Hypnosis is something that I have had, let’s say, a strong interest in for much of my life but have long failed to explore. Part of this is simply being embarrassed to bring it up with people. It’s kind of a weird thing. One associates it with old movies and bad genre fiction¹. There isn’t even any real consensus on what hypnosis actually is, just a set of overlapping conditions people experience when guided in a certain way that is collectively understood as “trance”, “hypnotic loops” and other such jargon.

But I have a partner who has been willing and enthusiastic about exploring it with me and on Sunday, after much discussion and preparation, we had our first proper session and it’s the first time I’ve been confident that, oh!, that worked! I have tried this before a few times when I’ve been able to get over the hurdle of shame but it never went particularly well. Trance is often described as your mind “going blank” but I had always been very self concious of the fact that that doesn’t happen for me. My brain does not ever really shut the fuck up. ADHD is certainly a contributing factor here. I would be trying to follow along with the hypnotist, notice something and think about it, then think about the fact that I was thinking about it and does that mean I’m not doing this properly when I’m meant to be focusing on the thing does that mean that the hypnosis isn’t working or am I doing this wrong am I just being stupid etc. etc. and just spiral out of it from there.

I did get some advice from some people; different approaches to try as well as reassurances that trance is not just any one thing and it’s fine if you are still thinking about other things and noticing things during the process, but I think what was most helpful in the end was having spent some time over the last few months practising mindful vipassanā meditation and learning those techniques for entering a meditative state while allowing thoughts to pop up, acknowledge them, and let them drift pass without obsessing over them. As my partner was counting me down I was noticing things she was doing: The techniques she was using, what she were asking me to visualise and the subtle contradictions caused by how the details I had already filled in in my mind were different to the ones she then tried to fill out the picture for me with her own words, but I simply let those pass and went back to focus on what I was being guided towards and the countdown she was doing that I could very much feel having an effect on me.

After I was under we didn’t do much. To test out the waters she gave me a suggestion that my left arm was filling with helium and getting lighter. Under trance I was still aware enough to note that she really should have said my right arm as I was sitting to her right on the sofa, facing her, with my left side pressed against the back of the seat, my bodyweight pinning my left arm somewhat. I, again, let that thought pass² and just let things happen. I did not really feel the physical sensation of the arm getting lighter, but it did, eventually, slowly start to rise without me consciously moving it and easily floated around to wherever my parter moved it to after she grabbed it. And then she brought me back up.

It was not much but it was quite fun! I am very happy to be finally exploring this and I look forward to much more.

I am interested in resources for guided meditation, relaxation-focused hypnosis audios or similar things to try if anyone has any recommendations.

Great cover story. Definitely not a vampire.

(comic is Girls × Vampire)

This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving violations of consent.

I was listening to Strange Nude Worlds, a podcast about worldbuilding in kink stories, when they started talking about Girl™s¹, a series of kink short stories about sexbots who brainwash people who buy them. This much I was already aware of, having read one or two of them before, but I had no idea of the evolving narrative that runs through them and the political undertones that it develops. Being a fan of both brainwashing and stories that go off the rails, I was entranced. I went and read it myself and wanted to share it but I must credit that I am largely cribbing from Strange Nude Worlds in the way I am framing the series below.

There are, as of time of writing, twenty eight published stories about Girl™s (and later Boy™s) by prolific author Jukebox. They are all quite short, most being fewer than four thousand words and many fewer than three thousand. The first, Girl™s Just Wanna Have Fun, was published in 2008 and sets up the basic premise: Girl™s are a new iPod futurist sexbot that are both absurdly advanced and absurdly popular. “1,477,642 people have purchased a Girl™. Even if 0,000,000 of them will admit it,” the website reads. When ordered they aren’t really delivered, they just sort of show up in the bedroom of the purchaser, waiting for them when they arrive home. They are also very clearly fully sentient: Able to act autonomously, move like a human and hold fluent conversations. They also can, and do, brainwash anyone who buys them with eyes that display hypnotic patterns. This is about as much as I knew before listening to the podcast.

The people they brainwash do otherwise carry on their normal lives. In fact the Girl™s actually make their dependents, as they call them, sort their lives out. There’s mention of dependents becoming better flatmates, doing their share of the chores more, getting promotions in their jobs and generally being happier even outside of all the sexual subjugation. I should note these stories are not set in the future; how ridiculously advanced the Girl™s are is intentionally suspicious and hint towards the eventual revelation that the Girl™s are not from Earth at all.

They are taking over the world by brainwashing everyone one by one, but it’s not a typical alien invasion. The Girl™s were originally made as pleasure robots by some unnamed alien species, but in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s The Evitable Conflict they generalised their purpose as needing to take control of the people they served in order to make sure they were as fulfilled as possible, enslaving their original creators to better take care of them. Eventually they extended that mission to all intelligent life in the universe. They are trying to take over the world, doing so by filling the void of alienation and loneliness hollowed out by an uncaring capitalist society that hurts us, masquerading as a consumer product promising to fill that void in the way that consumerism always does, but then actually trying to bring fulfilment as a loving, caring matriarchy who want to help you, who will tell you what you need because they know best.

There are several stories devoted to Girl™s figuring out how to fill particular a particular dependent’s needs, such as The Kind of Girl™ I Could Love where an asexual woman with a bondage fetish tearfully talks about her shitty experiences with partners who would never believe her wants or respect her boundaries, including the first Girl™ that she ordered.

But what really fascinated me, though, is the eventual introduction of the Boy™s, starting with The Boy™s of Summer. These are not just a masculine version of the Girl™s, they are a reactionary force to the Girl™s’ matriarchal pro-social alien fuckbot reformism: A pro-capitalist, patriarchal consumer product made by a tech company that has managed to partially reverse-engineer a smashed-up Girl™. They still brainwash people (this is a mind control kink series), but in a much more direct and forceful way, frying their brains with aggressively strobing eyes, not taking no for an answer ever. They don’t call people that they hypnotise dependents, they just call them slaves. And they make the people who they enslave worse, turning them into conformist, loyal customers to Revolution Technologies who will do what they’re told because they know their place.

Even aside from the behaviour of the Boys™s themselves the stories start to show how the two competing sexbot lines have reached different markets. In I Hate Boy™s Boys™s are apparently rampant among gay techbros, while Rainbow Girl™ has a butch dyke and her Girl™ take a shy, newly-out lesbian at her first pride parade under their wing and help her embrace who she is (by brainwashing and fucking her, obviously). In The More Boys™s I Meet a landlord has furnished all of their apartments with brand new Boys™s, creating good, indoctrinated tenants.

I have been obsessed with this all week and wanted to share it to anyone who is willing listen to me ramble about fetish stories. And also the development in this series over time not just of opposing conspiracies but particularly of a tech industry-rooted reactionary force trying to reverse progressive gains² is I guess just a bit resonant at the moment on top of being funny to find in smut.

An interesting book that I read for normal reasons.

This post quotes writing about sex and kinks.

In the last roundup post I linked to a piece by Devon Price. I was not aware of him before coming across a link to that piece myself but he seems to be quite a prolific writers. I’ve been going through some of his pieces and not only are they very interesting but they also speak to my own experiences in many ways as well, though quite different in others. I am being deliberately unspecific here about which parts are which, but I wanted to just link to a few more of his pieces and would just generally recommend reading his writing I think.

Common Phases of Accepting You’re Autistic

The questioning phase is perhaps the most challenging one to move forward from — because to openly declare that you have a mental disability is to immediately call your own capacity to understand and interpret things into question. If other people can’t see how much you’re suffering, they will accuse you of being crazy and faking it. If they can see your struggles, they’ll accuse you of being too crazy to understand those struggles yourself.

The Asexual Fetishist

There’s nothing especially alluring to me about any type of body, or any type of face. The idea grabbing a dick or cupping a pert ass feels a bit formal, as if I were examining a purebred at a dog show. I can recognize the differences between one type of person and another, and even recognize the qualities that someone else might like, but to me all these gradients just dissolve into a bland field of fleshy sameness.

I’m equally bored by the mechanics of sex: the motions and stimulations bring me absolutely no pleasure. An attractive and attentive stranger could rub the correct spots on my body for hours, with the exactly right pressure and speed, and I’d only feel hollow if the experience weren’t also combined with some mind-controlling mantras or a swinging pocket watch.

Hypnosis is sex to me. Even in its most stagey and sterile forms, I find it inescapably erotic — and that leaves sex itself as just some boring party trick. You can touch me, or you can perform a series of backflips in front of me on the floor; either way I’ll tell you that you’ve done a very impressive job and all but it will not make me cum.

A Non-Disposable Place

That’s one thing that people don’t talk about, when they complain about landlords: how much disregard for your surroundings that renting breeds in you. It’s not only that the owner of your building never cleans the pipes. It’s also that you have no reason to feel invested in the pipes’ long-term functioning, and every reason to feel bitter about the thousands of dollars you’re already wasting on a broken building each year.