Well, actually, just to the memes that were popular around me while I was in college. Most of these come from songs. I am tired of memeing around my American friends and having them be like “wut???”, so I am educating you all now.
I. [X] does give me me powers
The origin of this meme is the song Phenomenal by Benjai. It come from the line “Soca does gi’ me me powas; ey-ay”. ie: “[Caribbean music genre] makes me powerful; [sound of enthusiasm]”. The specific way this is used varies a lot.
Most commonly, it’ll be a comment on how something has given you the ability to do stupid things faster with more energy. “coffee”, “ganja”, “cocaine”, “manga”, and “pumpum” (ie: vagina) are all things I heard people say gave them powers (it has to be two syllables to fit the song). Alternatively, if your friend has just done something stupid, you can comment on it this way – usually attributing their sudden energy to something silly as a form of ribbing.
Alternatively, you can use it as an image macro, as we often do on WhatsApp (yes, we’re whatsappers). The general format here is a call-and-response macro. The first image is of the thing giving the powers, with the caption “[thing] does give me me powers”. The second image shows someone doing something silly, with either the caption “Ey Ay”/”Eh I” or the caption “See me deh/dey/there”.
Example from WhatsApp:
However, the punning potential is great and terrible
(I’m a horrible person, I know)
And, thus, you have been educated! Which is great, because I am constantly tempted to use this meme, and then have to refrain from it to avoid confusion. But no more! Go forth and meme like a true rudeboy
How does “[X] does give me me powers“ parse syntactically?
Specifically, what is each “me” doing? Do they both mean the same thing, and were just repeated for the meter to work? (Or for emphasis? Does [Redacted]-dialect repeat nouns for emphasis?)
Or are they doing different things? Are they both ~something about the speaker~ (with some grammatical effects), or is one of them totally unrelated?
“me” is the first person singular pronoun.
Yes, there aren’t first person singular pronouns. There is only one. It does the work of English I, me, and my.
So, replacing the ‘me’s with their equivalents, we get “Soca does give me my powers”.
But wait! What’s the “does” doing here?
It puts the sentence in the present tense, because “Soca give me my powers” would be past tense. The unmarked form of a verb in my dialect generally is.
So the sentence parses as “Soca gives me my powers” in standard English.
Ah, so that’s what the “does” was for.
(The doubled “me” didn’t confuse me, personally: my language-parsing module saw the second one, said “ah, it’s the cockney ‘me’”, and continued on. Apparently I’ve consumed enough British media for “’me’ can be used as a possessive” to be an available thought.)
—
On an unrelated note: is it just me*, or does that song–especially the chorus–sound very…itself? Like, a song they would play over a location-establishing shot. “HAVE WE MENTIONED YET THAT WE’RE IN THE CARIBBEAN??”
Not in a bad way, just…intensely Caribbean.
*It might just be me and my lack of experience with the genre.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #language #the more you know #music #also #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #because that was indeed a great and terrible pun
I feel like this is the kind of conversation that would make @wayward-sidekick go “no no no wrong wrong WRONG”
Because saying “I’m fine” in response to being asked how you’re doing is only supposed to happen if you’re trying to avoid a conversation. That’s how polite answers work! You use them to make the other person stop trying to speak to you, basically.
If you’re asked how you’re doing by someone you’re trying to start a conversation with, you never say just “fine”. You give a descriptive sentence or two. You try to optimise that sentence for containing as many potential things to talk about as possible, in the hopes that the other person will find one of them interesting enough to ask about.
If I were asked how I was doing by a stranger right now, I’d say “I’m doing pretty good! I recently got back from a trip to [visa country redacted] with an American friend of mine because I was interviewing for a visa.”
With the obvious potential follow up questions being:
When did you get back?
How was your stay in [visa country]?
Have you been to [visa country] before / do you like it there?
Who’s your friend / why did they go with you?
How did the interview go / did you get approved?
Which country are you travelling to?
What kind of visa did you get?
etc etc etc
There is no question you can ask someone who says they’re fine. “fine” kills a conversation. That’s its job. Like, you can’t even ask someone “why are you fine?” the way you can ask “why are you happy/sad/angry?”
There is just… Literally no worse way to attempt a conversation. But people do this all the time. I don’t get it at all. But, like, if you actually want to talk to your mutuals more, consider… Not choosing literally the worst response to a question that you can.
This has been Moderate Social Competence with Alison.
I just realized I answer that question like that, all the time, even when I want to talk to he person, because… somehow I internalized the idea that talking about good things in my life is bragging and talking about bad things is complaining; I’m supposed to talk to the other person about their life.
This runs into problems when both people in the conversation have this idea.
Oh, wow, yes. That would definitely run into a problem.
The ideal is for both of you to talk about your lives. The Social Optimum is something like 50/50, but it can depend a lot on who’s the better storyteller and who’s the better listener in a given situation.
(Though, like, it’s important to note that being the better listener isn’t the Important Virtuous Role to take. People like listening to good storytellers. Ideally you want to be good at both of these things so you can swap roles a lot.)
If you aren’t sure who should do what and the other person isn’t going first, you probably want to start by giving the other person opportunities to ask about your life. Then you talk a bit about what they asked about before asking them if they have any related experiences.
Examples:
You: […] and that’s why I don’t like coffee. Person: Yeah, me neither. You: What drinks do you like, then?
or
You: […] and I really don’t understand why someone would like golf in the first place. Person: I like golf! You: You do? What do you like about it?
or
You: […] and I can’t believe he’d just leave like that! Person: Yeah, that sucks. You: Has anything like that happened to you before?
So, like, things in that general vein. You always want to be able to get the other person to talk sometimes, and this is a great way to lead into it. Especially because most people are more comfortable talking about their own lives if you’ve opened up first (especially if it’s a similar topic).
And, if someone has just finished telling you about something in their life, it’s usually nice to respond by talking about similar things in your own life so it seems like you’re ~relating~. The major exception to this is situations where it might seem like you’re one-upping the other person by talking about your own thing.
Actually, I feel the opposite of called out right now.
See, I internalised much the same idea as robustcornhusk, but not “somehow”: I was actually explicitly told to always respond to “How are you?” with “Fine.” I’ve seen multiple socialisation PSAs to the effect of:
“Nobody actually cares how you’re doing, or if they do it’s only by pure coincidence. ‘How are you’/’Fine’ is a ritualised call-and-response greeting, not a literal question/answer pair. Only ignorant autistics or pedantic assholes treat ‘How are you?’ as an actual question to be given an actual answer, and someone who acts like a pedantic asshole–intentionally or unintentionally–is not someone other people want to be around.”
(Of course, the sort of people who think this is rude are also the sort of people who won’t tell you that to your face. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard such PSAs from anyone who knew me personally, just in general broadcasts.)
I usually do still give informative answers to “How are you?” when I’m looking to start a conversation, and (to bring in another branch) I do use recent interesting events from my life as conversation starters. But I do it because, of the options available to someone at my level of social competence, it’s the least of all evils. (Hell if I know how the PSA-writers start their conversations. Probably something too subtle for me to pull off.) I generally have a lingering awareness that this is the Wrong Thing To Do.
Your fetish is the main topic of a two hours long movie where it’s applied to the whole world. There’s no sexy time, the whole movie is about the financial and societal consequences on your fucked up fetish on society.
Oppressive [Light Is Not Good] oligarchic dystopia…. but that’s pretty damn hot; you can just leave details to the imagination. Could range from less creepy (everybody’s just LARPing!) to creepy/hot mind-screw (modifying people to enthusiastically consent??!).
it’s really boring because there’s no conflict as everyone is satisfied with things, also there’s half an hour of exposition to explain how the fuck things are able to happen, like how people can keep giving birth to the same people multiple times, and other logistical issues
Everything takes five times as long because whatever you do, the recipient has to describe in eye-wateringly explicit detail what it’s like and how good it is.
Your boss spends half her time standing behind you, murmuring what a GOOD worker you are, go on, add another column to that spreadsheet, YES, just like that…
Society could not keep functioning if my main fetish were real. Too many deaths too fast, humanity itself would probably go extinct soon afterwards. Vore is so good tho, it’d be worth it
#okay so I’m conflating some stuff here #to create a world where my fetish isn’t routine you wouldn’t actually have to remove sleep entirely #just (”just”) tweak human neurology to have a much sharper line between consciousness and unconsciousness #or hell you could even keep dreaming in #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #rape tw #(for preceding posts)
Why do people use video chats with Basilisk, anyway? Seems like it’s asking for trouble, and “death by videophone software glitch” is not one of the better ways to go.
Welcome to Decoder Ring Theatre fandom! What episode are you on?
shortly followed by: Ah! I see you caught up! I’ll amend my question, then – what was one of your favourite episodes!
I try to only answer asks indirectly because of the first-degree ask bug, and normally that works fine. On the other hand, if I post the ask unanswered and then give my actual answer in a reblog, it won’t go in the public tag, and that doesn’t seem suitable for this. I’m compromising by putting ask and answer in a text-post OP.
—
To pick one…well, the one that comes to mind is “The Golden Idol”. I love when characters think through the implications of their superpowers. The Mad Monkey’s plan here is *magnificently* clever, creating an entire fake person out of glamours and memory implants.
I spent a few minutes of this one facepalming when it looked like he’d enthralled the Flying Squirrel, seeing as how the show had *just gotten done explaining* that you can use mind control to prevent people from getting mind-controlled by others, which means that–as someone with a mind-controlling partner whom she would trust with her very soul–Kit Baxter has possibly the best access to psychic shielding on the planet. Shouldn’t they have learned their lesson after Diablos?
And then it turns out that our heroes *totally thought of this*, and she’s actually been faking being under the Mad Monkey’s spell this whole time so that he would let his guard down. That was a beautiful moment.
I love clever plans, and I love when they’re defeated by out-clevering (both the bluffing and how the Red Panda figured out what was going on in the first place), and basically cleverness is my narrative weakness.
—
(When I skimmed through the episode again just now to see if I’d gotten it more or less right, I heard Kit mention Ajay Shah as a potential suspect, and I was like “Hey! I know who that is now! Neat!”. Once I’ve finished the rest of the pilots and tie-ins, I’m going to have to re-listen to the series at *least* once to hear how it sounds from the perspective of having the whole thing. I *know* I didn’t get as much out of the “The World Next Door” as I could have, for one.)
If out-clevering is your thing, I can see why RPA works well for you! I do love those episodes, but a part of me always prefers when a villain (usually the Genie, tbh) tries to make some clever complicated plan specifically to counter the Boss, but overlooks Squirrel and her Flying Fists of Anti-Magic Justice. It just makes my heart sing when she makes the henchmen cry.
Re: Earth-2/Sillyverse/The Originals, don’t go in expecting what we got from the main storyline. Not only was there not enough time to fill out the plot, there’s a lot of other rough edges as well. Some fans can’t get past that, and I understand that. As for myself, I love the Sillyverse – there are some Canadian History in-jokes that the more serious tone of the main plot just can’t work in, and for all that Dr. Anna is less active in the plot than Kit, she’s still a woman who can stand on her own two feet – both in the lab and in the field. Besides which, there’s no episode in all of the DRT catalogue that hits all my hurt/comfort buttons quite like the Sillyverse episode “The Judas Boats”. I keep meaning to write a Red/Baboon/Anna fic based on a certain incident in that episode, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Even if it’s not the kind of thing that really grabs you, I do suggest giving it a listen – there are occasional references in the main story, especially in the WWII episodes, that will make you grin a bit on a re-listen!
(also, hope you don’t mind, but I’ve mentally pegged you as Harry Kelley in our little tumblr network of agents!)
>>don’t go in expecting what we got from the main storyline.<<
*nod* I know. I heard them saying how different it was in the Season One Spectacular (which I did listen to, but several seasons late because I didn’t notice it existed at first).
>>there are some Canadian History in-jokes<<
My grasp of history is often a bit shaky in general, plus as a first-generation immigrant* I’m missing a lot of the cultural osmosis one might get from growing up in Canada. (I only just found out a week or two ago what the Red Ensign was named after.)
>>(also, hope you don’t mind, but I’ve mentally pegged you as Harry Kelley in our little tumblr network of agents!)<<
Why’s that, if you can put it into words?
(Big shoes to fill, but at least I’ve got a while to do it in.)
—
*I moved to Canada when I was 13. The 10th anniversary will be this fall**!
**I don’t think we’ve made any plans yet, but my family should do something extra-special this July to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation and our 10th Canada Day. (Whatever we end up doing, I intend to wear my citizenship pin while I do it.)
Tags:
#Red Panda Adventures #our home and cherished land #reply via reblog
Real talk; where are the good hypnosis communities at
Getting real tired of transphobic shit etc. and would like somewhere to hang out and be into hypnosis without having to put with garbage people
Neither @brin-bellway nor @bannableoffense are garbage people to my knowledge. (Though they may separately be sanitation workers.)
@adzolotl manages to hypnotize trans people without them being annoyed. (Though perhaps they’re too hypnotized to??)
And … none of them seem to know each other in a hypnosis-y way. But they may be able to *direct* you to community things if you ask?
>>(Though they may separately be sanitation workers.)<<
Well, I have been experimenting with dumpster diving…
>>And … none of them seem to know each other in a hypnosis-y way.<<
I’m aware of Banny, though I don’t read her blog. I’m aware of @adzolotl, too, and I do read his blog. (I’m not sure we’ve ever had more than short, shallow conversations about it, though.)
>>But they may be able to *direct* you to community things if you ask?<<
The only members of hypno-fetish Tumblr I follow myself are @tennfan2, @ellaenchanting, and @hypnoticharlequin, because I try to keep the amounts of naked people, non-con porn, and Discourse on my dash relatively low, and all of those really limit your options. (However, since the Discourse is often about social justice, and the hypno-fetishist is almost invariably on the pro-SJ side, you may actually find the amount of Discoursing around here reassuring.) I also read @diaryofasnowflake manually sometimes.
Tennfan, Ella: I seem to recall you’ve both done welcoming-wagon-type stuff before, right? Can you help show Beanie the ropes, so to speak?
The what? If you mean something about revealing somebody’s kink without their consent, all of the people you tagged have been pretty open about it on Tumblr, so it seems reasonable to me.
Tags:
#it’s kind of weird to be somebody’s central example of hypno-Tumblr #I think I’m flattered #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof
I know that, when I’m aroused, the easiest way I can defuse the feeling is to make myself laugh.
But it just occurred to me – are there people who become aroused when they’re amused? I mean, I assume such people must exist, given that every single thing is both negatively and positively correlated with sex in some people. What do you guys think?
I’ve heard of dacryphiles (turned on by crying, although the term often refers to watching others cry), and I’ve heard of tickling fetishists, but I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone who was into laughing per se. Definitely wouldn’t surprise me, though.
(I, too, tend to laugh when turned on, especially if someone else is watching. While there could be a defusion aspect, for me I think it’s mainly deflection: “I am having an emotional response to this thing. I don’t want these people to know what emotion I’m having. I’ll pretend to be having a different emotion instead, one that can serve as a plausible answer to ‘Why [do you like]/[are you interested in] this thing?’” It’s not always a conscious decision, but I suspect that it’s still a similar line of reasoning when subconscious.)
Tags:
#sexuality and lack thereof #I wavered on what method to use to reply to this #I settled on #reply via reblog #since I figured that way more people would see it and some of them might have an answer to the original question #nsfw?
so obviously having a small turtle introspect about her childhood experiences with money leads to a whole new set of “is this normal?” or occasionally “does this ever happen? like, to anyone? what the fuck”
We had a lot of attempts to institute an allowance that never lasted very long, and what form the allowance took varied between attempts. IIRC, there were some versions where the money was dependent on good behaviour, but it wasn’t phrased as a fine: rather, “refraining from having a tantrum” *was* one of the tasks you had to complete in order to receive your money.
When we did the garage sale when I was 13 so that we wouldn’t have as much stuff to haul up to Canada, I *think* there were separate sections for each kid’s stuff. We’ve occasionally taken part in bake sales, and if I baked my own contribution I was consistently allowed to keep the profit. (It was inconsistent as to whether the cost of ingredients and/or the cost of things I bought from other bake-sale participants were deducted from the take.)
I don’t think I’ve heard the joint-casing one.
I never ran a service myself, unless you count Girl Scout cookies (and the profits from that went into a group fund for the troop, which was then used to cover supplies, field trip travel costs, and the like). I don’t know if it was common.
I don’t think I was ever outright forbidden from spending my money on a toy. (There was no question of whether I would get the money: even in-between allowance attempts, my extended family always gave me gifts of money for my birthday and Hanukkah, and I was allowed to keep it in a separate bank account.) There were a couple of times I wanted to buy a gadget and Dad talked me into getting a different gadget instead. (Which I think was for the best. A laptop *was* better than a Game Boy Advance (although I later got a GBA as a gift), and the Sandisk off-brand iPod was cheaper than Apple’s without really losing anything functionality-wise.)
Being so much about the power of suggestion, hypnosis is, to a fair extent, what people believe it to be. What hypnosis is changes over time, as society’s view of it changes.
I happened to be born into a part of space-time where the view of hypnosis meshed with what I was naturally inclined to find hot. It hasn’t always been this way, and, I expect, it won’t always be this way.
Someday, you’re going to leave me behind. You’ll move on to new pastures, where I will not want to follow. When I read things like this (or this, or that vanilla article you linked a while back on waking suggestions that I can’t find), I fear that it is already happening.
I’ve read over two pages of the /chrono version of the tag you linked, and he hasn’t said a single thing that makes me think “yeah, that sounds appealing”. It’s all a mix of things that don’t sound like fun at all and things that sound like they maybe could be fun but in a purely platonic way.
His kink is okay, but it is not my kink. If I’d been raised in a culture where this was the consensus view of hypnosis, I don’t think I would be a hypno-fetishist.
Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner, the future of hypnosis will be defined by people who say things like:
“Honestly I think the ‘relax/sleep/deep’ is counterproductive to what I want. People treat it as an idiomatic crutch but the reality is that I don’t really want any part of the person to sleep. I want them to be so focused that they can barely integrate the experience they are having with anything before, after, or around them.”
I look at that, and all I can think is, “I hope I find my real people before these people realise I’m not theirs.”
(And if I don’t find them in time, at least I’ll have had something resembling a community, and which will have taught me some useful techniques that I’ll likely be able to preserve privately even after they fall out of fashion. The next generation of people like me may be completely alone.)
@brin-bellway I’m not quite sure how to reply here- I think this post is partially a reply to me personally and partially a reply to the community and I don’t know if I can adequately address either.
I have had some of the same feels- seeing people I know get really into the D/s side of the kink or a more sadistic side or just a different side than I was interested in and feeling like I was being left behind or like my more tame interests were silly. I’ve had longer discussions with friends about the hypothetical timeline where I found the hypnokink community when I was young and how it would have pushed me away from learning hypnosis and towards just being a subject (and how sad that divergent timeline makes me).
I have developed a stronger interest in the more BDSMy side of hypnokink myself this past year- partially because I love learning new things and partially to keep up with the community at large. However, kinky or vanilla, I think the things that draw me to hypnosis are still present in either context- creativity, trust, intimacy, and even care. So the kinky stuff feels like an extension for me, not an entirely different thing. But just because I’m exploring more of the BDSM side, it doesn’t mean I’m losing my interest in other ways of doing hypnosis. I love being playful and silly. I love being experimental. I love being therapeutic (in a small way). I love being caring.
And (like you I suspect), one of my favorite ways of doing hypnosis is still to have someone that I care about lead me down into a deep relaxed state and be really gentle and soothing with me. That feels entirely lovely and good and potentially romantic and all of those wonderful things. I know not everyone in the community loves this, but I also know I’m not alone. This is true even amongst the people who talk about playing in ways that are edgier or seem more sadistic.
It’s OK. You still belong. I guarantee that if you came to an EEHU and just wanted to feel lovely and relaxed, there would be other people there who were just as interested in that as you are.
>>I think this post is partially a reply to me personally and partially a reply to the community<<
Mostly speaking generally, not so much you. (I know the examples I gave were all things you linked me, but that’s mostly because if someone frequently sets this feeling off I don’t follow them. You’re not frequent.)
>>I’ve had longer discussions with friends about the hypothetical timeline where I found the hypnokink community when I was young and how it would have pushed me away from learning hypnosis and towards just being a subject (and how sad that divergent timeline makes me).<<
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, in context.
>>And (like you I suspect), one of my favorite ways of doing hypnosis is still to have someone that I care about lead me down into a deep relaxed state and be really gentle and soothing with me. That feels entirely lovely and good and potentially romantic and all of those wonderful things.<<
:)
>>I know not everyone in the community loves this, but I also know I’m not alone.<<
It’s…hard to believe, sometimes. It seems like it tends to be a secondary thing for others, even when it comes up at all.
>>I guarantee that if you came to an EEHU<<
(Oh god, imagine me at an EEHU. Like, even if you ignore the logistical issues*…as I was tag-rambling about recently, I still haven’t really grokked the idea that kink can be consensual. Given how badly I cope with audios, I fully expect my brain would “defend me against the threats” by wrapping me in a protective layer of panic.)
>>No one is leaving you behind.<<
Even when I’m feeling hopeful, I still expect it eventually. Ever since I read that book on animal magnetism and saw how unrecognisable hypnosis used to be, I figured it would end up unrecognisable again in the future. There might, however, be a lot more time to prepare, and a much gentler break.
>>tennfan2 rightthewaydown anyone else who has comments<<
I wonder if I should wait to respond to avoid cross-posting, but I suppose I could always write additional responses to other people later.
(I’m curious what made you think of @rightthewaydown. I don’t really know her, though the fact that she was one of the people that came to your mind makes me wonder if maybe I should. (I did hear her seance audio once, though see above re: coping badly.))
*I can’t afford travel, and I don’t have enough freedom of movement to skip off to America for the weekend (or even Toronto, for that matter) without people asking a lot of uncomfortable questions.
I can’t speak for all of hypnosis-land, but if what I see at EEHUs is any indication, you’re not going to be left behind anytime soon.
Over the past two years (!) I have mostly observed that there are two paths folks take with hypnosis, in particular those who are not otherwise kinky. This is not exhaustive, your mileage may vary, etc etc:
One group of people who enter arrive for the hypnosis, and then realize using hypnosis for recreational or erotic purposes opens the door to a whole big world of kink. They may get drawn into sadism or submission or pet play or whatever. They may get less of a rise out of hypnosis for hypnosis sake, and more toward it being a tool for evocative experiences of other kinks.
The other group (which is to say, me) end up in erotic hypnosis world and while we are exposed to the great big world of kink, tend to feel more comfortable and much more at home playing with hypnosis. Maybe we play with suggestions that are broader than we once might have, but everything orbits around trance. I’ve dabbled in quite a few other kinky pursuits, but nothing gets me like a perfectly executed confusion induction.
This is all to say: there’s never going to stop being room for an interest in hypnosis that isn’t wrapped up in other kink. It’s never going to leave you behind. Hell, one could argue that Entranced (formerly MEEHU) is actually moving pretty intentionally in the direction of making even more space for that, given that they have dropped “erotic” from the event’s name and are marketing it as “recreational”
As to the larger questions about whether kink can ever be consensual, I wish you luck and discernment in figuring out how you feel. I only know from my own experience that it is, but my experience doesn’t count as more than that.
Finally, as to @hypnokinkwithmrdream, he’s someone who has a really particular perspective on how to do this kink – it’s fascinating stuff, and even though his style is very much not my style, I rarely talk with him about this stuff and don’t pick up something I can apply to how I do hypnosis.
Anyway, I hope you hang around and eventually find a way to get down to an event. It would be great to meet you, and I’m sure I’m not alone in the sentiment.
So as @tennfan2 alluded to in his tags, he and @enscenic invited me to be part of their Hypnosis in Kinkland class which was set up specifically talking about this sort of thing. Namely the divide between recreational hypnosis, hypnosis as a tool for BDSM, and the overlap (roughly represented by tennfan, enscenic, and I respectively).
When I entered all of this I was not prepared for anything beyond the “You are getting sleepy” variety (but hopefully with a lot less wavery voice tomfoolery), and I stayed there comfortably for a couple years before I strayed into power exchange land. I do play in various kinds of more traditionally BDSM kinks as well but ultimately it’s because power exchange helps me enhance my hypnosis–my partners are okay with feeling powerless to the pull of my hypnotic spell, or so our setup goes, and so I feel more empowered to explore consensually the unconsentual version of the thing because my first exposure that took so strongly for hypnosis and mind control was that forced and forceful nature.
Nearly anything I’ve picked up I’ve only added in order to be a new lens through which I could explore my primary kink of hypnosis (and sometimes to follow the interests of play partners, but ultimately any long term play partners I end up with it’s because our default way of being naturally clicks). It’s through those various strong contrasts that I feel I get a fuller experience of the thing because I love it for all the bits and bobs that make it up technically speaking as much as I just love the face of someone so blankly blissed out I could leave them that way contently for hours until I reasserted their reality to a new all consuming focus. More pure BDSM pursuits without some hypnosis woven into them have never, to this day, hit my buttons but they have been of great interest to me intellectually partially because I’m a reaction junkie, partially because I love walking my partners through new intense experiences and protecting them every step of the way through it, and partially because seeing them divorced now and again from the hypnosis I always otherwise bring in helps me see by contrast what each adds to the other. But watching my partner drift away into a cloud of only my words and lose all touch with everything else will be what I select every time between the two of them, because that is so much more central to who I am and what I’m here for.
I’ve watched the hypno kink community over the past fifteen years as it’s grown up, and only just in approaching three years now (Jesus, has it been that long already? I feel like I just got here) did I finally put my face out there at one of these events to see what the community had become. I went wholly preparing to be alienated and out of place, which is why I went for one day only in the middle of the con, talked almost exclusively to those I’d come with and the one person I went to meet, and expected that to be the end of it unless something astonishing came up to change that.
While I enjoy the kink community, I’ve never felt I clicked or fit really. They were more my people than the regular folks around me, closer to the heart of who I am and the traits I admire in myself, but I was always going to be stuck in that weird niche of the hypno-Domme: either not kink enough because what’s the big deal with whispering someone still like is that it? or the response that what I did was twenty steps too far and more intense than a really heavy beatdown scene because at least they never touched that person’s mind.
I went and I found my place in it so quickly I’ve been reeling ever since, because I am a shy and anti-social little anxiety ball of a person. There are several different break ups of the community, but they all are so overlapped in their Venn that there’s really no beginning nor end between them. If you happen to overlap with none, that’s fine. Your niche will still bump up against others and you’ll still find people who will be encouraging and even curious about your different perspective. It’s been so much more welcoming than I ever dreamed.
For what one more person’s word is worth, I don’t think you’ve anything to fear of the culture evaporating around you into something unrecognizable. We’re a part of it, a central over lap even, even if we’re not the part held up as the most flash by some sources.
I’ll throw my own two cents worth of possible wisdom here as well. As @soundshypnotic and @tennfan2 both say, there are really quite a lot of people around who love the actual process of hypnosis – hypnotizing and being hypnotized – for the sake of itself, and wander around in a sea of kinkier hypno-folk always feeling like they don’t quite fit into the community.
But we find each other! And it is definitely possible to have an entire weekend at an event hanging out with just those people and play around with the less bdsm oriented stuff and have a great time without feeling like you’ve missed anything. I have never had anyone make me feel like I was less welcome for not wanting to be fully immersed in a more loaded type of play than I might be comfortable with.
I hope that you will find a way to incorporate what works for you into the community at large; if you don’t, I wish you the best.
(This is going to be pretty disjointed, sorry. I might end up missing some bits, and I know I’ve repeated some bits in different words.)
@tennfan2: >>As to the larger questions about whether kink can ever be consensual, I wish you luck and discernment in figuring out how you feel. I only know from my own experience that it is, but my experience doesn’t count as more than that.<<
Intellectually, I believe it. Viscerally, I tend towards paranoia at the best of times, and was raised on a pop culture consisting entirely of non-con.
(I mean, if anyone could actually include me, it’d probably be you guys. I’m not saying I don’t believe you, exactly, just that it’s never been true before.)
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I’m not sure I *am* a hypnosis-for-hypnosis-sake person, exactly, though it’s certainly closer than BDSM. I might be more of a means-to-an-end person, but with a different end. IME, it seems like “hypnosis for hypnosis’ sake” tends to mean a lot of playing around with suggestion, and the thing that sets off this particular sub-type of loneliness *is* people emphasising suggestion over sensation. (Like the research article I linked to in the original reply, which acts like relaxation is useless because it doesn’t increase suggestibility. I read stuff like that and the theory-of-mind-lacking bit of my brain just goes “You’re–*headdesk*–missing–*headdesk*–the–*headdesk*–point–” (The more theory-of-mind-ish bits of me assume they must be hitting a different point.))
Suggestions that the for-hypnosis-sake people see as exploring trance often fall for me into the “stuff that sounds fun-but-platonic” camp (freezing, probably) or the “why would you even want that” camp (memory play; I deal with more than enough of that shit at bedtime).
(I think I’ve gotten narrower over time. I’m less desperate now, I suppose.)
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@injygo replied: “Same feel on the ‘kink is inherently nonconsensual’ feeling. It’s really hard for me to imagine going to a hypnosis convention and being at all ok with seeing or hearing anything.“
@ellaenchanting replied: “Hmmm- injyo, not to be rude, but have you done hypnosis before? It’s not as nonconsensual as it looks from the outside, especially with empowered subjects (which is a big deal in hypnokink)/“
I don’t think I really have anything to say here, but I thought I’d post it to make sure people see it (in particular, to make sure injygo sees Ella’s reply).
—
*leaves to do homework*
*returns, checks if anything else has been added in the meantime*
…goddammit.
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@hypno-sandwich: >>I wouldn’t judge the scene based on one person’s notes.<<
It’s *not* one person, just the latest example. If it were one person it wouldn’t bother me.
@hypnokinkwithmrdream: >>I am not sure why you think what you are doing is what I am doing.<<
It *isn’t* what I’m doing. Wasn’t that part of the point?
>>If I want to relax I nap.<<
I dislike unconsciousness, and I despise hypnagogic amnesia. Hypnosis offers a better solution.
>>Now people take it for granted that consent is necessary and good negotiation is necessary. But yeah, the times are changing. The days when it seemed acceptable for hypnotists to treat subjects as if they didn’t have the understanding to be equal participants in whatever they did, the conception that the subject has to be fooled into doing what they want to do rather than be treated like adults, is really fading.<<
…given the original context in this thread of the sentiment “the times are changing”, this looks like you conflating dozing fetishists and rapists. Why would you do that?
>>Don’t complain to me if what I built isn’t for you.<<
Please, point me to where in this thread I was complaining to you. This isn’t *about* you. You were one of multiple examples. You *happened* to be the example that inspired this particular post. Somebody thought that meant they ought to ping you and drag you into this, but that’s not my fault.
(I suppose I should have dug harder for that article on waking suggestions, where nobody who had any significant chance of coming across it could mistake a response for being aimed at them personally, and pretended that that was the final straw instead. It actually almost was: I nearly wrote something approximating my first post at the time.)
>>Maybe I don’t teach a lot of vanilla or non-kinky or orgasm related hypnosis but every con I got to that is what I see<<
You realise there’s more than two sides here, right? I’m willing to believe that you’re an embittered minority, but that doesn’t make my perspective the dominant one. We can *both* be embittered minorities. You don’t have to fight me for it.
–
I suppose it’s actually kind of flattering that you’re responding to me as if I’m a threat. (…at least, I hope you aren’t this prickly to people you *don’t* feel threatened by.) I’m no threat to you. I have neither the desire nor the ability to kick you out. I am simply accustomed to being collateral damage, the one that even people who take pride in acknowledging all sexualities don’t acknowledge, don’t even *leave* space for (let alone *make* space), and I get worried when I see things that might fit into that pattern.
(I know that people cannot reasonably be expected to account for my existence. I have had to accept that. That doesn’t mean that I can’t quietly grumble about it.)
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I don’t merely wait for my community to find me, and it is not something that can be taught. What I do, is I speak. I speak of what makes me tick, and I go out and I listen to see if others are saying the same things. Speaking doesn’t just leave a trail that others might find: it implicitly enlists the help of those who are listening. There are people out there in the world now who would hear somebody saying something like me and say “Hey, I know somebody I think you should meet.”
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(Goddammit, I’m probably not making any sense, and judging from Mr Dream’s response I’ve somehow managed to come off as entitled. *sigh*)
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Being so much about the power of suggestion, hypnosis is, to a fair extent, what people believe it to be. What hypnosis is changes over time, as society’s view of it changes.
I happened to be born into a part of space-time where the view of hypnosis meshed with what I was naturally inclined to find hot. It hasn’t always been this way, and, I expect, it won’t always be this way.
Someday, you’re going to leave me behind. You’ll move on to new pastures, where I will not want to follow. When I read things like this (or this, or that vanilla article you linked a while back on waking suggestions that I can’t find), I fear that it is already happening.
I’ve read over two pages of the /chrono version of the tag you linked, and he hasn’t said a single thing that makes me think “yeah, that sounds appealing”. It’s all a mix of things that don’t sound like fun at all and things that sound like they maybe could be fun but in a purely platonic way.
His kink is okay, but it is not my kink. If I’d been raised in a culture where this was the consensus view of hypnosis, I don’t think I would be a hypno-fetishist.
Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner, the future of hypnosis will be defined by people who say things like:
“Honestly I think the ‘relax/sleep/deep’ is counterproductive to what I want. People treat it as an idiomatic crutch but the reality is that I don’t really want any part of the person to sleep. I want them to be so focused that they can barely integrate the experience they are having with anything before, after, or around them.”
I look at that, and all I can think is, “I hope I find my real people before these people realise I’m not theirs.”
(And if I don’t find them in time, at least I’ll have had something resembling a community, and which will have taught me some useful techniques that I’ll likely be able to preserve privately even after they fall out of fashion. The next generation of people like me may be completely alone.)
@brin-bellway I’m not quite sure how to reply here- I think this post is partially a reply to me personally and partially a reply to the community and I don’t know if I can adequately address either.
I have had some of the same feels- seeing people I know get really into the D/s side of the kink or a more sadistic side or just a different side than I was interested in and feeling like I was being left behind or like my more tame interests were silly. I’ve had longer discussions with friends about the hypothetical timeline where I found the hypnokink community when I was young and how it would have pushed me away from learning hypnosis and towards just being a subject (and how sad that divergent timeline makes me).
I have developed a stronger interest in the more BDSMy side of hypnokink myself this past year- partially because I love learning new things and partially to keep up with the community at large. However, kinky or vanilla, I think the things that draw me to hypnosis are still present in either context- creativity, trust, intimacy, and even care. So the kinky stuff feels like an extension for me, not an entirely different thing. But just because I’m exploring more of the BDSM side, it doesn’t mean I’m losing my interest in other ways of doing hypnosis. I love being playful and silly. I love being experimental. I love being therapeutic (in a small way). I love being caring.
And (like you I suspect), one of my favorite ways of doing hypnosis is still to have someone that I care about lead me down into a deep relaxed state and be really gentle and soothing with me. That feels entirely lovely and good and potentially romantic and all of those wonderful things. I know not everyone in the community loves this, but I also know I’m not alone. This is true even amongst the people who talk about playing in ways that are edgier or seem more sadistic.
It’s OK. You still belong. I guarantee that if you came to an EEHU and just wanted to feel lovely and relaxed, there would be other people there who were just as interested in that as you are.
>>I think this post is partially a reply to me personally and partially a reply to the community<<
Mostly speaking generally, not so much you. (I know the examples I gave were all things you linked me, but that’s mostly because if someone frequently sets this feeling off I don’t follow them. You’re not frequent.)
>>I’ve had longer discussions with friends about the hypothetical timeline where I found the hypnokink community when I was young and how it would have pushed me away from learning hypnosis and towards just being a subject (and how sad that divergent timeline makes me).<<
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, in context.
>>And (like you I suspect), one of my favorite ways of doing hypnosis is still to have someone that I care about lead me down into a deep relaxed state and be really gentle and soothing with me. That feels entirely lovely and good and potentially romantic and all of those wonderful things.<<
:)
>>I know not everyone in the community loves this, but I also know I’m not alone.<<
It’s…hard to believe, sometimes. It seems like it tends to be a secondary thing for others, even when it comes up at all.
>>I guarantee that if you came to an EEHU<<
(Oh god, imagine me at an EEHU. Like, even if you ignore the logistical issues*…as I was tag-rambling about recently, I still haven’t really grokked the idea that kink can be consensual. Given how badly I cope with audios, I fully expect my brain would “defend me against the threats” by wrapping me in a protective layer of panic.)
>>No one is leaving you behind.<<
Even when I’m feeling hopeful, I still expect it eventually. Ever since I read that book on animal magnetism and saw how unrecognisable hypnosis used to be, I figured it would end up unrecognisable again in the future. There might, however, be a lot more time to prepare, and a much gentler break.
>>tennfan2 rightthewaydown anyone else who has comments<<
I wonder if I should wait to respond to avoid cross-posting, but I suppose I could always write additional responses to other people later.
(I’m curious what made you think of @rightthewaydown. I don’t really know her, though the fact that she was one of the people that came to your mind makes me wonder if maybe I should. (I did hear her seance audio once, though see above re: coping badly.))
*I can’t afford travel, and I don’t have enough freedom of movement to skip off to America for the weekend (or even Toronto, for that matter) without people asking a lot of uncomfortable questions.
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