I Like "Hypnokink"

I like the term "hypnokink" a lot, even above "erotic hypnosis", because it is a framing of hypnosis as kinky play, within the standards and conventions of the kink community - particularly the standards around consent.

People have been imagining and practicing sexually-charged hypnosis for a really long time. At least as far back as Mesmer himself, in the 18th century, and no doubt a lot longer, under many other names.

But the union of hypnosis and "kink" is young. I would be surprised if it is older than 30 years. The framework probably only really got solidified at mephki's gatherings around New England starting in 2009, which later evolved into the first pansexual IRL erotic hypnosis conference, NEEHU, in June of 2010 (the m4m HypnoCon started as much as 10 years earlier, but I haven't learned that much about it). Many of those people were also involved in the rope or impact play community, and so brought along those standards and concepts such as "negotiation", "aftercare", “safewords”, “drop" etc.

But the most transformative concept that came with kink is explicit, verbal opt-in consent: you talk it out ahead of time, and then only the things you have explicitly agreed will happen, happen. As my friend who was part of the Toronto lesbian leather scene in the 90s put it, you construct a box that the play exists inside. Even though people take on roles like dominant and submissive, or top and bottom, they negotiate those roles, building that box, as equal partners. A lot of life, including a lot of hypnosis that goes on, does not take so much care setting up those power relationships.

Another level of consent, that we also get from mainstream kink, is recognizing it’s possible for consent to exist even when it might be compromised later on, provided you use certain tools: altered head spaces are real, as in subspace or rope space, and the top should not try to ask for new things ("negotiating up") later in a scene, but you can have more extensive talks that cover everything that both parties want to do. Or you can explicitly discuss some version of blanket consent. All of this falls under the relatively new terminology of consensual nonconsent. This turns out to be extra useful not only for hypnosis, but for intoxication play and somnophilia - two other kinks that some people (and most online platforms) refuse to understand can be done consensually.

For people on this site, all these ideas might seem 101, but it's hard to overstate how much these were not part of hypnosis until recently. Foundational figures like Erickson and Bandler set a rotten example for respect for subject agency - they felt free to spring undiscussed suggestions on people in the name of helping them. Stage hypnotists are out there every night doing things that would be considered super edgy in our community, involving humiliation, memory play, gender play, and sexuality, with no more consent than "you volunteered to be on stage". The early days of online erotic hypnosis play, on places like CompuServe and AOL chatrooms, were pretty much the wild west, I have heard. These are crappy models, and we still see people in real life erotic hypnosis spaces, offline and online, emulating them.

(I am specifically not putting the blame on hypno/mind control fantasy fiction: even if it might put ideas in someone's head, like messaging a stranger a spiral gif and some text that's supposed to put them under your spell, or exploiting trust and post hypnotic suggestions to build an abusive "harem" of partners, the idea it's okay to do something like that for real comes from entitlement and lack of respect for agency - that’s all too modelled by the wider patriarchal society, besides real life hypnotists. Fantasy is not to blame)

I don't know where the term "hypnokink" was first used, but I believe sleepingirl’s Learn Hypnokink in just 2023 was the first to use it in a book title (there's at least one more book you can buy now).

But though flawed in some big ways, Wiseguy's first edition of Mind Play in 2013 was important for being the first book in print to bring a modern kink mindset to hypnosis, with sections on e.g. safewords and negotiating touch, and I’m grateful it set the new baseline. Since then many other educators have done amazing work in fleshing out how hypnosis, and even very intense scenarios of brainwashing and long term control, can be approached in a caring and consensual way. And many organizers have done the agonizing work to create safer spaces for consensual hypnosis play.

But it's all rooted in what came before in the kink community.

I am just beginning to learn properly about the modern history of kink, "kink" only being a standard, widespread term for a few decades - earlier, and in different communities, terms like BDSM, S&M or leather were more common. But I do know a few waypoints: I read in Secret Historian by Justin Spring that by the mid 60s there was a thriving gay leather community in San Francisco, developing ritualized practices in bars around dominance and submission. This continued to develop, and branched into the lesbian leather scene in the 70s, such as the Samois organization, which in the course of clashes with anti-pornography feminism which said that BDSM could never be consensual, developed much of the modern consent framework around kink (this pamphlet by them from 1979 is an extraordinary read)

A couple more waypoints: Safe Sane and Consensual was likely coined in 1983 by David Stein of GMSMA (Gay Male S/M Activists), in a somewhat unfortunate phrasing that nevertheless was a step forward and rallying slogan against the idea that it was always reckless and harmful. The early 90s were when people started to connect over their kinks on the internet, and it became much less exclusive to urban centers and gay and lesbian groups. And Risk Aware Consensual Kink was coined in 1999, and there’s some amusing suggestion that the “k” was just to make it a good acronym, but nevertheless suggests that the term was becoming widespread. The 2000s were when the concept of opt-in consent/“yes means yes” became popularized (and also when Fetlife was founded)

Ok that was very sketchy, and I’m happy to be corrected about anything I’m getting wrong. But the point is all of this is the direct lineage to the particular culture of the pansexual, global kink community I'm familiar with.

The idea of being in a community is radical in itself if you think about it: fetishes tend to come with so much shame, that they were (and are) so often practiced absolutely in private, with very little information exchange, even being rediscovered in every generation "from scratch". We have the queer leather scene to thank for the very idea of coming together and talking openly about these things, often in the face of great external pressure and internal strife.

It's easy to get disillusioned with community, when you see how it can be corrupted in various ways to serve selfish ends, not to mention taking tons of emotional energy, but it still gives so much, even if far from perfectly: people to meet, word of mouth about these people, normalization, ideas, skills, standards, safety knowledge, stuff to buy, fuel for fantasy, and, sometimes, organized political power.

I really believe in the consent framework developed by that kink community, to the point where I wouldn’t trust hypnosis without it. Plenty of people do practice sexy hypnosis outside it, but to me it would be like going rock climbing without gear that has been certified to a standard, or safety conventions that have been developed by the community over the years, such as the call and response between the climber and the belayer. All those standards and conventions were developed in response to really bad things happening, and predictable, really bad things eventually happen if you try to do without.

Our forebearers fought for the idea that lust for pain, control, and bizarre physical and mental predicaments could be pursued in a loving, respectful, risk-conscious way, and even though we hypno pervs have our own special concerns, the more we appreciate and connect to that tradition and what it can teach us, the better off we are. That's why I like hypnokink.