"Cum on command is easy," professional hypnotherapist Soforia tells me over the phone. "It takes about 15 to 20 minutes. You get someone into an hypnotic state and then you get them so aroused sexually that when you tell them to cum, they do."
Sadly, she was on a cell phone and taking five from a meeting to chat, so a demonstration was a little impractical. Besides, she doesn’t like to do it over the phone. Too much like phone sex. She’d rather have people who want to be hypnotized to orgasm buy her tape, Snap to It.
"I snap my fingers while hypnotizing them and they’re getting more and more aroused with every snap until I tell them to cum." Soforia got turned on to hypnosis when she saw a campy ’60s film called Woman From the Year 5000 in which a silver-sequin-clad babe comes back from the future and hypnotizes men so she can take them back to her world to repopulate the race.
"I suspect I’m too much of a control freak to give myself over to the other side. I couldn’t even fake it when a hypnotist came to our high school and had all my classmates clucking like chickens around our gym. So while it would be a novelty, I imagine I’d have a tough time being snapped to orgasm."
Soforia, who has found a niche for her special talents in an ever-growing community on the internet devoted to hypnofetishism and mind-control erotica, isn’t super keen on the whole cum on command shtick anyway.
Why settle for controlling someone’s orgasm when you can control his entire mind? Soforia says most of her clients like to have her hypnotize them so they will desire sessions with her at unusual times. She does this by planting a post-hypnotic suggestion so that, say, every time they see a particular cloud formation while strolling down the street they will feel the need for a $120 session with her. Marketing genius, that.
Like a dominatrix whose slaves live to serve her, Soforia has guys literally under her spell ready to do whatever she commands, like fetch hypnosis books down at the bookstore. The relationship is more about control than sex, she says. The turn-on for her clients is about being under her power though hypnosis.
Hypnosis has been around as a healing method since at least 1100 BC according to Look Deeply, a professional hypnotherapist and a bit of a watchdog in the hypnofetish online community. "There were sleep temples in ancient Egypt where priests put people to sleep to cure them," she tells me over the phone.
How it became a sexual turn-on for some people is anybody’s guess. (http://members.nbci.com/voyer) Voyer, a hypnofetishist who runs his own website, dates his own fascination back to "a scene from a ’60s James Bond knock-off called Our Man Flint, in which women are drugged and hypnotized into being comfort girls for the male minions of the film’s Criminal Organization."
While Soforia turns her clients on by putting them under her hypnotic spell, the turn-on for hypnofetishists like Voyer is women who have no control over their actions because they are hypnotized. "The attraction for some of us is in making a (fictional) woman do things even when she doesn’t want to," Voyer explains to me in an email. "To have her struggle futilely against your/the hypnotist’s control, to know that the acts she is performing are wrong/evil/immoral, and still do them, unable to help herself."
Sounds creepy. But Voyer insists his fantasies are just that fantasies that he enjoys through stories and images that are not real. He would never make a woman do anything against her will in real life, he insists.
In fact, as with other sexual fetishes based on the exchange of power and control, the Number 1 rule in this community is consensus. If you’re going to make someone your zombie love slave, he has to agree to it.
Which is one of Look Deeply’s pet peeves. Look Deeply discovered the erotic side of her profession when she put herself on the internet about four years ago. "I started getting emails from guys worried they were sick because they got turned on by hypnosis," she says over the phone. "I’d say, ‘If you’re sick, then so are all these other guys I hear from." Look Deeply offered counselling and a referral service for hypnofetishists to address their questions and concerns.
She says some female hypnotists get a little power hungry and can get people in trouble with their hypnotic suggestions. It might be a little problematic if, for example, a guy got feverishly horny and felt the need to have sex with the first woman he sat next to on the bus as a result of a post-hypnotic suggestion. Or had to explain to his wife that he simply must go get hypnotized NOW!
Look Deeply’s says much of the sexual attraction to hypnosis and mind control centres around just that, control having it or giving it up. In the case of the latter, while she believes that no one can be hypnotized against his or her will, part of the thrill is believing that you are surrendering your will.
:A lot of people I talk to come from very powerful positions in their work where they have to make all the decisions," she explains. "They want to turn their sexuality over to someone else and say, "Just do me." And the added bonus with hypnosis is that you have a great excuse for your naughty behaviour:"I couldn’t help myself, I was hypnotized."
Brian, who runs another hypnofetish site privatepages.com , describes a typical hypnofantasy where "someone (usually a woman) is made to participate in either homosexual acts or other acts that the person having the fantasy might find less than completely acceptable. Since the subject is under someone else’s control she is not responsible for her own actions, making it safe to imagine her[self] in a variety of wild situations without ‘losing face’ in the real world."
As it happens, there’s plenty in the world of mind-control erotica that has little to do with the real world. Hypnotism is only one form of mindfuck. Telepathic control, vampires, even mechanical brain implants are all sexy game in the world of mind-control erotica. And given how hard it is to find a good mechanical-brain-implant manufacturer these days, it’s not surprising that a lot of the material on these sites comes in the form of stories, drawings and B-movie references.
In fact, when she’s not on mind-control patrol, Look Deeply acts as a technical consultant on stories written by R.C., a self-described mild hypnofetishist who posts mind-control erotica on the website www.rcwrites.com.
A hot favourite right now is Chains, a story in which a woman hypnotizes her husband into believing she has him tied up in chains and engages in a long, drawn-out seduction while he is under her spell. The story is fairly sexually explicit, but like most mind erotica there is at least as much or more time spent describing the hypnosis as the sex. Look Deeply and R.C. know their audience; they know that many hardcore hypnofetishists are less interested in the actual sex than the process of hypnosis.
Like Voyer. "What happens after that moment of power theft [the hypnotic induction] is almost entirely immaterial," he says. "With most stories, what unsurprisingly comes next is sex. For me, at least, this is the failing."
It makes sense when you think about it, offers Look Deeply. "When I do a typical hypnosis session, my voice changes, I close blinds and windows, I get people very comfortable," she explains. "I create an altered state."
And let’s face it, she says, "altered states are a nice place to be."
"You are getting very sleepy"