Things I'm Sick of Seeing on Fetlife's "Kinky & Geeky"

I think it's clear that I'm kinky as hell. It should also be clear (in case it isn't) that I'm a class-A geek on several levels. I read Terry Pratchett and Atomic Robo; I watch Doctor Who and Kamen Rider; I own the entire DC Animated Universe and most of the DC Universe DTV movies on DVD; I play D&D; I collect toys (a lot less these days, but I still do). As it happens, I find that kink munches are an awesome way to meet more geeks, and since they also happen to be kinky, a lot of good friendships are forged based on multiple compatible factors.

Thus, it's no surprise that I'm a member of the Fetlife group "Kinky & Geeky." And sometimes I post on there, and often I read the posts there, and I find a lot of things that amuse me.

Two things that I'm really sick of seeing, though:

* "ZOMG! GEEKY WOMEN EXIST!! AND THEY'RE KINKY, TOO?!?"

Uh, yes. Yes, they do. Dunno about you, but I've managed to meet a never-ending stream of geeky women just by being a geek and doing geeky things I enjoy and talking to the women who also enjoy them. Also: treating those women like human beings who might just agree with me that certain things are awesome. In fact, I meet a lot more cis women than cis men who are into Doctor Who and Discworld.

To indulge in stereotyping for the purpose of a joke: if geeky women don't exist, who do you think is writing all that yaoi fanfiction? Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls, after all.

I realize that these threads are often just cheap tactics for creepy cis men to friend-request people, but there's this attitude behind that astonishment (and that tactic, for that matter) that just burns me.

A friend of mine (a cis female geek, as it happens) once said that I was one of the only guys (as in, single digits here) she'd ever met who looked her in the eye while talking to her. She is not even a particularly close friend of mine. You can say she's exaggerating, but if so, she made that particular exaggeration because on some level, that statement was true to her experience of the world. I cannot help but wonder how many of these guys, so astonished that geeky cis women exist at all, never met any geeky ladies because they were too busy treating women in general like members of another species.

Yeah. There are people other than cis males who enjoy D&D, comic books, Magic, or whatever other random thing. I really don't understand what is surprising about this. And please do something about the gratingly blatant gender essentialism and objectification inherent in this thinking. Thank you, demographic who will probably either never read this or deny what I have said.


* The webcomic Collar 6

OK, this one I probably don't have as much reason to rant about, because it's more about my personal ideals and views and passions regarding the kink scene. But: I HATE Collar 6.

I mean, I get it. It takes place in a fantasy world. However, the fact that it combines fantasy and reality in odd ways while indulging in stereotypes of BDSM...I don't know. I feel like it's fine to have a fantasy series about BDSM, but I don't like this one.

...but mostly I just hate the artwork. It uses that "all skin is shiny!" art thing that I see on a lot of comics, usually with the intent of making the characters look sexy. This shininess is a major pet peeve of mine - I don't understand how it's supposed to be sexy. OK, practically everyone in this comic seems to be wearing latex or leather, so at least there's a reason for it, but I have this deep-rooted association between "shiny anime-style people" and "sleaze."

[POSSIBLE BUSTED THINKING NOTE: I use the word "sleaze" to refer to pornography that is busted in mainstream ways - misogyny, male gaze, objectification, all of these are what I think of when I use the word. I apologize if anybody feels that my pejorative usage of this term demeans their sexual identity - I'm using it in a specific way to describe things that I feel should be less common than they are, and I encourage people to embrace the fluidity of language.]

Finally: this (TW: discussion of nonconsensual mind control that uses abuser's logic). Five women. One build. And if you guessed that that build is massive boobs and an impossibly thin waist, then congratulations, you get a No-Prize! I don't think there are any characters who even have different cup sizes in this comic.

Frankly, my favorite thing about the BDSM community is that I can get the hell away from a wider culture that seems to think that sex and sexuality are only OK for women who fit this mold. (If you want to read an awesome exploration of this subject, check out this blog post, which touches on body image/sexuality intersection eloquently.) I like being in a group where people of all ages, shapes, gender presentations, etc. can stand up and say: "I have a sex life!" There's a reason I don't link Collar 6 on the right-hand side of this blog, and why I instead point you, the reader, toward Nic Buxom: an utterly fantastic comic about BDSM that features a lot of different body types among its characters, both cis male and cis female (along with some discussion about prejudice toward gender presentation and fat).

So, uh, I suppose I should have a "live and let live" attitude toward this comic. There is nothing inherently wrong about it, from what I have seen - and the author has made at least one really admirable gesture in portraying aftercare and addressing the problems with some of the fantasy scenarios. I admit that I hate it mostly for its superficial aspects: its art, its use of generic attractiveness. I guess I'm just annoyed that the most popular webcomic about BDSM is one about a fantasy world and one that sticks to a tried-and-true big boobs/wasp waist model of sexuality and attractiveness. But, I can also at least recognize that Collar 6 has a big advantage over the webcomics I prefer - it updates regularly and doesn't take long hiatuses. I still say that Nic Buxom is a better read (and fully support the author's hiatus - she has a life!); however, where webcomics are concerned, regularity breeds popularity.

(After all, I'm still reading Misfile almost entirely because it updates five times a week on the dot, and it has never pissed me off enough to stop reading.)

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This has been a rant with feminist intentions, which may have busted aspects and judgmental attitudes.

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!