Beguiled 2023: Cut to the Feeling

Beguiled 2023 was actually my third erotic hypnosis convention since the pandemic started to ease up, but the first one for which I've wanted to do a writeup (though I did discuss an unfortunate incident with silicone lube). The other two (Beguiled 2022 and Charmed 2023) I was basically white knuckling it: just trying to exist, without getting totally overwhelmed by the fact of other people, and ideally without getting sick. khatsha and I had spent a long time fairly locked down, so we were jumpy as hell. And not irrationally: each time, including this one, there was a positive test, and it touched my circle of acquaintances. I guess that's just going to be a fact of life.

But we didn't catch it, and none of those cons were super spreaders, and for that I'm so grateful to the leadership for maintaining the mask mandate in public areas, when almost everyone else has dropped it. This is especially important for making it more possible for people with health risks, including many of my friends. Visa and MasterCard think hypnosis is dangerous, but this community actually cares a lot about safety.

Anyway this was the first con that started to feel like old times, and like Kimmy Schmidt, it was a rush of joy to realize "It's all still here!" 

Not just the classes and hotel room rendezvous's with comet partners but the sleepy breakfasts in the hotel lobby with random tables of hypnokinksters, enscenic's banana bread and cookies, and all the happiness, gossip and emotional chaos. As Warren Zevon sang, back in the high life again!

We flew into O'Hare on Thursday night, and everything went smoothly, with that buzz of excitement as we said our first hellos and tucked in early. Friday I had a hot scene in the morning, and later two killer classes: Ella Enchanting and Inquisition's very creative Hypno-to-Go! Improv techniques for inductions and triggers without props or prompts! class, which included a "warm rising bread dough" suggestion, and the hilarious yet educational combo of Sexobsessedlesbian and Bunbunlittleone, doing Getting In Touch With Kinesthetic Hypnosis where an audience member had the audacity to say, "is the Jessica Rabbit/Roger Rabbit thing you two have going on deliberate?" 

I was part of a five-on-one cotopping scene, which was a beautiful thing not only for how dazed and fucked up we got the object of all the attention, but also for the chance to bond with my fellow hypnotists and observe their amazing technique. This was a new Boston friend in the bottom role, BTW, less than a year into the hypnosis, who, in a dazzling display of confidence, stepped off the plane at their first con with a  plan to recruit a bunch of tops they hadn't yet met for this scene. And it happened by Friday afternoon!

Then in the evening khatsha and I dressed up and I surprised khatsha with a special wedding anniversary trip to the place they always asked to be taken since they landed in the US, and I had always refused: Olive Garden. Just to see them light up was one of the highlights of the whole trip. It was also my first time, and I'll just say, it was truly a slice of the American experience.

Back at the hotel, we took a tour of the dungeon and various evening activities, including hearing some great karaoke by a pro singer we met at lunch. Then khatsha and I went back to our hotel room for some nasty, hypnotic, marital sex.

I felt so connected to my spouse, and so reconnected with the community and who I am as a sexual and kinky person. I wrote in my diary, "One of the best days of my life."

Saturday the toilet overflowed at 6:30 am, cutting into already precarious sleep plans, but even the surging tides of toilet water could not dampen the day! But I was already needing to ease up a bit. I had a very quiet middle of the day, including eating a sad hotel lobby sandwich by myself for lunch, though on either end were very good times with old and new play partners. 

Then khatsha and I had mediterranean food and did our usual Saturday night spruce up, before heading down to the Garden of Living art, which I've written about before but remains one of the most bizarre, fucked up, heartwarming things I've seen under harsh hotel conference room lights: stations of people in latex, frilly dresses, or nearly nothing, typically in a trance state, with signs next to them saying what they'd like to have done to them, or their hypnotic triggers for the event.

We met up with more friends and went to the awkward but fun "masquerade dance" - a kind of a prom for a lot of people who maybe didn't go to prom. There were shufflers and there were people who had serious swing training, and nothing in between (I was a shuffler, though I did have cool Tron glasses). Then some of us played some consent spin the bottle in a hotel room and got a relatively early night.

Sunday morning had a cozy hypnokinkster breakfast and a lovely impromptu scene with a new person to make up for one that was canceled due to the bastard Covid (though it was a false alarm). We went to a super goofy but great Tex Mex place as a group after, the type of place with delicious food but where the waiters literally play pranks. Both me and khatsha ordered jalapeño strawberry mock margaritas. 

We hit another class, Cheating at Hypnosis for Fun and Profit, by Sexobsessedlesbian. The good: being cited by name from the front of the class. The bad: what I was cited for "lazy hypnosis", e.g. suggesting someone feels super fractionated rather than doing all the work to fractionate them. Later in Ella Enchanting's fantastic unconference class about developing scenes inspired by porn, I also got a nod to explain how you can cheat to induce the emotion of a scenario rather than painstakingly simulating the circumstances (what a friend has since referred to as a Jepsen approach, after Carly Rae Jepsen's song "Cut to the Feeling"). Is this what my reputation is becoming?? 

We were able to catch these last couple of classes because there was a storm that made chaos in everyone's Sunday afternoon flights, and for a minute it sure looked like khatsha and I would be flying from Schaumburg, IL to Boston the next day via Minneapolis and Nashville! (the final schedule, through Atlanta, sucked but not quite so hard) The bright side was that we had another night at the hotel, so we could hang out. We swam, and I gave khatsha a new permanent posthypnotic trigger, always an exciting time even though their brain is full of them. And we joined an expedition led by Hypnobunny to a Japanese restaurant where a robot serves your drinks and sushi whizzes out on a tiny table-side train! Echoes of another epic hypnokinkster outing at Charmed 2022 to a Hibachi restaurant.

A last memory is randomly looking into the hotel pool and seeing a couple of mermaids swimming. Presumably, human con attendees. But just one of many moments of being in an utterly mundane setting, and getting to see something strange and magic. 

I was lucky enough to be returning to a city where there's tons of people intrigued with erotic hypnosis, and where my life is rich in love, sex, and other good things. Still I sure missed that concentrated high of a convention, with all the rockiness that comes with it (this writeup is far from the full story - they never are). And now each one is unbearably precious, each time I get to climb up to that peak, so far above the everyday, of excitement and togetherness.

I wanna cut through the clouds, break the ceiling
I wanna dance on the roof, you and me alone
I wanna cut to the feeling

 

Plain Brown Wrapper Book Review: Hypnotism Revealed

 

I picked this one to review next because it appeared in a classic 1971 hypno porn film called She Did What He Wanted. I freeze framed it and found the book! In this film a young man reads this book and through some experimentation discovers he can nonconsensually hypnotize several young women to fuck him. Everyone, honestly including the guy, is kind of charming and hot in an unselfconscious 70s way.

 

 

Why did they pick this book? Maybe because it's the ubiquitous trash mail order hypnosis book. Its history is not a history of a hypnotist, but rather of a salesman. As you can read on the webpage of the Wilshire Book Company, he's a mail order entrepreneur, who started at the age of 16 advertising in the back of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (that name again), first selling how to play chess books published by other people.

His first venture into publishing was a book called Hypnotism Revealed, which he wrote himself. "There's no money in having someone else publish your book," Powers explains. "I was a budding entrepreneur, so instead of getting a small percentage as a royalty from another publisher, I decided I might as well publish the book and sell it myself."

 

This makes me once again reflect on how hypnosis is real, but you'd never think so, based on how scam-adjacent it so often is. He wrote this when he was 26 years old, and judging by the contents, this book is mostly either plagiarized or pulled out of his ass. It's a large type 113 pages, with several chapters towards the end consisting literally of random press clippings about the usefulness of hypnosis, reproduced in full.

Powers sold it continuously through the mail new without changing a single word I'm sure, until at least 1977, almost 30 years, charging $1 almost the whole time.

I did not succeed in finding a full original ad for this book in Popular Mechanics, though I found this fragment with the same typeface:

 

And in the search discovered the oldest one yet, from 1913 - that's at least how long this grift has been running!

And the pitch is so familiar, with a clear lineage to the ads in backs of comics I read in the 80s. But I digress! What about the actual book?

Hypnotism Revealed (1949, but 1975 edition) - Melvin Powers

Tone: Stiffly authoritative, like an insecure substitute teacher working out of the textbook

Valuable for: 

• Some pretty fucking sexy 1940s high femme hypno modelling shots

• As you can see some pretty grabby convincers, including one that is hard to fake where you wave ammonia under their nose after telling them it's french perfume, and another where you stab them in the palm with a hypodermic needle.
  
  
  
  
• Not the worst basic eye fixation script ("the fascination method"), though I was amused that it later appears to suggest self-hypnosis via staring at a point on the ceiling while somehow also reading the script.
  
  
  
  
  
• Another reminder of just how old some and hacky some of our hack concepts are, e.g. the depth scale, "all hypnosis is self-hypnosis", a lot of patter such as "drifting and dreaming" (I'm still going to say that one, I'm the hack, it's me)
  
• Surprisingly decent advice for dealing with difficult cases ("refractory subjects") recommending that you "pattern in to the personality of the individual", focus on the pretalk, use fractionation, try rapid inductions, and try a kind of overload where they lie down and both a metronome and a hypnotic LP is played (only $5, send check or money order) On the other hand, uniquely among the books I've found, suggests "when all methods have failed" sodium pentothol injections! 
  

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 3

This thing is scammy and shoddy, but not as gross as the ones that seem to be about the author's ego. Besides the record, tries to sell you "the Powers hypnodisc spiral" ($1), "the Powers crystal ball" (50 cents), and a "sleep-o-matic" tape recorder that can replay the same snippet of self-suggestions at intervals all night. He encourages you to practice hypnotherapy after about 15 pages of large type insructions, everything from smoking, to alcoholism, to "menstrual irregularities", to speedrunning Freudian analysis. Despite where I heard about it and the photos, a minimal amount of sexism and implied predation, though like a lot of these midcentury books it's easy to imagine the beta-est male in the Mad Men office studying it intently.

Hypnotic language example: "Imagine that every beat of the metronome is saying, 'sleep'"

The bottom line: Spend that $1 on 10 lemon drops instead!

Though this should become a meme format: