did.

After she got me off, I was moving into aftercare mode when I noticed she suddenly looked very sleepy sitting on the rug. Not sleepy trancy, but like she wanted to go to bed immediately, despite it being 7 pm. She could barely open her eyes. I bet it was something to do with her brain going, “fuck this, I need an REM cycle right now to sort this memory mess out!!” I checked in with what she wanted, and we went into every one of our de-role-ing exercises to bring reality all the way back: counting together while tapping her leg, asking her questions about mundane things, and looking out the window together to see that the outside world was still there.

After about half an hour the sleepiness was gone and she seemed fully herself again. “That was edgy as fuck.”

When I asked how many cycles she thought we went through, she guessed a range, but came down on 5 - almost twice as many. She had the sense that I had been alternating, but had no hope of telling whether the real ones were the evens or the odds. We were both aroused, and somewhat frightened, at how much I had managed to warp her reality. “I think that was much stronger than you intended it to be.”

I told her, “We’re in reality now. I promise not to joke around about it or gaslight you any more.” If you do try hypnotic adversarial memories, it needs very extensive, very informed consent discussion, with someone who knows their own mind and responses well. Or a long term, very trusting CNC relationship like I have with khatsha. And allow time, and have the skills, for major aftercare. This is big stuff.

What’s next? I would like to try it again with slipping in one-time variations to the repeated scene, to see if the variation can be either erased, or mistaken for real.

But more broadly, her unconscious mind has now had the experience of having her reality completely fucked, and of creating memories according to my instructions that should couldn’t tell apart. If khatsha thought she was mine before… now she’s really mine.

Why I Avoid Third-Order Consent Policing

Whenever I write this, you're going to think I'm writing about something going on right now. I promise I'm not! I outlined this over a year ago. And I kept not finishing it for this exact reason. It never seems to be the right time, it is always going to be taken as speaking to some current firestorm. Literally every time since I first thought of it.

But it's clogging up the other things I want to write, so I'm just going to do this.

First-order consent policing

First-order consent policing is something I'm strongly in favour of. That means, if you have the power to do so, banning, officially warning or otherwise sanctioning people who have violated consent. I've written how I think it's absolutely essential to the health of an event or club, and how I think organizers have the responsibility to make those painful decisions, which often have uncertainty and personal loyalty in the mix. But you have to do it.

Second-order consent policing

This is policing about policing. That means criticizing, boycotting, or otherwise pressuring people who have the power to do first-order consent policing, to do better. Examples include pulling out of vending at a con when they refuse to ban a dangerous person, or PMing an organizer about a problem with their consent policy.

This one I think should be approached with caution - although I've done it, several times. Caution because there's almost always more behind a decision than you know about, including often information they are not allowed to share because of confidentiality. This information might change your own judgment.

Plus people make mistakes, especially with all the distractions and energy drains around running an event. So it should be done with empathy. But, sometimes, for the sake of people's safety you have to call out someone's first-order policing, or warn people away.

Third-order consent policing

This is criticizing or pressuring people about their second-order policing. So yelling at them for things like: not participating in the boycott of a con. Not ostracizing the partner of a bad consent enforcer. Not offering their own statement publicly criticizing organizers when a lot of people are.
I avoid this as much as I can, and here's why.

First, making a point of doing this would instantly alienate me from a lot of friends. I don't stay friends with predators, but a lot of my friends don't share the same opinions on how predators should be detected and handled (that is, opinions about first-order policing). Therefore they might choose to support an event that I consider unsafe. People are all over the place on these issues, people who care just as much about preventing consent violations as I do.

Second, it's very abstract what good it does. Second-order policing tries to get organizers to act on consent violations better. Third-order policing could, I guess, help to organize a boycott by getting everyone on board? What exactly is the effect you are trying to achieve?

(note that when organizers commit consent violations themselves, this is a very different story - the term "third-order policing" only applies when organizers are only accused of bad consent policing)

The pressure is very diluted by the time it gets all the way down to say, the person who is directly doing harm. The irony, though, is that you are much more likely to get a reaction to your call-out, when it's to people who are almost completely in agreement with you. People who have values and who struggle mightily with these tough moral questions. Whereas Wolfie McDompants, who is actually assaulting people, could not give a shit about your criticism. This is a dangerous seductive quality of the third-order call-out, that it feels like you're doing something, because it gets a reaction. It has a yummy gossipy feeling to it, whereas condemning rapists feels like shouting into a void.

Third, it really has the effect of dividing the community. Often people say that to shut up accusers, but in this case I think it applies. We shouldn't let ourselves get sorted into teams, or camps, based on who's boycotting which event. People are going to have different opinions about how to handle consent violations, or rather opinions about opinions, and we can co-exist. When someone who did a bad job of first-order policing doesn't have that power anymore, they are not in the category of actual consent violators, and even less so their supporters. And people may have reasons you know nothing about why they need to stay silent or need to attend something.

(that doesn't mean I don't privately question people's judgment of course, especially in the marital bed, always the best place for talking crap. But not publicly)

We all have limited energy for conflict and criticism. I want to put as much of it as possible where it can do the most good - that is, reduce the most harm. And I think that is almost all first and second order consent policing, and almost no third order policing.

How to Get a Hypnosis Munch Off the Ground

I wrote these three bits of advice in reply to a thread about trying to start a hypnosis munch, reposting in case they might help someone else.

---

I have been involved with the Boston hypno munch group now known as BEHIVE for the past 5 years. Wednesday night we had 22 people, but for much of my history it was often very small.

First, keep on keeping on. You have to be ridiculously consistent, and accept that it's going to be small for a long long time. This is a niche kink, and these things take forever to get going anyway. The important thing is to make whoever shows up feel like this is the place to be, this is the party, and to be glad they came - phrases to be avoided at all costs are "I guess this is everyone who's coming?" and "It's weird, where are all the people who RSVPed..." One that that has helped is thinking of it as personal relationships, and reaching out to the people who are becoming your friends in the days before the event to let them know you're excited to see them there. But you might hit critical mass of nice, charismatic hypno enthusiasts, as we did, or you might not. If you're going to do this, you have to take pleasure just from the fact that you're meeting and hanging out with people who get your kink, even if it's one dude, and to realize that no matter how small, every time your event connects two hypnokinksters in real life you are stacking a building block towards something wonderful.

Second, it's very possible that there are barriers to coming or enjoying themselves that are invisible to people in your demo and mine (older straight white cis men) . I would seek out at least advice, and ideally equal co organizers, with real power to override decisions, with quite different perspectives and lived experiences. No matter how well read and alert we are, there's just no way to avoid blindspots through not having lived it. The biggest thing is that femme folks are going to be hyper watchful for whether you are going to creep on them, and how you as an organizer will handle things if they get creeped on by other attendees. Messing that up is where you have enormous potential to lose people and stunt the growth of your event. Two concrete things in that direction: have a consent policy, and believe consent reports the first time, without any second guessing of the reporters judgment or actions. Then take action based on them.

Finally, and this is very hypno specific, let people see the thing. We're lucky that our kink can be practiced in semipublic without getting unwanted attention, or violating bystander consent. (for one thing our kink is protected by a cloaking device of "that looks like some new age bullshit, or possibly an improv class") So put the effort into finding a venue where you can have a bit of privacy, like a restaurant back room or quiet corner of a large coffee shop. This is very difficult! (dying franchises and old legacy restaurants are your friend) but as soon as we did events got way more exciting and fun. Having some structure to ensure that stuff really happens was a huge leap too. For some this is a planned class. For us, it was the koala box that made things completely blow up: that is, pulling pieces of paper out of pringles can about what people would like to see demonstrated and then asking for volunteers to top and bottom. It's less hierarchical and more participatory than having a designated teacher, and this probably works better for some attendees and worse for others, but helps to make the flavour of BEHIVE. Keep in mind that there will be munch attendees who are uncomfortable watching hypnosis scenes, even ones that are not explicitly sexual, so it's a good idea to "wall off" the practice part and give people a chance to gracefully make an exit before then.

Good luck! This is what I do with basically all my free time, and it's giving back so much. I had a vision of how big and thriving Boston hypno could be, and it only took literal years for us to get there. But I enjoyed every step of the way, and I think that made all the difference.

Kinky Mohawk Girls

So I’m watching this fun and flirty Canadian show about four young women on a Mohawk reserve near Montreal. For real!

It’s great! And episode 5 just introduced a thread where Zoe’s sexy internet hookup asks the character what she likes in bed. And she thinks about it for half an episode. And she says, “You know what I’d like? I’d like a break. From all the responsibility. And decision making.”

And then she says, “I have to go!”

What follows is the best version of consensual D/s that I think I’ve ever seen in a mainstream source, obliterating all memory of 50 Shades and even surpassing Waitress, all the more incongruous since it’s lit and scored like a CW or NBC show. And it’s hot!

I was like, this is awesome, but this is just going to be like a little adventure, like Sex in the City, right? Even when the next episode has more:

I figure we’ve got one more episode then she’s going to shake it off and realize she’s vanilla after all. Still, pretty cool! So I tried to find the clip on YouTube, and look where we are by season 4:

Damn Canadian television, you are killing it most unexpectedly!! She’s Mohawk, and a lawyer, and kinky, and all those things can coexist.

I am watching every episode.

(psst for now you can illegally see that episode here)

The Cracked.com Cartoons that Changed Me

This Cracked article from 5 years ago by Winston Rowntree, 5 Reasons Your Online Dating Profile Isn’t Working, in particular the cartoons, stuck in my head so well that I spent an hour looking for it just now. I think about some of these all the time, and I sincerely think they made me a better person. Like

And

and

And this one from another article:

Damn. This guy is uncommonly thoughtful and compassionate!
Here’s his Instagram and looks like there’s lots of other good stuff on tumblr

Into the Woods, Then Out of the Woods, and Home Before Dark!

You've changed
You're thriving
There's something about the woods
Not just
Surviving
You're blossoming in the woods...

- It Takes Two, Into the Woods

This weekend was DeepMind Darkwood, the erotic hypnosis retreat in western Massachusetts. It was the second time I've gone. My last time was 5 years ago. A lot of stuff has happened in that time!

My first time was within my first year of knowing that hypnokink exists, and it was my first hypno con of any kind - I wouldn't go to my first NEEHU until the following March. I was in way, way over my head. I came in without any play partners or good friends, I had barely ever hypnotized anyone, and I was just freaking out most of the time. (I looked up my old blog entry to remember the date, but I don't dare read it!) I still found it mindblowing and valuable, but this time I was so much better positioned to dive into its cultish charms.

This time I knew so many more people, including close friends from the Boston scene (thank you again DigitalSwitchGamine and AndSleep for the ride!) and most of all I got to share it with my wife khatsha.

40 people in a wooden lodge in a big clearing in the woods, 36 hours, no classes, mostly collective activities. There is nothing remotely like Deepmind. Every year LeeAllure and MrDream set out to engineer a very specific atmosphere, that might not work for everyone, but which I found both cozy and invigorating - a wonderful invitation to relax, open up, and try new and scary things.

Scary things: yes there were still occasional moments of anxiety and missed connections, and we certainly put to use our couple skills of calming each other down (that get heavily exercised at every con - cons are the greatest, but also stressful!). But we came out having learned new things about ourselves and each other.

Some of the best moments, and achievements of Lee and Dream that I want to call out:

• Opening and closing ceremonies. Simple yet lovely, they grounded me in the present and made me feel connected to everyone.
• Something called the word cloud (?), which is hard to describe but involved people running around in the dark on the lawn yelling things that are part of hypnokink like "DOLL PLAY!" or "ORGASMS!" and it gave me warm feelings.
• Speed trancing! I'd avoided that in the past at NEEHU, but now that I've done it, I see it is genius the way they set it up, and we are going to steal it for BEHIVE. I had so many great hypnotic encounters and so many good conversations in a short span of time - each one only 6 minutes.
• Plentiful and delicious food along with cozy communal dining, signalled by a dinner bell that brought me right back to summer camp.
• Breaking into groups and creating group trance activities, for three of the modalities, which took up the bulk of the day on saturday. It's really striking how little there was that felt like a class, and it made me realize how I can sometimes get into passive, cautious, overintellectual mode sitting in classes at Charmed, NEEHU etc, rather than putting energy into creating new things, both 1 on 1 and in groups. Deepmind insists that you come to do.
• For one such activity, digitalswitchgamine's droning collective "sound bath", which definitely felt just as cultish as I wanted the weekend to be. Any lost tourist happening up the road just then would definitely have been justified guessing they were were about to see or be part of ritualistic murder.
• Outfits! So many people brought their A game and showed just how alluring they can be. The 15 minutes it took for two of us, using half a tube of lube, to get khatsha into her latex dress? Well. Fucking. Worth it.
• My performance at (alcohol-free) dizzy bat, which I can confidently call the worst ever, wherein I ran in a tight circle and fell down possibly having recrossed the starting line
• Gorgeous weather. That wasn't their doing (I think??), but we got lucky with a couple of perfect golden September days outdoors in Massachusetts. Even the route there and back was beautiful.

Amidst all that khatsha and I got to watch and do some wonderfully twisted and pleasurable scenes, and enjoy many quiet moments of togetherness with likeminded pervs.

Thank you to the organizers, the volunteers, and everyone who came and made it so special!

When We Said Our Default Is To Believe Accusations, We Meant It

In the BEHIVE consent and conduct policy, we wrote "Our default approach is to believe accusations unless there is powerful evidence to the contrary." This caused some consternation and objection from one person. He compared it to the satanic panic of the 80s and falsely imprisoned anti-war activists of the 1960s.

Later, he backed off and apologized, saying "I have been reassured that the statement means that any and all accusations will be taken as seriously as possibly and investigated, thoroughly." Another observer agreed, "With some very subtle changes the meaning could have been more clearly presented to eliminate any confusion."

We did not mean that. We meant what we wrote.

We don't intend to conduct investigations.

We are not investigators.

We don't have the training. Or resources such as background checks or ability to subpoena evidence. We have no desire to build a formal investigative procedure. Not to mention that in the case of consent violations, legalistic questioning is often retraumatizing, and sharing information with the accused can put the accuser in danger.

Even if we could conduct thorough investigations, in most cases there would remain a fog of uncertainty. Very many consent violations don't have witnesses except the people involved.

With all the information in the world - which we will not have - you still have to make a call. And we choose, by default, to make the call to believe the accuser.

This is different from the legal system! It makes sense that the legal system should require an assumption of innocence, with the burden of proof on the accuser. We do not. The key difference being, and I can't stress this enough, that one involves going to jail, and the other, not getting to go to a dinner.

Positive, lively kinky atmospheres are so fragile. I have seen them wither and die because of only a couple of individuals, and those events continue on, dead. Zombie events. I've seen people show up at an event, smell the decay, and turn right around and walk out, never to come back. And that's a good scenario, compared to the one where an event becomes a hunting ground for serial predators.

We built the BEHIVE executive, and started our jobs, ready to fight for the atmosphere. The need to deal with consent violations and creepiness doesn't take us by surprise. That would be like a hotel manager not being ready for shit-clogged toilets - it's a horrible part of the job, but it's the job. And since all of society is weighted towards dismissing assault reports, the best way to do our job, and deal with that shit, is to believe accusations, the first time.

That said, of course we're going to use our intelligence. Even though we don't consider false reports to be a big problem relative to actual cases of assault (when it comes to rape, the Journal of Forensic Psychology estimates about 20 true ones for every false one, and that's based on law enforcement reports), it's happened. And of course rules can be gamed, consent rhetoric can be weaponized. (and if you don't believe that, you've never seen someone accused of an assault turn around and accuse the accuser) So nothing is automatically triggered by an accusation. We make a decision by having a discussion, and then taking a vote.

That vote is among the five of us on the executive. Three are femme, and three are people that primarily bottom. That means that even if I turn out to relate a bit too much to an accused person who is like me, an older male dom, I can be outvoted. By people who each have more than enough experience with being creeped on.

All this is designed to weight things towards believing accusations, and taking action. If this stance rubs you the wrong way, start your own club! I'm serious about that! All you have to do is click "Create new event", and then call a restaurant.

The only other part is, who will show up? My friend Jukebox says, if you don't ban consent violators, you are effectively banning the people they drive away. Will you be left with just the thickest-skinned event attendees? The ones who are not from any vulnerable minorities? The ones we banned?

For the people we most want, hopefully this all sounds good, but words are not that useful - watch our actions. Over a long period of time. If you make a report, see how we react to it. But here are some actions the BEHIVE exec has taken in its first six months, besides write a consent and conduct policy:

• We've added three previous munch attendees to our ban list, and sent one official warning.
• We created an anonymous reporting form, and we've discussed reports at every executive meeting.
• We created Google docs to accumulate reports and observations about people, even minor ones, so that people can be banned for patterns of subthreshold behaviour.

A different person, who has never been to one of our events, wrote to us: "I think that your group is very concerned with rules and laws and control, and not so much about considering the humanity of people." I disagree: I think that we are using explicit rules and laws (which include, by the way, such laws as "Be nice") to express our intention to protect the humanity of our spaces. It's an agonizing, painful thing to ban someone, but not to do it is to fall into geek fallacy #1, and to fail the amazing people we might not even get to meet.

We are doing our absolute best not to make mistakes. But, inevitably, we will. We're going to ban people who shouldn't be banned, and not ban people who should be. All this is just to say: we want to risk making more of the first kind of mistake than the second.

And that's what we meant.

(this is a personal essay, not a BEHIVE statement, but it was read by the other four executive members)

NEHG Is Now BEHIVE

This was written collectively, but I sketched out the first draft, and I'm particularly proud of the part about IVE.
----
NEHG has a very exciting announcement: we’ve officially changed our name to BEHIVE! Please join the new Fetlife group. You don’t have to rejoin the mailing list or Discord server; we’ll rename them both accordingly.

That's

Boston
Erotic
Hypnosis
Initiates,
Virtuosos, and
Enthusiasts

Why the name change?

"New England Hypnosis Group" hasn't been a good fit for us for a while, for a few reasons:

• With very few exceptions, we organize events in the Greater Boston area. People come to our events from all over, and once in a while we will do something outside of Boston (like help organize the hypno lounge at the Winter Flea in Rhode Island), but the Boston area is our home base and the core population we serve.
• We would never want to appear to supersede totally independent (and awesome) New England groups such as New Hampshire Hypnokink or HypnoRI.
• It's confusingly similar to NELA, NEEHU or NEDS. (That’s New England Leather Alliance, New England Erotic Hypnosis Unconference, and New England Dungeon Society.) We’re distinct from all those groups, although we remain a NELA Special Interest Group, and will keep collaborating with NEDS.
• The old name didn’t include “erotic.” We also considered "kinky," and "recreational," but we want people to know what to expect: you're probably going to interact with people who find hypnosis at least a little sexy. You aren't required to feel the same way, but you may see demos of erotic triggers and trance experiences, and you're probably going to hear conversations about how to use hypnosis to enhance eroticism, how hypnosis fits into a framework of consent, and how many of us had our sexual awakening because of that Scooby-Doo clown episode (it's a lot). We’d also never want someone to come to the group thinking it was going to be about hypnotherapy or vanilla stage hypnosis.

Nothing else is changing except for the name. The current executive committee has been running the organization for six months, since leadership was transferred by the previous leader, DeCordazon, in February of 2018. In those six months, we have posted and run 18 events, including:

• The Cambridge munch
• The additional weekday "munchkin"
• The revival of the study group (thanks, @DeviantSimian!)
• A class taught by Wiseguy, presented in collaboration with NEDS
• A presence at the NELA summer Fetish Fair Fleamarket
• The Hypnosis Lounge at the 2018 winter Fetish Fair Fleamarket, with 150 attendees

At munches alone we've had 231 visits by people all told - a minimum of 13 every time and the biggest headcount at a Boston hypnosis munch so far (27 people!).

Also in that time, we've initiated some changes such as leadership by a five person executive committee that meets at least every month, a constitution with a voting protocol, a consent and conduct policy that has been used as a model by at least one other group, a Discord server, and a monthly email newsletter.

A bit more about the IVE part:

Initiates are anyone who has the courage to walk through that door to a munch or study group, to take the first step of joining the IRL hypnosis community. That's a huge moment! We all went through it. Our focus is on you and making that experience as welcoming and awesome as possible.

Virtuosos are whoever is working on developing their mojo as a hypnotist, hypnotee, or both. (And initiates can be virtuosos!) Erotic hypnosis as an artform and a community thrives through mass creativity, and everyone has something to share and teach.

Enthusiasts are all of us who are enthusiastic enough about erotic hypnosis to go out and meet people (even if just on Discord or FL!) As long as you can follow our consent and conduct policy, we want every possible voice.

We have so much stuff planned for our first year as BEHIVE, and we're so excited to do it with you.

Welcome to the BEHIVE!

For a Fetishist like Me, Hypnosis is Sex

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Me and Hypnosis and Competency Threat

I’m not a very good hypnotist. That’s just true. My wife is getting ready to argue with me on this. And even a couple of other people too. But they are wrong.

How do I know they’re wrong? Because I’m not working to get good.

We’ve been hanging out with some lovely shibari people recently, people on a very high level, and it always hits home the level of commitment that goes into a rope practice. Especially the most spectacular manifestations, like suspensions. I don’t know the number of professional rope teachers and dojos around the world, but I bet it’s staggering. People move to Japan for months just to learn.

The other night, I and another hypno top made ourselves quite grumpy while getting taught an intermediate single column tie. We realized it had been a long time since we were really bad at something. Since we had to work. I found myself pulling back, talking myself out of wanting to learn at all. Our little focus group has a mission of exploring hypnosis and rope bondage, but it’s in danger of going away if I don’t commit to being more than a beginner at rope.

And I thought why should I? In the last week I got to show off hypnosis in front of a couple of groups of people, and it was easy and I got praise. I got to feel like a badass.

But really, people love the feeling of hypnosis, and my partners and their powerful imaginations (and fetishes!) are making the magic happen. If everyone knew how easy it was, if hypnosis was even a fraction of how popular rope is - let alone something like classical music or Super Mario speed runs! - my skills would be seen as mediocre at best. The fact that it feels easy is not really a good sign.

There’s a few things I think I’m right on track with: Working with first timers. Consent conscious negotiation. Some twisty evil scene ideas. Intimate, unhurried scenes with highly motivated and imaginative people. Engineering positive environments for other people to get their hypnoplay on.

But I can feel myself getting cautious with my abilities, as though they are flimsy and wouldn’t stand up to bending or stretching. I’m not watching instructional videos, even ones recommended to me by friends. I’m not reading a book at the moment, and I’m not going hunting for new sources of ideas in various corners of the internet (e.g. reddit, discord). I’m writing less - certainly not keeping up the detailed logs I did at the beginning. Although I hypnotize people several days a week (usually khatsha!) I don’t do hours of hypnosis a week. I’m not following around hypnotists I admire and studying what they do - in fact I’m a bit avoidant and intimidated.

And in particular I’m not doing deliberate practice on specific skills, the kind of practice everyone agrees is necessary for real mastery, like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. There are plenty of skills I could use work on. I don’t have a decent hypnotic handshake - I’m often out of my body and not good at using it in general. I’m lacking in almost all the skills that stage hypnotists and street hypnotists have, such as speed, showmanship, and quickly getting attention and rapport. I’m not very fluent - I pause a lot, and have a rough time with intricate wordplay and random confusing nonsense. My voice could be improved a ton. I’m not great at asking people to play. I’m still often so freaked out just to be doing hypnosis with someone that I think I don’t truly connect with them and stay in the moment, give them my authentic self.

I’ve hit a wall that’s all too familiar, when I start to get kinda good at something, enough that my ego gets tied up with my competence. The fear arrives: what if you’re not that good?? What if you’ll never be good? You’ve put so much of yourself into this - wouldn’t it be better just to not to find out? To just keep having “potential”?

On another, more legitimate note, do I really want to make hypnosis about achievement and skill building? This is my sex life. And this is my play: this is about spontaneity and joy and silliness and ridiculous science fictional scenarios. This is my submissive hypnotized to blow me at a single command. This is living the dream. Why should this be work?

Here’s why. I think there’s something there, over that hill: a chance to be part of building something that has never actually existed before, in the form of large-scale hypno community and high level hypnosis skills. A chance to be one of the best in the world at something, however tiny the pond.

Who gets that kind of chance? Besides which, spontaneity, play and creativity are not the opposite of practice and learning - take the examples of fiction writing, or improv comedy. In those you practice and you learn to be able to play better, have a higher hit ratio, go farther into it and sustain it. While still striking out a lot of the time!

The only obstacle is this competency threat, this hangup that is such typical baggage of being raised male. Especially the stirrings of competitiveness, which is so useless: what this is really about is getting to the point where I can jam with the greats, tops and bottoms and switches, have so much fun, be wide open to learning, make so many memories and invent new things together, expand the playground together and fill it with toys.

So that’s why it feels great to say: I’m not very good at hypnosis! I kind of suck! (And I really suck at rope!) But who cares?

There’s specific things I want to do differently, now that I’ve gotten here, but basically I’m going to be a doofus and work and put the time in, just for its own sake. Just for the pleasure of seeing myself growing, for the new territories that open up, and to get to watch other people growing too. This erotic hypnosis thing is going to be big, people. This is going to be bananas. I’m going to be there.

This Was a Real Nice Hypnolounge

Last week was the enormous Fetish Fair Fleamarket near Providence, Rhode Island, one of the biggest gathering of kinksters on the planet. This year it nearly didn’t happen, with the entire governing board of the parent organization NELA resigning just weeks before the event, but it rose from the ashes of that consent-report-handling scandal thanks to some people working their ass off, and I’m sure glad it did.

For hypnokinksters in particular, it had a bunch of neat classes by @theleeallure​ and @hypnoobiwan​, and the Hypnosis Lounge on Sunday, organized by me and @khatsha​. Hypno people are a cheap date - all we really needed was a bunch of chairs in a large room, but we also had a bunch of wonderful swirling lights, supplied by @tell-a-hypnostory, snacks, and a hypno tent by @digitalswitchgamine​ (based on @khatsha​’s brilliant insight that “hypnosis people are often claustrophiles”).

Over the six hours, according to the count of our greeters, 150 people visited!! That’s the size of NEEHU, holy crap! Besides promotion at the classes, I credit @orchid-girl​’s amazing poster and flyer, which we placed everywhere we could. And of course the coming hypnowave in BDSM.
My favourite part about the lounge is how kinksters walk right in all day, hoping to learn about hypnosis and maybe have a hypnotic experience. We had some wonderful hypnotist volunteers, very keen and very slutty, and that includes me. I tranced 6 or 7 people, which was nothing compared to @tell-a-hypnostory, @ragezdasta​, @hypnoobiwan​ and @digitalswitchgamine, who were absolute machines. In the end I think almost everyone went away satisfied - and more than one with their hypnofetish mutant gene newly activated! Many lovely and hot experiences with people, including making someone feel like they were breathing the atmosphere of Venus. I think my favourite moment though was when I hypnotized someone who was interested in switching, and then hooked her up with @khatsha for her first experience on the topping side. She did great, and besides the voyeuristic thrill, I got warm fuzzies seeing her imitate the very lengthy, careful negotiation I did with her.

Not everything went perfect - for one thing, the projector we had showing a spiral movie on the wall (specifically HX: 01) switched to showing my wedding video. I had to interrupt a scene real quick for that! And next year we clearly need more space, and more hours - a hypnolounge should not have the noise level of a high school cafeteria, or be so packed there’s a danger of floating arms smacking people nearby. We also need more stuff for people hanging around to do. Maybe we’ll have the hypno viewmaster set up next year for gif ratings. Finally, we didn’t do that well with connecting volunteer bottoms with aspiring hypnotists, which surprised me. Something else to figure out.

I love the flea, with the wild outfits in latex and leather (this year I didn’t dress up as Kylo Ren) and the feeling of absolute freedom and acceptance, but the lounge experience was unmissable. We are grateful to everyone who came, and especially to our amazing volunteers, including @undersleeper​ and @yoshibound​ and @sageturtle. After six hours we all lay around as exhausted and happy as the villagers after the clambake in the song from Carousel I’m referencing in the title (only @diaryofasnowflake​ got that). Although the actual song that was playing was Closing Time by Semisonic - no thanks to @digitalswitchgamine​ there.

And then we hopped in cars and drove back to Boston for another 3 hours of hypno fun at the reboot of the NEHG Study Group. That part was insane but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

I Support Furries

and if you’re a hypnofetishist, you should too. It’s objectively no more ridiculous and inexplicable than getting turned on by a swinging pocketwatch. With a different roll of the dice, all of us could have easily been furries too.

One of my best friends is a furry, and only found the courage to tell me after I told him about my hypnosis thing, after three years of working in the same tiny office together.

One of my favourite people I met at Charmed is a furry, and told me there’s a universe of hypnosis interest and innovation in that community that most of us have no idea about. The two of us will be collaborating on a project.

If your argument for stigmatizing people is “actions by specific furries are terrible,” or “furry culture is gross and busted in certain ways”, think about what you’re saying. Hypnofetishists are responsible for terrible things, and our culture is gross and busted in certain ways. (there was also an excellent post I can’t find about how furries support and respect visual artists in a way that almost no one else in our culture does - here’s an equivalent New York Magazine article) I know that some people are bothered by furries wearing their outfits in public, but like lots of other public expressions of sexuality and identity this hopefully can be navigated with mutual respect and tolerance - it’s not clear to me why it would fall into a different category than say age play, nudity, or the sometimes intense consensual-nonconsent scenes that can be seen around hypnocons.

I support furries and I want them to feel welcome in the hypnokink community.

On the Top Shelf

That morning you opened the fridge and saw a tomato sitting on the top shelf, at the front.

Something brushed across your mind about that tomato. But you shook it off, and bent down to get the almond milk.

Two more times that morning that tomato was there, right in front of you, and you felt troubled. But only for a moment.

Then, towards noon, you found yourself checking the clock regularly.

When you saw that the time had passed 12, you were sitting cross-legged on the couch in the living room and you realized there was something you had to do. "Just after I finish this important email," you told yourself. But you found your body standing up by itself. "Ok, I guess this is happening."

As you walked to the kitchen, your brain let you remember what I whispered in your ear last night, in bed, when you were deep in trance: That at noon, you would be compelled to go to the fridge and eat an entire raw tomato.

Knowing this, you tried to stop your body. You tried to turn around. But you were in the grip of a compulsion. You could feel how helpless you were compared to its power, like a giant powerful hand was moving your limbs.

You opened the fridge again and took out the tomato. Your heart was pounding. The first bite was the worst. Cold and squishy. But every other bite was also the worst.

"He didn't make me like raw tomatoes," you thought. "He didn't make it taste like something else." Instead, there was your arm, your jaw, your tongue, your swallowing muscles, all of them under my remote hypnotic control, forcing you to keep eating that tomato.

When did you start crying? Was it when you realized you were only halfway through, and there was so many more bites left?

Or was it when you thought you were finished - it was gone - but the compulsion riding in your head, that I put there, made you look at your fingers, see the pulp and seeds left on them, and lick them off.

Then it was over. Your muscles were back under your control.

You were a mess. You still had the taste in your mouth, even after rinsing it with water.

You messaged me on Whatsapp. You told me how much it sucked, and how wet it made you.

And I got a boner at work.

The Two Faces of Creepy Weird Guys

“Please, just block him. Or at least unfollow. This is not healthy.”

“No, I can’t.” she says, “It’s like my thing with spiders. I have to know where it is.”

There’s a new creepy weird guy in the Boston scene, and unfortunately my wife got on his radar, for a little while anyway. He went to a munch and afterwards messaged every person who he exchanged even one word with, including her, asking them to come to his new year’s party, which will take place in a motel room. “I just want to have a good new year’s!” he wrote.

When I say weird, I mean socially “off”, awkward, uncomfortable - which also describes half my favourite people. But then there’s the creepy part: acting like they are entitled to women’s attention, appearing to not see them as people, being very persistent and not taking implicit and explicit “no"s - or if they do respond, responding badly.

Of course many creeps don’t seem weird, in fact have great social skills, and they are the truly dangerous ones perhaps. But there’s always a few seriously creepy and weird guys floating around the scene - including a really bad one with the initials JC a couple years ago - and there’s something most of them share that I find particularly unsettling.

That aspect is these statements of, "I’m here to make friends!!” and “I’m all about love and positivity!” and “I just want to be nice to everyone!” Complete with lots of smileys. Many hopeful and positive messages on many groups, and under many women’s pictures.

But then as soon as things don’t go their way, it flips around, like the face of the mayor in Halloweentown, and they dump rage and self pity everywhere. Suddenly everyone is cruel and against them. Everyone is spreading lies.

My wife and her friend notified the munch organizers of the private messages, resulting in a gentle warning to this guy. Who responded with four long, butthurt paragraphs posted separately within minutes of each other on the munch thread.

What makes me unhealthily fascinated with these guys is that they do what I do, just really badly. That is, they cover up their yearnings and lusts and craving for affirmation with a happy social face. And they get disappointed and frustrated, when people don’t behave as they want. The difference is, I recognize that other people are just as real as me, and that the possibility of disappointment is part of that. And my social persona is way more convincing, and my disappointments and frustrations way better hidden. Reading their creepy timelines is close to comedy, and it’s close to horror - two genres that let us externalize our churning, unacceptable inner urges.

Of course it’s not funny, because there’s a threat: at the least, a threat of more creepy private messages, and maybe an escalation of bothering people at public munches, or at creepy events they create that naive people might respond to.

And when the tone of their posts begins to trend towards rage and grievance, the second face taking over, me and my wife both see the possibility of a much greater threat. I keep reminding her that the likelihood of violence is very small (even in America!). But on the rare occasions when something horrible does happen, I bet this is the pattern we see leading up to it.

This guy hasn’t yet done anything bannable according to the rules of the munch! And yet I find this pattern, of raging out immediately when things don’t go his way, to be such an enormous, frightening red flag.

Can you really ban people just for red flags? I don’t know. But if you don’t react well to criticism, especially the specific criticism that you’re creeping people out, you belong at the top of the list of people to watch very carefully.