Saturday, November 19, 2022

We've Been Here Forever. We're Not Going Anywhere.

Explicit erotic hypnosis pornography has been widely circulated for at least 142 years.

The year after he bought his first film camera, 1897, Georges Méliès directed a pornographic hypnosis film called Le Magnétiseur. (Yes, cinematic hypnosmut is older than A Trip to the Moon. By five years) That film is lost, but the next year Alice Guy, the first female film director, made the raunchy Chez le Magnétiseur, which you can watch.

One of the most well known stag films that has survived is called The Hypnotist, originating some time in the 1930s and featuring a POC woman hypnotizing and then fucking a woman and a man.

Hypnosis fetishism has been reported in medical journals since at least 1957.

To jump back, in 1784 Benjamin Franklin and other notables investigated mesmerism, and made a secret report for the king's eyes only about their concerns that hypnosis was Too Sexy. (Thanks to @GleefulAbandon for this story)

 
One of the most famous hard core porn movies of all time, Behind the Green Door (1972), prominently features a sexualized hypnosis scene kicking off the action (but first, mimes!)

Among the authors of erotic hypnosis smut: Leonard Cohen, recipient of the Order of Canada, in his 1963 novel The Favourite Game.

One mind control fetish story site, mcstories, has been run continuously for 26 years, apparently by the same person, and as of right now contains 14393 stories.

On the BDSM social networking site FetLife, as of November 2022 almost 20,000 people have added "erotic hypnosis" as a fetish.

Kink negative forces from both the left and the right (but most especially SESTA/FOSTA, and cowardly credit card companies under pressure from religious anti-porn crusaders) are trying very hard right now to scrub hypnosis fetishism from existence. A small flavour of things that are genuinely happening right now: AI being applied on a major pornographic websites to instantly detect and remove videos where someone is completely clothed, but dangling a crystal pendant! And just this week, "hypnosis" and related words have been censored as a search term on FetLife, and many are worried that all groups and posts with those terms in their names will be removed, as they were in 2017 after the search term was similarly banned.

But erotic hypnosis and mind control fetishism is not going anywhere. It is common, has been around since Mesmer (and probably a lot longer), is enjoyed by a wide spectrum of people, and can be practiced ethically and in a risk-aware manner, as much as any sexual or kinky practice, not to mention the fantasy side of it, which can be dark and disturbing but no more than the content of widely streamed entertainments - and is in fact fantasy. 

And someday the tide of censorship and stigma has to turn. And we can think about what each of us can do towards making that happen more quickly. Take comfort from these words of the poet Leonard Cohen: "Hey! My pants!"