Brainwashing is a Commitment: Risk Profiles for Long Term Modification

Note: I drafted this before @sleepingirl's book on brainwashing came out, and I have bought it but not yet read it. I'm sure my thinking will evolve based on my reading, but this captures my thoughts at one point in time!

Brainwashing - or conditioning, training, programming, personality modification - is hot. It's really hot. How much porn have I watched, read, and occasionally written, about people being gradually broken and reshaped over time, obedience and trained responses permanently rewriting their mind?

There's fantasy, and then there's reality, and when it comes to making fantasies real, it's one of the edgier Things We Do. In the last couple months alone, I've read several accounts in my feed of people getting hurt from this kind of play. Orgasm conditioning having negative aftereffects when a relationship ended; an account of an online predator, who reels people in via videos and escalating submissive suggestions; and posts nearly every week in hypnosis FL groups asking strangers for help shaking off sticky suggestions. I also know two different firsthand stories of people getting hypnotized to sleep by their partner every night, and then getting insomnia when they broke up.

Of course lovers leave tire tracks across our brains, for better and worse. There's songs, movies, locations, turns of phrase, that force me to think of someone, and I even find myself copying past and current partners' habits and opinions. In that way, intimate partners are always modifying each other, and this is as it should be. But here I'm talking about deliberate tactics, often in the realm of hypnokink or D/s training, to get into a consenting partner's head and rearrange the furniture according to the top's plans.

I would never tell someone not to pursue their brainwashing kink - I have this kink, and I pursue it! But even when consent practices are excellent, I think long term modification play, for both the top and bottom, should be calibrated in terms of the emotional commitment with the partner.

By emotional commitment I mean something like, trust that the top will care about the bottom's wellbeing some ways into the future, and will listen to them and work with their needs. So this involves thinking about the level of commitment you have with a person, and where it falls on a spectrum. Which could range, from highest to lowest commitment, something like: Getting their name branded on you - marrying them - moving in together - planning an expensive vacation three months out - getting tickets to a concert together - co-owning a copy of Castaway on Blu Ray - sharing a 15 minute Uber ride. If you think about people in your life, you know where they are in that range. That can be a guide for calibrating the intensity of your modification play.

But what makes modification play "intense"? Here are my rough thoughts about what makes modification play higher or lower risk.

HIGHER RISK

• Involves addiction-like dependency (needing it to feel ok), especially addiction to the top
• Makes the bottom think about the top way more often than the reverse
• Happens on a daily schedule
• Triggered by something very common (e.g. stoplights, doorknobs)
• Takes away some important ability
• Modifies or is triggered by a basic human activity: e.g. sleeping, eating, having sex
• Could interfere with ability to consent or safeword (e.g. bimbofication, overpowering submissivness)
• Tries to fix a problem the bottom has with themselves (e.g. therapy)
• Escalates automatically over time
• Involves conditioning with negative emotions
• Changes core parts of the bottom's personality

LOWER RISK

• Bottom explicitly empowered to modify or cancel
• Limited to a particular time frame
• Tied to a particular location or object (e.g. the top's apartment, or a play collar)
• Has a very trivial effect
• If the top is brainwashing multiple people, the top is following good poly practices
• There's a plan to clean it up even if the relationship ends badly
• The modification can be explicitly reviewed and approved in advance (e.g. reading the script or listening to a file outside of trance)
• Roleplaying some elements of the brainwashing, or simulating them with temporary post-hypnotic suggestions, rather than really inscribing changes over hours, days and weeks.

Again these are my opinions, and people will differ on how risky these sound to them, especially the ordering within these categories.

They will also choose the mapping between the level of risk they want to take on vs the commitment they feel. For myself, I mostly stay away from any deliberate brainwashing/conditioning play except with khatsha, who not only has clear consensual-nonconsent agreements with me, but also long term public commitments that are understood by vanilla society (marriage) and kink culture (collaring). She's definitely the only one with whom I would play near the riskiest end of the pool, and we have precautions for when we go there, and plenty of places we won't go. As an example, she can't get off without my permission - but this only applies when I'm in the same room (so when I hear her sneak off in the middle of the night with the Doxy I know exactly what's happening!)

But that's us. The point is that you have to decide your risk profile for yourself, whether topping or bottoming for long term modification, and no one should push you on that - not even yourself, not even if it's really hot, not even if you're longing for it.

Of course even if you calibrate it perfectly, risk is risk. Hearts get broken. People aren't who you thought they were, promises aren't kept. There are excellent resources for how to clean oneself up from unwanted conditioning or post-hypnotic suggestions. But it's still going to suck.

That's no reason not to pursue and enjoy brainwashing, if that's your bliss. Hopefully there are some ideas in these lists about how you can start with the fantasy, and tune it up or down in terms of risk when it comes to doing it for real.

Letter To The Hypnotist Who Tried to Get My Wife To Go On A Surprise Date With Him Tonight

cw: short fragments of quoted hypnotic language, discussion of nonconsent

Dear fuckface,

Last night at 4 a.m. you sent my wife a message via Fetlife to try to convince her to go on a date with you tonight. The message started,

You ever just stumble into someone wonderful and feel yourself light up with attraction purely by chance? Where your pulse quickens and you don't even know why?

After attempting to elicit a state, you then went on to try to connect it to yourself ("Or maybe you do - like with me, a professional stage hypnotist in town overnight")

Then in the next paragraph you wrote a kind of sexual word salad, 73 words in one sentence, to create overload and attempt to produce arousal ("just the perfect tones that heal, and seduce, and entrance and enchant" etc), even wishfully walking her some of the way to a hypnotic orgasm ("... or bring you to cum with a touch on your ear. Or a whisper. Or a note. ... But probably not an email. That might be asking too much ;)")

Then you bragged about yourself for a while, and described yourself as "all the things you mentioned in your ad" (would that be her profile that requests "social justice and consent warriors, and owned vulnerability"?)

Then came the closer question. You're in town for two days only, and would like to offer her a "surprise date". And in a final, age-old seduction tactic, you asked "Are you down to carpe the fuck out of this diem?"

No, no she was not.

It didn't hurt to try though, right?

Yes it did. Here's how it hurt you to try.

There is a vibrant and growing erotic hypnosis community in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. It is full of hot, sexually adventurous women - including of the type whose pictures you love to love - who absolutely adore being hypnotized. A charming, skilled hypnotist could do well!

Except, Doc, for the fact that you tried to non consensually mind control one of us into going on a date with you. Right now, a bunch of people are getting ready to private message me to ask for your user name. You just eliminated your chances of getting with any of them, or their partners, or friends, and put at fatal risk your chances of going to any of the several erotic hypnosis conferences around the world, each with hundreds of excited hypnosis devotees (where you could have even learned something, expanded beyond dimestore NLP).

This is about trust, and you've shown that potential trance partners can only trust you to see them as an object to be manipulated.

What is a "surprise date" by the way? Is this a date where the woman doesn't know where she'll be whisked off to, which by the way means not being able to tell her friends where to find her? Or are you just too lazy to come up with something Boston specific?

You have set your bridges on fire. You have told the internet you can't be trusted not to use hypnotic language on people without their consent. You have proven yourself to be a predator, in easily screenshotted form.

This is not about me being possessive, by the way, even though I'm her husband and dom (and I actually do possess her). This is about my anger for you hurting the one I love most in the world.
She read your message over her morning coffee, and it had a little creepy effect on her. She shook it off, and used a safeword trigger. But for that icky awful feeling, of a stranger treating her like an object and trying to get into her head, and get her to meet him. For that, I'm not going to forgive you.

Hey, not to put you on the spot, you're not the only one out here doing this. In fact it's quite likely you copied and pasted the text off a website. You're typical. One friend of mine or another gets one every few weeks. This is gross PUA nonsense, that gives all hypnosis a bad name, by making people think it's about sad horrible creeps attempting to mind rape women they see as nothing more than holes to warm their dick on a Friday night. The kinky hypnosis community is scrubbing out this kind of truly nonconsensual manipulation, not to mention hackiness, and becoming a place for creativity and respect for agency, where people like you will never be welcome.

But I wouldn't be surprised if you wrote the message yourself, and are even pretty of proud of it. How many times have you sent something with a lot of the text of this message? Do you have it in a separate little text file, or do you copy it from your sent messages? It's bad enough if it results in pitiful failure like this time, but much worse if you had any success. What a delightful time, what a treat, that woman probably had on her surprise date, starting from this basis of treating her like a fuck machine whose buttons you just have to push in the right order.

This slimy bullshit has to stop. You need to stop sending your message. On Fetlife, people will be warned about you. And don't be surprised if word spreads anywhere else you hunt.

Fuck you sincerely,

Divney

P.S. khatsha says fuck you too

That Sneaky Feeling

Very often in my online communities a discussion breaks out about where is the line of consent when it comes to hypnotic and influential language. What kind of persuasive language requires consent? What about just charisma and good social skills? What if you've incorporated NLP principles into your communication style so much that you don't know where it begins or ends?

I honestly struggle with all these questions. I'm a bit sympathetic to the "I can't turn it off!" objection because I find myself unconsciously doing some things I learned, like avoiding negations ("I hope you feel more comfortable soon" rather than "I hope your pain stops being so bad"). Although the BEHIVE executive committee wrote into the consent and conduct policy from the start "Don't influence people without consent", we haven't defined exactly what it means to us or and when it isn't ok. There are clear cases I think, like when a PUA guy at a munch tried to get me into a Yes set, ironically about the topic of whether NLP was unethical, or when slimy messages arrive in my friends' mailboxes trying to get them to imagine sexy things being done to them, but there's a ton of grey area as far as evaluating people's behaviour.

When it comes to my own conduct though, it gets a bit simpler - there's a question I can ask myself that covers a lot of it. (This is not to preclude any kind of calling out of my language use by others) The thing you're about to say: Is it a "device" you learned from an NLP book or Zebu card? Could it be found in a PUA or salesmanship YouTube video? Does it give you that sneaky-smug feeling of intellectual domination, like you're floating up in the sky above them, pulling their strings as if they were an object? And whether it's for your own benefit or theirs, do you have consent for that?

If not, and you catch yourself on that, how about you don't say that thing?

And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things.... That's what sin is.
-- Granny Weatherwax

Book Review: Mastering Erotic Hypnosis by James Gordon and Rebecca Doll

Note: A quick way to get a feeling for the book and its contents for free is to go through the slides from Gordon and Doll's 2019 Charmed class.

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Mastering Erotic Hypnosis by James Gordon and Rebecca Doll (2019)

Tone: Opinionated clinical handbook

Valuable for:

• A framework for approaching hypnotizing first time subjects. They explicitly set out to let the reader "design your own inductions, tools, and presentation, tailored to your situation and needs", in fact to "make your own recipes". Along the way, they throw interesting shade on hypnotists in the community, "Often they work with only partners who are already highly suggestible and do not understand themselves what they are doing." One big component is dividing people up into "direct suggestibles" and "inferential suggestibles", who need different techniques for getting into trance and receiving suggestions. They also talk a lot about creating a "hypnotic modality", meaning something like a readiness to accept suggestions due to strong rapport and expectation. Whether you agree with individual bits of theory, it could be a useful starting point, and rather than scripts the book is packed with building blocks like signs of trance, lists of vocabulary, etc.
• Grounding in history and scientific research of hypnosis. There is a large amount of useful history - often in the form of side bars on different figures, but also integrated into discussions of consent and technique. And scientific studies are discussed at appropriate moments. This is the only erotic hypnosis book that's remotely scholarly - the only one with end notes.
• A lot of content on hypnotic orgasms (26 pages!) and edgy topics such as ageplay, death play, and drug play that I either can't find in any other books, or at much less depth. If you're on the fence about committing to the book, I would at least recommend paging through these juicy sections in the last third.
• Nuanced and thoughtful discussion on consent in hypnosis. The book begins with 30 pages of discussion of this, including some forceful statements I agree with such as "if you feel like you have to invoke the 'you must have really wanted to,' card, you're definitely violating consent, and depending on what things happened, you may be, both ethically and legally, a rapist." There's a long chapter about the difference between doing therapy and doing BDSM that ends up with therapeutic benefits. There is more than one negotiation checklist, with blank spaces.

Things I didn't like so much:
They often wear a rhetorical cloak of authority, very much borrowed from the doorstop tomes of clinical psychology. The authors have as much of a claim to knowledge as anyone, having many hours of clinical training and practice, and convincing exposure to the history and science of hypnosis. Or as they put it, "These techniques are not ours. They come from more than two hundred years of scientific study, and include techniques and principles ranging from those developed by James Braid, Jean-Martin Charcot, Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Janet, Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and John Kappas." The latter is a hypnotherapist known for, among other things, treating and then marrying Florence Henderson from the Brady Bunch, and the founder of the Hypnosis Motivational Institute, now run by his son. It's an actual office on the outskirts of Los Angeles, offering $3000 online courses in hypnotherapy as well as in-person classes and treatment. That is Gordon's training, which explains why Kappas is lavishly referenced in the book.

So there is a halo of authority, but I found many strong assertions that were not strongly backed up: "We feel talk inductions are weak." "We very seriously doubt that hypnosis can cause car crashes" "Based on observation we strongly suspect that orgasm induced by hypnosis may involve greater prolactin release than masturbation, but far less than intercourse." "The typical physical component is a light touch to the forehead" "The typical deepening technique at this point is a slow countdown." There's a type of rhetoric here that tries to dress up "I tried this and it worked!" or "This is how we usually do it" as something more. @khatsha wrote about "competence posing" in hypnosis and how it has the potential to stifle innovation and participation by traditionally underrepresented groups. The book is pompously subtitled "A Comprehensive Manual for Erotic Play, Fetish, and Kink" (vol 1 of the "Comprehensive Mastery" series!), and this also strikes me as wildly premature - I think it's like writing a "Comprehensive History of Digital Computers" in 1960. They have advice about "establishing authority" with your partner: "[you should say] you have had training in that art because you have read a book which explained hypnosis in a scientific way. Eventually, you may wish to add other classes and certifications to increase both your authority and your perceived understanding of the paradigm." Later they say, "You won't succeed at hypnosis without carrying an attitude of infallibility into each session." I feel like they took this advice too often in writing this book itself.
That said, sometimes a human, playful voice pokes through that made me feel that they really do this and enjoy it ("Eventually Hot Pockets, too, are eroticized"). And in many places they express appropriate uncertainty or skepticism.

The musty mid-century psychiatrist tone comes out in some troubling sections about problem subjects, including one literally called "Working with hysterical subjects", advising tops to ask themselves is this person "prone to creating drama and disaster?" with an "attitude of martyrdom", warning they may find "an element of opposition and defiance towards the hypnotist". They also speculate intrusively on why people are the way they are: inferentials "were often raised in an inconsistent environment", intellectual suggestibles have "extremely robust ego-defenses", maybe masochists like pain because the first time they had sex it hurt. To their credit, though, they avoid "hero psychiatrist" stories.

The biggest obstacle for the average hypnokinkster reader would be the pages of cautions, side notes and nuances that become exhausting - maybe it's appropriate to touch on the unlikelihood of dying from hypnosis, but does it need 11 paragraphs? But a persistent annoyance for people in the community will be the clashing specialized jargon. They use "in state" to mean "in trance", "conversion" to mean falling into trance (and then later define "conversion" in a distinct technical sense), "challenge" for "convincer" and "reaction" for "fractionation". Who knows why we've settled on the words we actually use in hypnokink, and one set of pseudoscientific jargon is no better than the other, but I found it tiring.

Hypnotic language example: "I want you to think about the weight of your head on your shoulders."

The bottom line: Absolutely a sufficient introduction to erotic hypnosis from a kinky perspective, with unique coverage of hard core play, and it should be on every erotic hypnotist's shelf, if not with all its 400 pages read.

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If you found that useful, here are five more hypnosis book reviews.

Very Horny and Very Confused

When you wake up, you will feel very horny, and very confused.

One of the simplest hypnotic scenes I do, and one of my favourites.

khatsha wakes up, nearly incoherent, immediately reaching for touch. She might hump my leg, or start rubbing herself rapidly. Complex questions result in blank stares. "Want", "Please", and "Fuck me" are most of her vocabulary. A cock near her mouth is immediately swallowed, with a moan, or else she might strip down, climb on top and shove me into her pussy.

Sometimes I suggest she's too confused to know where she is, when she is, who I am. I might use language like, any thoughts that try to form break apart into a million shiny dazzling pieces, or that her mind is full of thick cotton wool, or that it's like when you wake up suddenly and are completely disoriented. Whichever, the one thing left clear is the need to fuck.

She is utterly unselfconscious, utterly uninhibited, and sexually aggressive. All of her mind is lost in sensation and need.

Clearly, this is a bit edgy. For one thing, for my consent and even physical safety. In a recent session she tried to fuck me without a condom, when I thought she was taking medications that could have interfered with her birth control (it turns out she knew that wasn't the case). And when she's bouncing on my cock in the middle of the living room carpet in this state, she's not exactly taking care with the angles and torsional forces.

That's why it's essential for me to have complete hypnotic control over the situation, and able to snap her out of it at any time, not to mention she must have good practice with her hypnotic safeword and other safeties. It also doesn't hurt to have some experience with what she's like in that state! Otherwise what is unleashed can be very unpredictable.

Even D/s doesn't necessary get through - once I told her in dom voice, "Follow me to the bedroom." After a minute of waiting on the bed, I went back to the livingroom to see what the heck was going on. She was riding a girl's thigh. She told me later, "It was right there... I think I just said 'I want thigh.'"

To be safe - or mostly safe - "horny and confused" takes a depth of trust and consent that is only possible over a long term hypnotic relationship, which is why I'm so grateful to be married to khatsha. The possibilities just keep getting wilder.

And also, how great is kink, and consensual nonconsent specifically? In vanilla life, if someone was to say, I like to get my girlfriend so drunk she can't put together a sentence, while I stay completely sober, and then fuck her, some people would be very worried. In kink that can be ok. And with hypnosis, she can come back to clear-headed with just a snap - sweaty, sheepish, and grinning.

Slut Tech: Consent-Oriented Games and Tools to Free Everyone's Inner Slut (Vol. 1)

Introduction

A sad thing I've seen in real life is a play party where no one plays. Everyone got dressed up, drove or Ubered to a sketchy building, signed a liability form, and are now standing next to a veggie plate, chit chatting. Many wishing something sexy was happening, but no one seeming to be able to get it started.

Also sad, and more common, are play parties where literally everyone only plays with well established partners. This isn't a total loss, since a new setting, with special equipment, can be a lot of fun. But I still think most non-monogamous people, as they lace up a corset or strap on a utilikilt, aren't thinking, "hope I don't make an exciting new connection tonight!" Parties should facilitate that adrenaline surge of making a new acquaintance and playing with them, or doing a new type of play with an existing acquaintance.

Enter slut tech, which is what I'm calling party games, icebreakers, hookup apps, whatever, that have the goal of assisting people to be as slutty as they want to be.

I have a lot of theories about why sex parties don't get started, which turn into rules for good slut tech. But I want to start with some usable, tested examples. We threw three activities on this list at BEHIVE's 10th Anniversary play party, with 46 people in a space for erotic hypnosis fun, and it definitely helped it to be a success - there were hot scenes happening everywhere you looked.

A final note, none of this is a substitute for getting the basics right: good invite list, good lighting, and a conduct policy that you enforce.

The Tech

Consent Spin-the-Bottle

This is a version of spin-the-bottle developed by @Twixtmynethers. I wrote a post about it, but essentially it's the high school version, plus a graceful out. People sit in a circle and spin the bottle, and if it lands on someone who's playing that person has to give three offer for things they would do for the bottle spinner. These can be as raunchy as it can get, including going off into another room and doing something, except at least one of the three offers has to be for something that doesn't require consent (and depending on the group, even a high five might require consent).

Consent features: Make sure people can enter and leave the circle at any time, ideally by just scooching back so there's a clear visual signal. People can avoid play with someone by picking one of the non-consent-requiring choices. It's important to set a standard of good non-consent-requiring offers - whether it's singing a song, doing a dramatic scene, or offering an extravagant compliment - and not make it just a checkbox (it helps to emphasize it doesn't have to be original and creative). This is more fun and, more importantly, helps the other person if they have to sell being excited about it.

Best for: Smaller (<20) gatherings with a lot of people who are into each other. Great for kicking off parties, because at some point it will naturally dissolve into scenes.

The Koala Box

This was developed at BEHIVE, and is the activity we do at every erotic hypnosis munch. Read the full description here, but essentially people stuff a box full of slips of paper with suggestions for things they would like to see demonstrated (at our munches, all to do with hypnosis), and then suggestions are randomly pulled out one by one, and volunteers are sought to top and bottom the scene. This happens in two stages, with the first volunteer, who is picked by the "koala wrangler", choosing their partner for the scene. If no one volunteers we move smoothly to the next suggestion.

Consent features: Raising your hand to volunteer is an active process, and if you don't it's ambiguous about whether it's the person or the suggestion you are avoiding (or maybe you're just taking a break). All trances are observed by the room, and in addition we have begun having an exec member assigned to carefully watch the negotiation and make sure it covers the bases, as well as that the subsequent scene matches what was negotiated (we don't usually point this person out).

Best for: When there might be a ton of less experienced people, but at least 3 people with the skills to top and 3 people with the skills to bottom. Still fun when sexual content isn't allowed (eg in a restaurant back room), and is particularly good at lowering the bar for observers to choose to cross over to their first experience as a participant.

PlayMail

When someone arrives at the party, give them an envelope, a marker, and a piece of tape. They write their name on the envelope and stick it onto a wall. This is their mailbox. Later, they can propose play by writing a note with the paper next to the mailboxes and putting it into someone else's mailbox.
Consent features: Put the wall of mailboxes somewhere out of the way, ideally on the way to the bathroom, so people can check theirs secretly. Then if they really don't want to play, they can leave the note in there, so the person delivering it doesn't know whether they saw it or not.
Best for: Medium to large sexy play parties.

Activity Matcher

This is software created by my brilliant wife khatsha, to be used in the days leading up to an event with kinky play. You access a website with a special password. For each activity, you select the party attendees you would like to do it with, including whether you would be up for topping, bottoming, or both. You can then get a report of every match you have: activities that a particular person would like to do with you. The activity list you use really determines the feel, but the one we've been using is very long, ranges from the lightest play to the most hard core, and is customized to have lots of hypnokink.

It is only in extreme alpha, held together with string and chewing gum, just enough for our parties, but it will be open sourced and coming to your phone soon.

Consent features: You only see the things an attendee has selected for you that match what you want to do with them. There is no notification about whether they have filled one out for you, so it's ambiguous whether they have no activities in common or just haven't gotten around to it. It should be emphasized to attendees that a match does not constitute consent: it is the beginning of a conversation. The database should be wiped between each event, since people's feelings towards each other will evolve.

Best for: A very sexy play party where a lot of the people know each other in advance.

Slut Tech theory

More than the specific activities, I want to get across the concept of slut tech: Of deliberate social engineering for events. Of learning and adjusting based on actual literal playtesting, exactly like people do for boardgames and video games. And of developing core theories and principles about what leads to more play, from which brand new activities can be developed.

But why do you need all this stuff? Couldn't we keep it simple, with a space and some invites and a couple of St Andrews Crosses?

Here's my theory why simple freeform parties often don't seem to work, despite many people longing to play with each other. It's that for each person, there is someone they most definitely don't want to play with. But who it would be awkward to say no to. And if they are seen playing with anyone, that person will definitely approach them (the "my turn next!" phenomenon). So it's easier to not play at all.

As a consequence, a sex party only really gets started organically in one of two ways. Either with the ultimate, perfect invite list, with everyone well balanced, into each other, and not creeped out by anyone; or by the presence of a handful of people I would call "resilient megasluts" (no gender assumed): they have a big appetite for play, they like most of the play they get, and they don't mind at all saying no or hearing a no. (By the way, vanilla sex parties lean heavily on alcohol or other drugs to shift attendees in the direction of being resilient megasluts)

Of course there's a third possibility: coercing attendees to be more sexual than they want to be. Besides the detail that it's evil, this leads to the practical dilemma of who will come to your next party, since many of your guests had a horrible shitty experience. If you are cold messaged by someone who always seems to be recruiting new people to their play parties, that might be why.

There's no guarantee of getting either of those first two conditions. So I let go of the fantasy of an organic orgy, great as they are, and put my faith in slut tech.

Because of the awkwardness of wanting to play selectively, I think the best slut tech has two important, symmetrical qualities. It lets participants:

• Approach people without risking an explicit no
• Avoid people or activities without having to say no explicitly

All of the tech listed above has those qualities, and I think that's where the magic comes from. Any new games and tools we pilot - and khatsha is working on some tech that will make the above look like the stone age - will start from those principles.

I heard one organizer say, his goal is to teach his attendees to be able to say "no". I think that's a good goal, but between that and the short-sighted goal of my party getting crazy, I choose the latter (plus I feel like femme folks get enough chances to practice saying no). My goal is to make it work better for that fat slice of people in the middle: they would love to play, but are not resilient megasluts, and so they could use a boost. Of course the event should also work for the people at either end of the thirst spectrum too, which is why there should always be a graceful way to not do the activities.

When you get slut tech right - as well as the guest list, setting, and consent policing - all kinds of people you never saw playing before are suddenly getting sexy. All kinds of connections you never expected are happening. And the gloating goes on for a week.