My answer to this is a qualified “kind of.”
When I was a kid, hypnosis was totally compelling to me – any time I saw it, heard about it, anything, I could not at all pull myself away from it.
I was also obsessed with the Atlanta Braves, but the mere mention of Paul Assenmacher did not leave me hanging on every word, you know? (Dale Murphy is another question.)
So on some level, I knew my interest in hypnosis was something other than a hobby. It was literally always in the back of my mind. It still is, actually.
I was a young, young child when this started. I had no idea that I was a fetishist. At the same time, though, it always did feel “dirty” to me for reasons that I get now, but had no way of knowing at the time.
Anyway: hobby before I *knew* it was a fetish, but not by much.
Here’s a question for the crowd: is your hypnosis fetish something you were born with?
Hypnosis in movies and stories was always compelling to me. But I “knew” that was just fantasy.
I saw hypnosis as a real thing, but something used for therapy, and stage magic, and stuff like that, and that was intriguing, but not in any kind of fetish sense.
When I found the mcstories site, I saw it had lots of hypnosis stories, but I after trying a few, I found them boring and tended to skip them. Stories involving fantasy elements and scifi gizmos were more interesting, and hot, because they were more believable (giggle).
(Though to be fair, hypnosis stories often have things like, “And now your boobs grow three cup sizes” and they do, instantly, due to the power of hypnosis. Things like that just destroyed my ability to take the stories seriously. )
Then – much later – I stumbled across hypnofetish sites, and had that lightbulb moment: “Whaaaaat? Hypnosis really can be used in this way? OMG give me it NOW!”
And the hypnosis subgenre of mind control simultaneously got a lot hotter for me (but there’s still so much terrible stuff in there, sigh).
Yeah, I think there’s a much broader gulf between the MC fetish and the direct hypno, and that expanding from MC to hypno (as GG and I both have) leads to a very different approach to hypnotic suggestion.
I’m the polar opposite. Hypnosis as a subgenre of mind control? Obviously the other way around! (Kidding, kidding)
Mind control was pretty much never that appealing to me except when it looked and behaved like “classical” hypnosis.
That said, I also have rarely if ever gotten off on anything that feels “fictional.” Even when I got off on hypnosis in fiction, it was hypnosis that felt in some way accurate.
See, this is the thing. I don’t think MC and Hypno are kink and subkink.
I think fantasy MC and real hypno are whole kink categories in and of themselves, with sufficient thematic overlap that a lot of people miss this.
And I think there’s a specific point where that needs watching, and it’s where inexperienced hypnotists and naive subjects cross from MC to real hypno without really grokking issues like consent, post-scene sub- and dom- drop, and the potential repercussions of deep conditioning work, because the MC fantasy stuff doesn’t have the ties to established kinks that teach this.
Mostly, though, I think that realising they’re disparate kinks can go a long way to helping people sort out what appeals and what doesn’t and feeling more able to specify the stuff they like.
Elsewhere on here the discussion that @ellaenchanting has been part of with retro/pop culture hypno is right there on stuff that walks the line.
I like both. But my life in kink got a lot easier when I realised there was this bg divide along the lines of which people liked or didn’t like aspects.
(yes, there are also subkinks for both that not everyone digs, but not usually in so polarising or definitive a fashion.)
Okay, going to try to respond to multiple things here.
tennfan2: I was a young, young child when this started. I had no idea that I was a fetishist. At the same time, though, it always did feel “dirty” to me for reasons that I get now, but had no way of knowing at the time.
Same, and if I implied otherwise, I didn’t mean to.
It feels weird to come up with a completely new phrasing for this when I can just quote my past self, so I suppose I’ll do that. Take it away, me of one year ago. (Note: the question I was answering was “If you had kinks, sexual fantasies, or sexual interests before puberty, how did you interpret them?“)
I thought it was just a fascinating topic, like the things I later learned to call perseverations* but much more stable. Sure, I had a sense of privacy about it, but I also (though to a lesser extent) tended to keep perseverations private. And sure, perseverations didn’t cause that twinging feeling in my chest and abdomen, but I figured that was probably some minor quirk that I would never have an explanation for. (I now think the twinging is my brain misinterpreting the “heat” of sexual arousal.)
For the record, the thing that made me re-evaluate this was not puberty, but rather learning from TV Tropes (at about age sixteen) that hypno-fetishism was a thing. (And dear *god* did my life make so much more sense after that. I wish somebody had thought to tell me sooner.) I didn’t really “bloom”: I mean, obviously my libido didn’t vary with menstrual phase back when I didn’t *have* a menstrual cycle, and for some reason I didn’t start having erotic dreams until I was fifteen, but in essence my sexuality is pretty much unchanged since the time of my earliest memories.
*Note from the present day: these days (and even at the time, really), “special interest” seems to be a more common term for this autistic trait than “perseveration”, and you might be more familiar with it.
scifiscribbler: Mostly, though, I think that realising they’re disparate kinks can go a long way to helping people sort out what appeals and what doesn’t and feeling more able to specify the stuff they like.
The definition of “mind-control fetishist” in my internal dictionary is something like “person who genuinely prefers the stuff I subsisted off of as a child because I didn’t even have the concept of anything better”. Like, I do know there are honest-to-god MC fetishists out there, and I want to emphasise again the unendorsedness of this reaction, but when I encounter MC fetishists talking shop I am frequently struck with the urge to tell them “You don’t have to settle for this! There’s other stuff out there, and a lot of it is so much better!” *I* was settling, and I find it hard to tolerate erotic horror these days knowing there’s fluffier stuff I could be reading instead.
tennfan2: Here’s a question for the crowd: is your hypnosis fetish something you were born with?
Depends on your definition. It doesn’t really make sense to me to claim anyone was born with a hypnosis fetish per se, because you’re not born knowing what hypnosis is.
You are, on the other hand, born knowing what sleep is. While a version of me raised in the late 1700′s would probably not have had a hypno-fetish (the conception of hypnosis at the time was not restful at all), I think any version of me would enjoy dozing…I was going to say “a little too much”, but that makes it sound like it’s wrong. Enjoy dozing to an extent that normal people would not. The ways in which this desire manifests depend on what’s available in the surrounding culture, but the core remains the same.
Yeah, this neatly speaks to what I mean. Hypno kink and MC kink are neither of them better or worse, but they can be better or worse for individual people, and an awareness of both helps.
I’m glad you’ve found what you’re after. Similarly, I’m glad I know they’re different things, because I get different things out of both… even when collaborating with the same people.
Tags:
#(April 2016) #conversational aglets #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #nsfw text
One thought on “brin-bellway asked: Huh, you found out hypnosis was real *before* finding out it was a fetish? I did it the other way ’round. I wonder what differences that causes. (Like how, while *intellectually* I believe there are people whose kinks actually can’t be satisfied in real life, my experiences have left me with a visceral skepticism towards the idea. My first thought when someone says their fetish can’t be acted upon is always “When *I* said that, I was wrong: maybe you’re wrong too.”)”