Plain Brown Wrapper Book Review: The Secrets of Hypnotizing Women

 

(barely visible: tiny hearts in her eyes)

Magicians have survived by generating notoriously sturdy constitutions, ignoring the shambling, tawdry elements that surround them, and focusing on the tiniest, most glorious achievements. The process is a lifetime of continually panning for gold. 

- Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear

I've run out of erotic hypnosis books. There's the ones I've already reviewed. Then there's Sleepingirl's The Brainwashing Book and Kinky NLP, Chewtoy's Erotic Hypnosis Scripts and Lee Allure and DJ Pynchon's The Amnesia Book, all of which I heartily recommend you read (but haven't figured out how to review since they're all by friends!) After that the pickings get slim - very slim indeed.

Why books though? Although there have been disturbingly accelerated attempts to scrub us from every major website and app, including the porn ones, there's tons of information about erotic hypnosis to read online, not to mention lots of terrific online classes, and now, even better, in-person classes - not to mention peer learning and hands-on experimentation.

But for me there's something about having a paper volume in my hands, concrete evidence that eroticized hypnosis exists and has for a very long time (at least back to Mesmer! As another book coming out someday soon will show!). And so I've accidentally tipped over into being a collector. The embarrassing fantasy is that even if the purge of the internet were to be completed, and all the private hard drives wiped, at least somewhere there's a bookshelf of forbidden material to show we existed - and to reseed the hypno perv community of the future.

So what's left? Mostly what I would call "plain brown wrapper books": sleazy paperbacks sold out of the back of male-targeted magazines, often shipped in brown paper wrappers like pornography. These go back at least as far as 1929, as this discussion of a Popular Mechanics ad mentions. The ads are often pretty sexy to us fetishists, heavily implying that you will gain some kind of nonconsensual influence over women, but they also paint a picture of real sad tragic dudes that they were hoping to sell to: “Don’t be unpopular, lonesome, or unhappy a minute longer. Now you can make your life what you want it to be — now you can win admiration, success and big money — through the strange power of hypnotism." I picture Red Dwarf's Arnold Rimmer, or Adventure Time's Ice King.

Even though hypnosis is real, these books probably delivered on their advertising copy about as much as X-Ray Specs or Sea Monkeys did, but I'm still fascinated, and now that I have my hands on a few, plan to read them and extract any valuable content. (and continue onto the modern, $1 e-book equivalent too)

The one was found by my pal sleepyhead, and has an odd pedigree, being apparently a new edition of a 1950 book by Ormond McGill that was sold out of the back of magazines, with 1999 revisions by Shelley Stockwell. I'd like to get my hands on the original, but it's easy to guess that the changes are mostly awkwardly inserted new paragraphs either about Stockwell's own experiences, or dubious neuroscience (at one point describing endorphins, dopamine and serotonin as "opiates"). 1950 is still strong with this one, e.g. "You're going to awaken in a few seconds full of vim, vitality and pep."  My copy was mailed by the hypnosis society Stockwell runs, apparently from a box in someone's damp basement.

The Secrets of Hypnotizing Women (1999) - Ormond McGill and Shelley Stockwell

Tone: Dated, sexist pickup manual, with some incongruous 90s-style pop neuroscience

Valuable for:

• Unintentional humour. The whole premise of the book, that there are special secrets to hypnotizing women, is goofy, playing out in statements like "Being mesmerized, especially by a charming man, is basic to [women's] nature" and "Women love authority and also to be gently soothed." One chapter notes that women have smaller brains than men and implies this makes them more suggestible, and also that women are all about feeling while men are about thinking ("Ask her what she thinks and you'll usually draw a blank stare"). Sometimes I wondered if the original author had ever met a woman, as when a female orgasm is described thus "She breaks into a warm sweat and then relaxes", or when it says "If she is suffering from PMS, why not hand her a banana and hypnotize her, then suggest that her brain now manufactures more serotonin?" (don't do this)

Then there is some pretty wild hypnosis advice, like that you need to learn to stare for five minutes without blinking, and that you should practice your commanding hypnotic tone on a chair, saying: "You WILL do as I tell you! It's no use, you MUST do as I say!" Here's the book's description of "a non-verbal technique called NLP": "To do this, look into her eyes; look down at her lips, look back into her eyes and smile." Another induction begins with the instructions to lift your arms above your head and stiffen your fingers, which I believe is also the way hypnosis is done by Bugs Bunny.

• Some stale, but valid hypnosis advice and language. There's a basic FAQ, some standard convincers, ok examples of patter in scripts, and an Elman variation. All just hasty sketches. There's a nice scene in one chapter in the form of an "experiment in thought transference" (unfortunately framed as a sneaky way to get women to trance with you). There are some nice phrases some of their subjects used to describe trance: "feeling passive", "placid and mellow", "filled with light or surprised by new perception". There was an interesting induction involving pressing on the fingernails, and I liked the advice to "Make your words delicious so that she wraps her mental lips around them." Another induction is based on eye fixation where you induce trance in yourself, timing it by your own eyes getting tired. However for each good point there's either something silly, or just one of those moldy old ideas that have held us back for years, like that there's a hierarchy of difficulty for suggestions, or some people are "good subjects" and some aren't.
  

• Nothing interesting about sex, that's for sure! Many readers, like me, must have turned to the Sex and Hypnosis section first, only to find hilariously weak-sauce advice like "Do it as she likes it done" and "Warm the pan before you throw the meat on". (how often do I buy a sleazy hypnosis book and find all kinds of filler in the form of tedious advice and observations about everything but hypnosis?) Then there's "taoist" and "tantric" sex advice that's too brief and ridiculous to even be  offensive. The only hypnosis is in the form of general affirmations to give your partner in trance, like "sex is a natural, normal, healthy, friendly, fun, playful and satisfying expression between lovers". It's wild to me that not only is there not a scrap of kinkiness, there's also not even the concept of turning your partner on via hypnosis, or making touch feel better, or making a fantasy more vivid. Those things seem so easy and obvious!

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 4
The first impression is cringe-inducing, a rape joke as a blurb on the inside: "The only trouble is that when the women wake up and find Ormond is not Richard Gere - wow is he in trouble!" It's at least lightly icky throughout, always assuming a straight male reader who wants to influence "delectable damsels". In one section it suggests winning her over by curing her substance abuse problem, or helping her "desire only slimming foods".

The authors make the familiar claim that the subconscious will protect the subject from any harm, so by definition no harm can be done to them in hypnosis. But then they keep going, further than most, to say the subconscious mind is actually better at reacting to threats than the conscious mind, "which often falls victim to to indiscreet reasoning, flattery and the desire for thrills"! Then comes the all-too-revealing warning that "the hypnotist is in far more danger from the sleeping girl than is the girl from the hypnotist", cautioning the aspiring hypnotist of the "unprincipled woman" who will attempt to "compromise you". Hmmm.

In more subtle toxicity, there's explicit endorsement of the patriarchal mode, advocating hypnotists wear high status clothes and "Assume the manner of a physician attending a patient: one of earnest concern and slightly impersonal" Aha, that right there is what we're up against. There's a sad overselling of the first author as a rock star, "The most famous hypnotist on the planet today, the venerable Dean of American Hypnosis", with multiple pictures of McGill hypnotizing forgotten TV hosts and movie stars. The sales tactics continue with a full 20 pages of ads in the back for the second author's tapes and books, including "Hypnosis: How to Put a Smile on Your Face, and Money in Your Pocket" and "Denial is Not a River in Egypt" (though I did enjoy her anecdote about learning hypnosis was real via an encounter with Pat Collins, the Hip Hypnotist!)

If you're wondering why it's not a 5 out of 5 - the bar for scuzziness in hypnosis books is high.

Hypnotic language example: "It is as though a heavy and dark cloth was being draped over and about your body."

The bottom line: Skip it except for history and laughs, or to see how some of the concepts and vibes that still circulate are seriously moldy oldies