Quiet Hypnotist

Building Subject Agency: The Blog Post!

The author's proudly displayed fetish

The author's fetish you're pretty sure they don't realise they have

The author's fetish which they're firmly convinced everyone has and is just pretending otherwise

The author's non-sexual special interest which just sounds like a fetish because of their habitually unfortunate phrasing

The fetish the author is making a well-meaning effort to cater to in spite of clearly not understanding it themselves

The author's fetish that never quite makes it into the text because they keep getting sidetracked by the requisite worldbuilding

The author's utterly pedestrian sexual preference which the text treats like a bizarre fetish because they've got shit to work through

The author's seemingly innocuous recurring trope they're going to have a personal revelation about ten years down the road

The writing has been on the wall for years, but now it’s in the boldest of fonts: if there is porn that you like, games with even remotely adult or queer content that you enjoy, queer art you appreciate that features nudity or discussions of bodies, works of fiction that you love that features controversial subjects or themes, or any queer historical records that you think should continue existing, now is the time to build an archive of them. If you are panicked by the growing libricide of LGBTQ and NSFW records from the internet, this is one very impactful thing that you can do right now to help.

Download the files, store them on an encrypted drive, upload them to a protected server, and communicate with other lovers of sexual art and queer records, so that you can help build a library of it that is accessible to us, and those that come after us in the future. If you have the capability, keep meticulous records of what you have collected — where you found it, who originally made it, what year it comes from, the spaces and communities it was associated with, the names of the people who brought it into existence.

As the burning of the Hirschfeld archives and the catastrophic losses of the AIDs crisis taught us, queer history evaporates quickly when there is no one around to keep circulating it. But you can be a part of what keeps our stories flowing, the blood moving through us that keeps us animated and alive. And you do not have to be a trained historian or especially skillful with technology, though now is also a wonderful time to learn how to be a better archivist. Just begin doing something. Save and document all that you can — in a private space that you control, and that technology companies cannot purge.

It is also important at this time to understand how LGBTQ content bans happen on a tactical level, and resist in kind. Collective Shout pressures platforms into removing NSFW content by contacting payment processors, such as Visa and MasterCard, and convincing those companies to not process any transactions involving sexual works. Collective Shout claims that it only took about a thousand phone calls to get the companies to enforce a NSFW ban. We can also call them in large numbers, and demand that adult & queer content gets put back.

If a game that you paid good money for on Steam or Itch.io has been removed in the NSFW ban, you have grounds to demand a refund.Give your payment processor a call, make a complaint, and get them to issue you a charge back. This may help place pressure on both payment processing companies and game platforms to revise their policies.

It is also important during this time to study the recent history of LGBTQ & NSFW censorship on the internet, and learn from communities that have been able to resist it successfully. One of the very first groups to be targeted by efforts like these was actually the hypnosis kink community, back in the late ’90s and early 2000s. During that time, an avid porn site user reportedly disputed hundreds of dollars in charges, alleging that he had been hypnotized into giving his credit card information away against his will. To avoid future such cases, payment processors like Visa and Mastercard refused to honor any transactions for any content involving hypnosis or mind control, and this has remained their policy ever since.

In spite of harsh repression at the hands of credit card companies and digital platforms, the hypnokink community has continued to thrive, and even grown in popularity and public acceptance in recent years. As many of you know, I am a long-term member of this diverse & queer-affirming community — I spent all of last weekend at an in-person erotic hypnosis convention, which I blogged all about on Instagram — so I know a bit about how we have managed to cope with being attacked and have come out stronger and healthier than we were before.

I think that any of us who are concerned by the stripping of queer and sexual content from the internet can learn from how the hypnokink community has responded to similar censorship over the years, and adopt some of their strategies.

One of the first things that the hypno-kink community learned once it was under attack was not to self-snitch. When we got banned from mainstream porn sites, we found the seedy, poorly regulated platforms that were not as likely to enforce payment processors’ ban on hypnosis content. On sites like Pornhub and Patreon, we learned to use terms like mesmerized and other euphemisms instead of hypnosis or mind control, or to merely reference media properties where hypnosis is featured without saying it outright.

We became data hoarders, snapping up copies of every porn video, erotic audio file, animated gif, and illustration featuring hypnosis that we could find, and then sharing it on forums with our fellow fetishists. We learned to make and share our work in private — in chat rooms, on password-protected servers — and began hosting hypnotic content on shared drives and websites we didn’t widely advertise.

Rather than allowing outside groups to censor us, we took community responsibility for maintaining standards of consent and safety, and gave no quarter to predators. At conventions, we require attendees to complete consent quizzes, and provided dungeons with consent monitors. We offer classes on consent, safety, and developing agency as a hypnotic subject. Many of our events ban the use of substances and require COVID vaccinations and KN95 masks in order to reduce risk. We continually debate how best to navigate riskier kink practices and negotiate encounters with one another.

We have continued gathering in person, and in small virtual conferences, because there are conversations about our shared passion that require an in-depth conversation among people who are at a higher level of understanding. We discuss more complex, nuanced topics in rooms where people are prepared to have them, and we understand that every rule has the power to cause exclusion and damage — and appreciate that even the best guidelines need to be broken sometimes. (For example, plenty of people still benefit from using substances for their mental health, even at a “substance-free” con).

Because the kink we are playing with can be psychologically very risky, we emphasize the importance of being in community with one another and vetting play partners, and speak about our experiences so that we can better understand what we’re going through and what we need. We do what we can to unlearn our shame and stigma, and to bring our feelings and needs out into the open — but not in front of corporations and social media platforms that will only punish and censor us.

We come out to one another, and commune to build better art, more responsible and effective hypnotic files, to write hotter smut, to have better scenes, to be able to play at the edges of consent and consciousness with intention and responsibility. This does not erase all of the risk, but it allows us to be informed of it, and to accept what difficulties and costs we take on. Nearly everyone finishes a scene by asking who needs aftercare. We prepare for the emotional drops of having seen and experienced intense shit — and for the most part, we are grateful that we get to dive with such strong parachutes.

It is this combination of privacy, technological shrewdness, dedicated archival and resource-building work, and loving community responsibility that has made us robust. Though so many outside forces have attempted to silence us and portray us as a group of perverted predators, we’ve continued spreading the truth about who we are and helping people who share our desires to find one another, and revel in our passions as safely as we can.

We have escaped the fear mongering and corporate pressure, and made something completely our own. All queer people and all makers of sexual or erotic art can do the same. We will get through this, but we will have to be more than just passive consumers of content.

We will have to become archivists, librarians, developers, community stewards, consent monitors, peer educators, advocates, organizers, and creators in our own right. And we can do it. Queer people have been producing creative work about our identities and inner erotic lives for as long as we have existed, and we have always been able to find one another in the back rooms of bars, in small bookstores in cities, in veiled language in personal ads, and everywhere else that we have tricked our enemies into not looking.

I GROW WEARY OF MIMICKING YOUR OBNOXIOUS MANNERISMS TO ACCOMMODATE FOR THIS ENVIRONMENT. I WISH TO RETURN TO MY CHAMBERS TO REST AND SO I MAY PLAY SPLATOON 3 ON THE NINTENDO SWITCH. WE SHALL GATHER AGAIN NEXT HALF MOON AND I SHALL TELL YOU OF MY VICTORIES.

them:

Real sexism is not sexy.

Real sexual harassment is not hot, it’s awful.

Real women don’t owe you anything for simply existing.

If you’re doing anything without consent, you are objectively wrong, vile, and a predator.

That people get off to the idea of being hypnotized and mind controlled by a powerful being?

That some people, out in the outer stretches of the Internet, find looking into someone's eyes, not even noticing as their minds going completely blank, and getting lost in the world that that individual implants into their mind... arousing?

Are you telling me that some people think that...

which name(s) you know gives you different powers over them.

there are Rules but you mostly have to figure them out for yourself.

getting the Rules wrong or breaking them can cost you more than you ever even knew you had.

Maximum Horny at all times

be careful what you wish for or you just might get it

Gift Of Prophecy

Except... what's going on with those labial scales? Something about them looks off. And that row of spikes down the back, Komodos don't have that. And their nostrils aren't so round. Hm. I think I know what's happening here.

I did not realize that this was AI at first glance; I thought it was just a really heavy editing style. I saw the missing central toe, yeah, but Komodos will do that to each other sometimes. The other forefoot, the one with four toes, is positioned in such a way that the fifth toe could be hidden, and the lifted hind foot could be similar.

But if you know Komodo dragon anatomy like I do, the inaccuracies pop up pretty quickly. Still, it's not like it was during the early days of GenAI; what I'm seeing here is that the GenAI image algos are getting better at discerning what part of a picture is a Komodo dragon. Since the inception, GenAI has really struggled to make accurate reptiles. In the beginning, everything was an iguana... even the Komodo dragons.

Over time, the models have been refined, but there are still some pretty obvious anatomy differences- the slit pupils, the mouth shape, the overall definition of the snout...

And they often struggle with the tongue. This isn't what the inside of a lizard's mouth looks like!

There's a lot of talk about how GenAI is bad for the brain- but it seems like most of it is actually about writing. And I think we should be talking more about images, too. Not even just about the stolen training data or the erosion of opportunities for artists, but... what is such easy access to these generated images doing to our ability to perceive what's real versus what isn't?

Every single one of the images I pulled is from a highly popular stock photo site. In case you don't know what a stock photo is, it's a photograph (you can also have stock illustrations and stock footage) that's been licensed to use in different applications. These pictures aren't taken for a specific client; anybody who pays can use them within the terms of the image's license.

But all of these images- they're not photos. They're inaccurate illustrations. I recognize them for what they are because I spend a lot of time looking at lizards, but what if you've got someone writing a quick news story, or designing a science worksheet, or throwing together a museum brochure or a zoo sign? If they don’t know what a Komodo dragon is supposed to look like, they’ll use whatever looks convincing.

Images trigger something deep within us- you know that saying "A picture is worth a thousand words?" We're wired to trust what we see. But the problem here is that genAI doesn't create an image of the thing; it creates what its internal logic says is associated with the subject of the prompt. It all comes down to probability; generative AI makes images by looking at its training data and creating output based on what the data is associated with.

(For more info on how AI "sees" what it does, check out the LENS project, which you can read more about here.)

We don't see things the same way the computers do, and we're willing to trust images more than words. How many stock photos do you think you see each day? It's probably more than you think; after all, the average American sees around 5,000 ads per day. And while those photos are marked as AI generated on the stock sites, they aren't marked as AI generated once someone has licensed them. And if the stock site doesn't have what you need? No problem, just use the AI image generator to fake that photo yourself!

We already have seen political deepfakes and AI generated images used to spread misinformation. Did you see the image of an ICE agent arresting a Doordash worker? That was an AI fake, part of a larger hoax. Some of us are already learning to respond with increased skepticism to important images, because people have an agenda to fake those. But what about the less important images, the background images, the completely mundane images? GenAI seems to be quietly coming for them, and it's something we should be paying attention to, because if we're exposed, constantly and quietly, to generated images and are trained to believe it's photography, we'll be more accepting of the bigger lies when we see them.

I chose not to license my photos for sale and made everything on the site free for non-AI artistic use: paywalls ruin the internet, and there has to be something accurate out there available for folks to access.

And if you’d like to see some real Komodo dragons, well, the site has a bunch.