My Complicated Hypnofetish

I started to write this as a response to this DeviantArt journal entry by Zombieslavegirl, but the comment got so long that I decided I might as well edit it a little, expand on it, and turn it into a journal post of my own. You see, Zombieslavegirl talked about her conflicted relationship with certain DA accounts, and about how she as a bisexual woman experienced the online hypno-community. 

I recognized a lot of her thoughts. Not ALL of them… there were parts of her post that didn’t match up with my opinions and experiences… but quite a number of them did. I myself have had some conflicting thoughts about my own hypnofetish, and the hypno-community. I think I have mostly worked it out by now, but it was a bit of a bumpy ride before I got there.

So, to explain, I’m going to have to bore you with a bit of personal history here. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, and I won’t mention any names or even talk about individual experiences. It’s a very general recap:

I’ve had a huge hypnofetish since before I was old enough to know what a fetish was. I remember being as young as five or six and being TOTALLY INTO IT when the characters in TV shows or books or comics were hypnotized. I was around 18 or 19 when I first discovered the online hypno-community, and I spent a LOT of time lurking in utter fascination. Reading stories and chat longs, looking at artwork and comics. Before actually taking the step, joining a chat room, starting to talk to people… I may have gone a little overboard with it for a while, and while I met and talk to a number of really lovely people…. I met my fair share of those who didn’t hesitate trying to take advantage of a naïve and inexperienced 19 year old. 

Like I said, I’m not going to go into details. I’m not going to share any of the individual stories. But some of these people… they were in no way the majority, but I got a vibe from them that I didn’t like. Turned out they were all too eager to take liberties I hadn’t agreed to, and if you gave them an inch they’d try to grab a mile. These were the people who took it from fantasy and exploration and straight into use and abuse. There were a few occasions where I was being steered down paths I didn’t want to go down… Luckily, I managed to pull away before things got TOO out of hand, but by then I HAD ended up being made to do a couple of things I REALLY didn’t want to.

Let’s just say there’s a reason I deleted my old Internet handles and pulled away from the hypno-community for a while. I was exhausted, and a little freaked. I’d caught a glimpse of places I didn’t want to end up.

Moral of the story, kids: Don’t EVER let anyone pressure you into doing things you’re not comfortable with. 

It was actually a few years before I made the decision to return. At the time of writing, it was around seven or eight months ago. I’d done a lot of self-exploration in the meantime, found out more about myself and my limits, and talked to some people IRL who helped me sort things out. I was more prepared to deal with the nastier sides of the community. So I began dipping my toes back in… A lot of people have commented that I seemed to just come out of nowhere, but I didn’t really. It’s just that I used to be someone else, someone I didn’t really want to be anymore.

And to anyone I’ve befriended since… no, I don’t think I ever talked to you back when I was that someone else. Unless I forgot, of course, or unless you’ve changed your Internet handle too. It’s possible.

Once again, while I met a lot of genuinely nice people, I also encountered people who just wanted to take advantage. Especially when they found out that I was an artist… so many people tried to get me to do free artwork for them, and resorted to some underhanded tactics to get it. I was pretty good at filtrating out only the artwork I actually WANTED to do, but after a while I decided I needed to set clearer boundaries to make it easier on myself.  Which was how I came onto the idea of the “monthly request project,” but that’s a story for another time.

So, now that you know a little more about my previous experiences with the hypno-community, you know a little more about what has shaped my attitude towards hypno-themed art and stories.

And what IS that attitude, you ask? Looking at my art, and my faves, it’s not hard to see that I love hypno-themed stuff.  I don’t mind it if things get really graphic, but I don’t mind it if they DON’T either. Sometimes my tastes run towards the darker things… I can get really morbid when the mind takes me. (I suppose some of it can be blamed on the erotic horror comics I read when I was younger.) 

I tend to prefer it when there’s some STORY there… like just a picture of some woman standing there with hypno-eyes isn’t very interesting to me; I want to know who she is, what she’s like when she’s not deep in trance, how she ended up like that, what whoever hypnotized her is planning on, and so on and so forth. The story doesn’t always have to be spelled out in detail; sometimes it’s enough to have a hint that there at least IS a story, and that this story isn’t JUST “I hypnotized her and now she’s my slave who worships me and does whatever I want.”  It’s sort of the same thing I have with LGBT representation, by the way. As a bisexual I certainly don’t mind if bisexuality is portrayed as sexy, but a person’s sexuality isn’t their entire identity. I want to know the PEOPLE behind it all, which is one reason why I prefer stories, or at least implied stories. 

I’m not that concerned with the actual content… I like variation, and too much of just one thing gets dull. No… With me, it’s more about the attitude behind it all. Or rather, I know it when there’s an attitude I DON’T like. And it’s the same attitude that I met in some of those people who took, or tried to take, advantage of my younger self: The ENTITLEMENT. The CONTEMPT. The bloated ego, the demanding for ego-stroking. The demand to be the absolute center of the universe, the insistence to make it all about yourself, and with it the refusal to acknowledge that your sub/victim is an actual person… or at least, a person worth consideration.  The treating of the the sub/victim as nothing more than a convenient way for you to confirm your heterosexuality. Or your homosexuality, I guess, if the victim is the same sex as you… but I see FAR more of this with male hypnodommes and female subs. (Maybe that’s one reason why I often lean towards preferring femmeslash in these contexts…)

One thing I really don’t like is all the real-life people stories or manips, especially with celebrities. I especially can’t stand all those “story” manips, where you’re greeted by some photo of Emma Watson or whoever, taken from the Internet and manipulated in Photoshop to give her spiral eyes and make her look hypnotized, and it’s all accompanied by a story or a dialogue that details how the self insert manipper got close to her and easily turned her into a cocksucking slave. Often the dialogue in the beginning has Emma Watson or whoever act haughty and “uppity” at first, quite understandably calling the self-insert a creep or some other choice insults, or threatening to call security. All so that the self insert is “justified” in “teaching her a lesson.”  

This is what I have taken to call the “Bitch got what she deserved” attitude. Yeah, the bitch got exactly what she deserved, for being an attractive woman and not automatically being yours. Forget that it’s iffy to use people’s real photos in an erotic context without their consent (which it is), or that the Photoshopped hypno-eyes more often than not look really bad (which they do), this sort of thing essentially reads as revenge porn. And extremely petty revenge porn at that. And that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I suppose it’s better to just live out your revenge fantasies this way than actually trying to do anything to people in real life, but it’s definitely not something I’m interested in… In my opinion, hypnosis and hate don’t mix.

In summary: I have embraced my hypnofetish, but I have also learned to set boundaries within it, and realized that it’s okay to be picky. ^_^