Back from Inactivty with Insights

Hey all! I've been a terrible, lazy person and haven't been updating this blog as much as I should be. :)

Without giving away too much personal detail - my life is in an odd place right now. Not bad-odd, just odd. I'm currently away from the majority of my closest friends; distance has forced me to come to a friendly parting of the ways with all of the play partners I've blogged about; and I'm slightly lacking in direction right now.

In order to ensure that future blog posts happen soon, I'm going to make an enticing preview of things that I promise to write about soon: an account of my last one-on-one scene with Georgie; more threesome shenanigans with Georgie and Eve; my experience looking for a hypnotist on http://www.hypnotising.org; and an excellent online hypnosis session.


I'm going to take a moment to write about hypnosis porn, to sort out and publish some thoughts I've had lately. Please excuse the MASSIVE generalizations I make, as well as the fact that these thoughts subscribe to sexual binaries. If anything, I think it is fascinating (and saddening) that my observations show that the gender binary pervades hypnosis porn and all discussion of it - I think that these observations can contribute to an understanding of how a specific group understands and reacts to gender.

I also want to emphasize that I do not think any of the various groups I generalize are wrong. Rather, I'm simply struck by how people with certain sets of tastes outnumber those with other sets of tastes by such wide margins.

I've noticed - from browsing around the Mind Control Forum, Fetlife, and hypnotising.org - that the hypnosis porn market consists of the following vocal groups:

* Dominant or switchy males who want to see women hypnotized, and want to see as little of the male hypnotists as possible while never, ever wanting to see hypnotized men. (There's a reason that the proprietor of Girls Gone Hypnotized advertises the lack of male nudity in the sex scenes! That's not a dig at him, it's simply the way the market has evolved.)

* Submissive or switchy women who want to see women hypnotized.

* Submissive men who are not interested at all in seeing men hypnotized (this group appears to primarily consume MP3 inductions and video inductions).

* Dominant females who produce their own content: [listed in order of proliferation] MP3 inductions; video inductions starring conventionally attractive women; videos of women being hypnotized (real and fantasy); videos of men being hypnotized (I have found exactly one example of that last category in all my time looking at hypno-porn - will discuss this in a moment).

* Dominant males who produce their own content: [listed in order of proliferation] videos of women being hypnotized (real and fantasy); MP3 inductions; and video inductions.

* Dominant males who do not seem to care for hypnosis porn and would rather hypnotize men themselves.

These groups dominate any discussion of hypnosis pornography on the Mind Control Forum. Fetlife and hypnotising.org have not produced too many discussions of the topic, and the different demographics present there (BDSMers with a casual interest in hypnosis on Fet; gay men on hypnotising.org) could skew this demographic overview. It's not like I'm taking numbers, but I think it is worth noting that these are the groups that drive the creation of hypnosis pornography.

The trends that these groups create are as follows (according to my subjective but long-term observation):

* Correct me if I am wrong, but the number of men producing MP3s for sale is minuscule compared to the number of women producing MP3s.

* There is exactly one website that I have found featuring men being hypnotized by a woman: Queen Cleopatra's site.

* There is exactly one website that I have found featuring men being hypnotized by a man: HypnoSubmission.

* HypnoSubmission, the sole producer of male/male hypnosis video that I have found, does not pay its models. The models are volunteers - the website's model application is actually an application for a pro-dom session, in which submissives willing to be video-taped are allowed to get their session for free. This indicates that the producer is primarily interested in scheduling hypnosis sessions - the videos are a bonus source of income that he cannot and does not depend upon.

* Producers such as Lex (real hypnosis) and Daphne (fantasy mind control) have been outright told in polls and discussions that there is no market for videos featuring men being hypnotized. Lex has, on at least two occasions, posted a poll on the MC Forum surveying the interest level in a shoot where he puts under a man and a woman together; the response, each time, has been overwhelmingly negative. Daphne's production has sadly stalled due to various issues; while she was producing, she never made a male-sub video despite (if I'm recalling correctly) showing interest in doing one on the forum.

* The Erotic Mind Control Story Archive has around twice as many male-dom stories as fem-dom stories. It has around triple as many f/f stories as m/m stories.

I've commented before about the utter dearth of male-sub hypnosis porn available - and how I wish I had the confidence/security/what have you to help address that dearth.

What I'm trying to get at, in this sprawling series of observations, is that the hypnosis community may be shutting out people who would otherwise be interested. There may be a touch of insular thinking going on - all the hypnosis porn is of women being hypnotized by men; therefore, all of the people who frequent the most popular forum about hypnosis porn and erotica are fans of that who wish to see more. I will support this statement by noting that there are very few openly trans posters on the MC Forum, despite transwomen making up a significant proportion of the hypnofetishists I see on Fetlife - no doubt in response to the Erotic Mind Control Stories Archive's rule against featuring transgender content in its stories.

OR, alternately, there is flat-out less demand to see men hypnotized. If so, why is that?

This website suggests that there are simply a lot of forces at work that prevent the professional creation of erotic male imagery that does not conform to a very specific mold. This sounds about right to me.

Perhaps all of the men who would like to watch men get hypnotized are turned off because the men they'd see would inevitably fall into one of two categories - so unattractive to the man watching as to render the model unappealing, or so much more conventionally attractive than the man watching as to render the model threatening.

One thing specific to the hypnosis community - there appear to be very, very, very few dominant women active in the online community who are not simply producing their own content, and these women go with what the market demands. Those women who do not fit the molds I listed above probably do not even bother with the hypnosis porn available - or are bi/pan/homosexual and satisfied with what is out there. I have no doubt that there are plenty more dominant female hypnofetishists than those who are producing content - they just don't seem to have much online presence for one reason or another.

Furthermore, in my opinion, is that the cultural conception of being hypnotized - with all of the subtext of domination and control that it entails - has made being hypnotized an intensely feminized position. Hypnotize the Princess is a trope that is very rarely gender-flipped in Western stories - just count up all the prominent examples of women being mind controlled on that page. In contrast, there are a tiny handful of examples of men being mind controlled. (Hence the title of the trope.) Perhaps there is simply very little room in Euro-American culture to see a man put into a a hypnotized state while acknowledging the eroticism of the scene. Most times when a male character is hypnotized in a cartoon - Barney on The Flintstones, Beast Boy on Teen Titans - he is made out to be weak-willed and foolish. The only example of a male hypnotized by a female villain, with all of the erotic subtext intact, that I remember from my own childhood is Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon - IE, originating from a Japanese text.

So, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is this: American culture (and the English-speaking countries that also consume same culture) marks being hypnotized as a feminized position. This has shaped the formation of the online hypnosis porn community, to the exclusion of those who would like to see men hypnotized. To me, this says a lot about a growing expectation that women be more sexually flexible in contrast to a rigid male heterosexuality, as well as how the regulation of gender norms produces disgust and disinterest in any content that breaks those norms. Perhaps those two points do not come across very clearly in the scattered observations above, but I am simply ruminating here rather than crafting a strong argument.

This post is meant as a polemic - a starter for discussion. I want to read other people's thoughts about this! Are there sources for porn of men being hypnotized that I simply haven't found yet? Are there people with similar frustrations about the content available? Is the market simply that hostile to seeing men being hypnotized? (My observations say: yes.)

All I can do, I suppose, is show my support for video of men being hypnotized whenever I see the topic raised - and encourage others to do the same if they want to see it!