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.