Author: Kate Sloan

Interior Dickorator: How to Make Your Home a Sex-Positive Sanctuary

Kate Sloan

They say home is where the heart is. Home is also – for many of us – where you get to be your most authentic self. And if you’re a kinky sex nerd like me, maybe that means your home is a palace of perversion.

When I moved out of my parents’ house and into my own apartment last year, one of the most exciting aspects to me of this new experience was the chance to decorate my new space exactly how I wanted to. And since both my career and my personal life are soaked in sexuality, obviously my new room quickly became the lascivious lair of my dreams.

Are you similarly committed to building a raunchy refuge? Here are some sex-positive decor suggestions you might enjoy…

Risqué prints. Look, what is even the point of having your own private space if you can’t plaster porn everywhere?! I have on my walls, for example, a glossy color print of Quinne Suicide, a Clementine Morrigan illustration of a femme in a strap-on, some postcards featuring art from vintage romance novel covers, and large medical illustrations of the vulva and internal clitoris. Other suggestions: pictures of you and your sweetheart(s), framed screenshots of significant sexts, vintage porn prints, Vargas girls posters, other pinup illustrations, dirty needlepoints from Crass Stitches, sexy stained glass pieces, Vanessa Walsh paintings. You’ll feel saucier in your space once you’re surrounded by sexy objets d’art!

Artfully-arranged condoms and lube. I firmly believe that life’s “boring” minutia doesn’t have to be boring; you can always inject a little pizzazz into the day-to-day. One way I like to do this is by displaying my condoms in a cute little basket, like a barrier buffet. Consider keeping yours in a glass vase, a painted flowerpot, a sleek Container Store solution, a colorful Caboodle, a hollowed-out 1950s music box, or whatever receptacle tugs at your heart. Likewise, you can lay out your lubes in a pleasing fashion, perhaps arranging them in ascending size order on a bedside shelf, or even pouring your fave into an automatic lube dispenser. Class up the joint and you’ll feel even better about reaching for condoms and lube when you need ’em!

Sex toys and/or kink gear on display. I have friends who store their sex toys artfully, in shoe racks or wine racks or various other inventive methods. Currently I have several impact toys hanging from adhesive plastic hooks I’ve affixed to one wall, and several leather kink items are displayed on my windowsill. My under-the-bed restraints also peek out from under my mattress at all times, a glinting glimpse of my kinky proclivities. How could you show off your prettiest sex accoutrements in your bedroom?

Sexy lighting. My friend Suz recently installed LED light strips behind her headboard, which has me thinking about what a big difference good lighting can make in a room. A Tinder hookup once said, of the too-bright overhead light in my old bedroom, “Can you turn that light off? It kind of feels like a hospital in here…” and that comment has stuck with me, inspiring me to seek out more aesthetically pleasing solutions! Currently I have a Neuma LED lamp on my dresser, which has a mode where it cycles slowly through the entire color spectrum in a slinkily seductive manner. In the past, I’ve also experimented with white fairy lights, which cast a comfortingly cozy glow. Your bedroom shouldn’t feel like a fluorescently-lit hospital room – unless you’re into medical play, I suppose!

Tempting fragrances. Assuming neither you nor your paramour(s) suffer from scent sensitivities, this can be a delicious way to add to the mood. I am a fan of Square Trade Goods scented candles, woodsy incense sticks, and diffusers that circulate essential oils throughout the room (you could even reach out to an aromatherapist for a custom blend if you’re feelin’ fancy). Kinksters, did you know Leatherstock makes leather-scented incense and candles that smell stunningly true-to-life?!

A lascivious personal library. John Waters says, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!” I would add: if you go home with somebody and they have a lot of sex books, it’d probably be fun to fuck ’em! Some sex-nerd faves that would enrich your brain and look good on your bookshelf: Sex at Dawn, Girl Sex 101, Becoming Cliterate, The Killer Wore Leather, and Sex with Shakespeare.

Sex-themed knickknacks. I have so many of these! A 3D-printed internal clitoris on your desk is a great conversation-starter, for example. I store my pens in a Museum of Sex mug that says “Sex Makes Me Thirsty,” which is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. Some sex toy companies even make miniature versions of their dildos; flag your phallus fandom with flair!

How do you like to flag your sex-nerdiness through decor choices?

Behind the Seams: Fetishwear & Mean Girls

Kate Sloan

September 29th, 2018. A new-ish dungeon space in my city was having a hypnokink play party, and my Sir encouraged me to go. This is normally the kind of thing that would activate my anxiety a lot – and, indeed, it did – but, as per usual, having been instructed to do it anyway by my beloved dom made me feel better equipped to overcome my fears.

The event dress code said “fetishwear or all-black,” which I and the femme friend I invited both found daunting yet doable. I got dolled up, then trekked uptown to meet my friend walking-distance from the venue so we could head over together.

It ended up being pretty low-key and fun. We’re both on the shy side, so we didn’t play with anyone or even really talk to anyone, but we had a lot of fun sitting on the sidelines and catching up on each other’s lives while intermittently watching some of the scenes that happened. We didn’t see any hypno, but then, it can be a tough kink to spot. Instead, several impact scenes unfolded in front of us, including one that also featured rope suspension, forced orgasm play, and a mega-hot domly dom in a suit. Woof.

At the end of the night, I took a bus home, got McDonald’s as per my Sir’s instructions, and told him all about the party over the phone. Pretty sweet night out, all in all.

What I’m wearing:
• Hair in little buns
• Black skater dress – H&M
• Pink leather chest harness – Stockroom
• Pink and white striped kneesocks – American Apparel
• Black leather Frye harness boots
• Eyeshadow and lipstick – the Sugarpill Oh Honey! collection

October 2nd, 2018. I wore this to Tell Me Something Good, the monthly sexy storytelling event I love so much. My Sir chose my outfit, as he often does when I go to events.

The theme was open, so the stories told that night were a wild grab bag: a first sapphic experience, a chance meeting on a Megabus, ableism on dating apps, awkward Pride celebrations with homophobic parents, being outed by nosy bosses, and more. I sipped a double whiskey on the rocks and laughed/gasped all the way through the night.

I told a story too: the tale of my first knifeplay scene with Dick, way back in December of last year. I figured it was an appropriately scary story for this October event. I can’t believe I’d never told that one at TMSG before!

What I’m wearing:
• Orangey-red heart-print dress – CowCow
• Black Danier leather jacket
• Blue suede collar – L’Amour-Propre
• Black leather Coach Station handbag – vintage on eBay many years ago
• Black leather Frye engineer boots
• Revlon Fire & Ice lipstick (a classic, a legend)

October 3rd, 2018. October 3rd is Mean Girls Day and it was also a Wednesday – so, obviously, I wore pink.

My regular Frye harness boots had cracks in the soles so egregious that my socks got soaked when I walked in them on rainy days, so I’d set them aside for the time being. That meant that my rainbow glitter Doc Martens got to see the light of day again.

I wore this outfit to a local café to do some dayjob work, and then back home to write this post.

What I’m wearing:
• Pink T-shirt – Gap (it needs to be ironed!)
• Black Danier leather jacket
• Blue sparkly heart necklace – Tarina Tarantino (current fave jewelry item)
• Black leggings – H&M
• Rainbow glitter Dr. Martens – Urban Outfitters a while ago

Monthly Faves: Steel Wands & Sweet Words

Kate Sloan

Hope you had a pleasantly scary Halloween! Here are some things I enjoyed in October…

Sex toys

• We-Vibe sent me their Anniversary Collection and I adore it. It contains updated (and sparkly!) versions of two of their best vibes, the Tango and the Sync. The included case works for both storage and charging, and makes this duo super travel-friendly – always an important consideration for someone in a long-distance relationship like me.

• I’ve owned my Njoy Pure Wand for years but it deserves just as much revere now as it did when I first bought it. Truly, if you like intense G-spot or prostate stimulation, there is nothing better. Also, adorably, my partner bought his own recently, so sometimes we each separately use ours while having phone sex. Aww.

• Speaking of Njoy: I feel like I mention the Eleven every five seconds on this blog, but like… seeeeriously… it is quite good. It’s also integral to the story of how my Sir and I met (our first contact of any kind was him tweeting a link to my own Eleven review at me) so it’s, um, very romantic when he pounds me with it.

Fantasy fodder

• At one point this month, my partner – an actual living kink genius – sent me the following text: “What if the We-Vibe Anniversary Collection was actually sent to you as a medical device to treat your obvious hysteria symptoms, and you have to call in and speak to a doctor over the phone who can supervise your treatment by controlling the device and monitoring your progress?” We did a “hysteria hotline” roleplay over the phone that night – not a new thing for us, but the inclusion of the remotely controllable We-Vibe Sync was a new element of it – and it was so hottttt, helpppp.

• My monthly writing assignment for my Sir involved making some recommendations of porn and erotica for him, and one of my selections was a Sherlock fanfiction story where John has a hypnosis kink and Sherlock takes it upon himself to play with this newfound knowledge. I have a long-standing weakness for subby-John/dommy-Sherlock stories, and this one paints a particularly excellent picture of what trance feels like and why it can be so hot.

• Still giggling over this story: in a cab ride back from a Halloween party, I told my Sir I desperately had to pee, and he (jokingly?) suggested we do a watersports scene upon arriving back at our hotel. I told him he wouldn’t be able to get all his clothes off fast enough to account for the urgency of the situation, and he was basically like, “Try me.” Once we were in our room, he shed his clothes faster than I’ve ever seen him do it, and laid down in the shower for me before I was even half out of my dress. While my emotions in the moment were a mix of anguish and amusement, in retrospect it was a surprisingly hot experience; unbridled enthusiasm from a sexual partner often is.

Sexcetera

• Some of my work elsewhere this month: I read my review of the teddy bear vibrator at the Bed Post variety show. I reviewed my favorite band’s new album, while meditating on depression, toxic masculinity, and men’s inner lives. (Please check out the album; it’s divine.) On our podcast, Bex and I discussed sex education, roleplay, polyamory myths, and fear play, and I interviewed my pal Dick Wound about knives, death, sweat, and all kinds of weird shit.

• Excited to announce I’ll be teaching/speaking/reading at this year’s Naked Heart festival! It’s coming up soon; grab your pass online, or you can get tickets to individual sessions at the door.

• Hey, thanks for the outpouring of love when my Sir decided to come out as my Sir! We were both thrilled and relieved that the reaction was so positive. Taking this risk together made me feel even more in love with him and even safer in this wonderful relationship, which was already one of the best ones I’ve ever been in.

Femme stuff

• I got my legs waxed for the first time this month! Actually, it was my first time getting anything waxed. My technician asked me if I had a decent pain tolerance, and I was like, “Uhhh… Yeah.” It wasn’t too bad at all, and I had silky-smooth legs for a little while. Would do again!

• If you’re in the centre of the Venn diagram composed of “people who like spooky things” and “people who live in Toronto or are familiar with historical Toronto landmarks,” you probably need this “Honest Dead’s” shirt. Every time I wear it (in Toronto, at least), I inevitably get asked multiple times where it’s from.

• As I told you on Monday, I have a new collar! I want to give an extra shout-out to Tal at L’Amour-Propre for being so accommodating of our special request vis-à-vis material. Tal is the actual best and I highly recommend their products!

Media

• Pinegrove’s new album Skylight is gorgeous (with caveats about the lead singer’s problematic behavior). The refrain of the title track – “Whatever you’re feeling is alright… Whatever you’re feeling is natural” – felt particularly needed.

• I read a lot of books this month, and their common theme seemed to be “shitty men interfering with brilliant women.” Sigh. What else is new. All of them were good, though: The Wife is about a woman who decides to stop giving her husband a free pass to be terrible after decades of marriage; The Real Lolita is the tale of the pedophilic kidnapping that supposedly inspired Nabokov’s masterpiece; Our Kind of Cruelty is about an obsessive love that turns into a sick delusion; and Gone Girl is about… well, if you’ve never heard of Gone Girl, you should really watch the movie and/or read the book, stat.

• My Sir recommended we watch some of James Acaster’s comedy specials together this month and we loved them. What a strange man with a strange sense of humor.

Little things

Eating chicken noodle soup while paging through The Science of Orgasm. Getting slightly better at rejecting creeps when necessary. Interviews with articulate, generous kinksters. Thigh bruises from sweet and loving impact scenes with my Sir over the phone. Seeing Dick get a lap dance at a sex club (OMG) and then hanging out in a hot tub with Lav. When autocorrect knows me too well. Max telling me stories from touring with his band (“I don’t feel too good…”). Kissing Sir in between songs at a Hippo Campus concert and keeping my hand in his hoodie pocket. Knowing he still loves me even though he made me laugh while I was eating a French fry and standing over him so I accidentally spat some potato onto his jeans (“CLOSE YOUR MOUTH, little one!!”). Autumn daiquiris. A literally perfect truffle risotto at the NoMad (and also truffle mac and cheese the night before; give me all the truffles). Boys in bowties. Phrenology skulls (the best creepy decor!). Watching horror movies with my family. Attending a Halloween party with some of my favorite goofs. Feeling like part of a community.

Blue Suede; He Stayed

Kate Sloan

I’m a sucker for physical objects that represent relationships. I still occasionally wear an ex-boyfriend’s boxers, clutch a stuffed bunny that a beau bought me when I can’t sleep, sigh contentedly at an emerald ring gifted by an ex-girlfriend on our first Valentine’s Day. These things mean something to me, even when the relationships from which they surfaced no longer do. What they mean is this: I loved and was loved. It happened. There is physical proof.

But these are all objects which outlasted relationships. It’s rare, in my life, for a relationship to outlast an object it contains.

When my Sir bought me my first collar – not my first-ever collar, you understand, but the first collar I’d worn as an agreed-upon, mutually meaningful symbol of a D/s dynamic folded into a romance – no discussion was had about how long we foresaw the object lasting, and what we would do if and when it needed replacing. The closest we got was a conversation about what we would do if I accidentally lost my collar: dropped it down a subway grate, forgot it at a restaurant, lost sight of it in a TSA tussle. We agreed that we would be sad in such a case, but that we would soldier on and get another one, because it was the symbolism of the item, not the item itself, that ultimately mattered.

“I don’t think we would get the same one; I would want to get one that was a better reflection of our relationship at that time,” my Sir told me, and those words stuck in my head. He, with his history of fewer but much longer relationships than I had had, believed in our future – in our ability to persevere and grow as a couple. It had been so long since I had done such a thing that I hardly believed it was still possible for me.

Our first collar was suede with a silver heart at the front. We chose it after multiple long slogs through the kinky corners of the internet, fixating on it for its bright cobalt color and its simple, versatile aesthetic. Weirdly, although I knew from past experience the kinds of things that can happen to suede when it gets wet and well-worn, it didn’t occur to me that such things would happen to this collar, too. It seemed as though the symbolic importance of the item would permeate its pores and prevent any harm from befalling it. The night he gave it to me, I wore it to a crowded concert in chilly New York, double-dousing it in sweat, snow, and maybe some stray droplets of bourbon as we moshed and kissed and laughed.

It didn’t take long for the royal blue suede to darken to a formidable navy, especially given that I tended to wear the collar in sweaty situations: sex with my Sir when he was nearby, or nervewracking days when he was far away and I needed some encouragement to get through my work. The collar’s color changed so much that one of its makers remarked on it with alarm when he saw it on me at an industry event. I just laughed; I liked owning such a tangible sign of my relationship’s cozy comfort, its establishedness. But part of me missed that bright blue.

At some point, my Sir and I began discussing the possibility of replacing my collar. We were both, at once, sad and excited about it; the beginning of a new chapter inevitably also brings the end of another. Much like trading in the irrational distractibility of New Relationship Energy for something warmer and sturdier, it felt bittersweet but like a definite step forward, one we wanted to take.

We once again combed the internet for collars. We looked at fancy ones, cutesy ones, over-the-top ones. There were a few criteria: it had to be blue, it had to have a heart on it, and it had to be comfortable enough for all-day wear but easy to take off quickly, because I don’t wear it on a 24/7 or even everyday basis. It was surprisingly hard to find collars that fit these parameters and weren’t ugly as fuck, so once again, we gravitated to that L’Amour-Propre collar we’d chosen in the first place.

I thought it would work better for our purposes if it was regular leather – as opposed to suede – so my Sir reached out to the company to see if they could make that happen for us. They had to visit their leather supplier and pick out a piece for us, which they were happy to do. We pored over the one photo they sent us of the leather, trying to discern whether it was perfect or not quite right. We trusted the process. We started getting excited.

It was easier than I expected to transfer the psychic energy of one collar into another. It helped that we stuck to traditions from last time (we earth signs love our rituals and routines). Like our first collaring, the second one happened on the night of a Hippo Campus concert; my Sir pulled the beautiful piece of blue leather out of an elegant watch case he’d stored it in; he stood behind me as I knelt, and slid it around my neck. We went and looked at in together in the mirror. Tears may have been shed.

My new collar hasn’t had time yet to absorb the scent of my skin, my sweat, and my perfume. It hasn’t yet molded to the shape of my neck, tarnished from use, or rippled on the inside. But it still carries with it the weight of my relationship, my D/s dynamic, my love, so it’s more valuable to me than many objects I’ve had for years.

Intimate Intercourse: Hypnokink (Part 3)

Kate Sloan

Hello again! Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. This week we’re discussing hypnokink! This is the final part of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here and part 2 here. In this instalment, we discuss combining hypnosis with other kinks, how to ensure ongoing consent in a hypno scene, hypno aftercare, resources we recommend, how to cultivate a hypnotic voice, and the role intoxication plays in our hypno play. Enjoy! Content note for this post: hypnosis (obviously), impact play, Daddy Dom/little girl roleplay, sleepy sex, bondage, axe violence (!), and marijuana/intoxication.

Kate Sloan: So – we’ve been talking about this a little bit already, but – how do you like to combine hypnosis with our other kinks? I know we’ve combined it with impact a fair bit…

Super Sleepy: I think the best combination that we did with impact was pretty recently. You had said that impact I was giving you was already making you feel trancey – because, as you alluded to earlier, flow state, subspace, trance, they’re all names for gradations of the same feeling, the same state. And so, sometimes the brain recognizes it as one or another one or whatever, but it’s kind of the same. It’s a hyperfocused state where a lot of stuff fades away and things feel really good, and like they’re working. And the particular thing that you’re focusing on, and the particular emotional valence of it, are dependent on the context. But you were feeling like the impact I was giving you over the phone was pretty trancey. Maybe it was the rhythm, maybe it was just your mood that night, but we decided to lean into that and actually use that impact as an induction. I think that worked out really well, and I’m really looking forward to doing that in person, where we use impact as a way to make you really sleepy.

KS: We also combine hypnosis with DD/lg a lot, but not super overtly; just kind of ‘cause our relationship is DD/lg.

SS: Yeah. Daddy often wants to make his little girl sleepy before bedtime, and then often fuck her, maybe while she’s somewhat unaware of that. You know?

KS: [giggling] Mmhmm! A lot of people are concerned about consent with hypnosis…

SS: Same.

KS: So, you do the pre-scene negotiation, but how do you ensure consent when the scene is actually going on?

SS: Ongoing consent. Yeah. This is one of the toughest things to do. It’s similar to ensuring ongoing consent in any case where you’re gagging somebody or you’re taking away some obvious way that they’re able to show that – blindfolding them or putting a bag over their head or a mask or whatever. The best practice, and what I try to do, is phrase the suggestions with safeguards. So, your trance trigger, for instance, originally and every time it’s reinforced, is phrased like: “You will get sleepy and trancey and go into trance for me, as long as you’re in a place where it’s safe to do that.” If you’re not, you don’t have to do that, and also, if you don’t consent, then it’s obviously not safe, so you can opt out of it. The other thing you can do is, you can talk to somebody that’s in trance. They won’t quite be the same as if they’re in the negotiation mode, or fully aware of what’s going on. It’s sort of like talking to somebody that’s in subspace; you gotta phrase things very clearly, and you have to be aware of the differences in their mindset, but you can – while keeping somebody in trance – do check-ins, as long as you know how to talk to them about what you’re checking in about. So I do that a lot.

KS: What would be an example of that?

SS: An example of that would be, if you had somebody in hypnotic bondage, you could say something like, “It seems like you’re feeling really good right now, and that not being able to move is making you feel happy and comfortable. Is that right?” And if you hear an enthusiastic “yes,” that’s great. If you hear a hesitation, that’s when you might want to either press further or bring the person out of trance, because you’re not usually gonna get a “no” in that case. You’re using hypnotic language, and the person’s in trance; you wanna listen for the tiny hesitations. We’ve been in a lot of scenes where you’ve hesitated, and usually it’s like, “My phone is falling,” or “I need to charge my phone,” or whatever. It’s not a gigantic consent issue, but there’s these tiny hesitations, which, in a normal scene, would maybe be much easier to hear; you gotta listen a little bit harder in a hypno scene, though.

KS: And we established a safeword, which I don’t even remember now…

SS: Purple!

KS: Yeah? Okay. I think we should have it be any color that isn’t red, green, or yellow, because the fact that I couldn’t remember it now makes me worry that I wouldn’t remember it in trance.

SS: Sure, yeah.

KS: So that was just supposed to mean “I need to talk to you, so I need you to take me out of trance so I can talk to you.” I don’t remember what happened that prompted that, but there’s occasionally been stuff like, one of my roommate’s cats is in my room and I have to let her out, or…

SS: Yeah, there’s stuff like that, or, do you wanna talk about the time that you had an abreaction, like a really scary thing happened in a visualization?

KS: Yeah. You were making me picture going down in an elevator, as a deepener, and you had the elevator door open on a few different floors, and there was no reason for this to happen – I hadn’t been watching a scary movie or anything – but I saw this nun dressed in head-to-toe white on one of the floors, with the habit over her face, she had no face… It was really scary!

SS: That’s creepy, yeah.

KS: It was some American Horror Story shit. And then, when I got all the way down to the bottom of the building, I still felt like the nun was in my room, holding an axe over me. I couldn’t open my eyes, ‘cause I was in trance, so I couldn’t check to see if there was actually a nun in my room. But yeah, I got really freaked out, and I didn’t know how to communicate that to you, ‘cause that’s quite complicated and weird, and you were trying to do a sexy thing, and I was just panicking. Pretty weird.

SS: Yeah. Stuff like that can happen, especially if you’re having people visualize situations and you don’t control very tightly what you’re telling them. It’s good to have ways to communicate that, even if the person is in trance. Reminding people who are in trance that their safewords will still work, that they can still say them… I would be hesitant to ever take away somebody’s ability to talk in a hypno context. To make somebody unable to talk – that’s possible, but then you have to figure out alternate safe-signals, and that’s a pretty risky thing to do.

KS: Especially over the phone, yeah.

SS: Over the phone, don’t do it. Like, just don’t do it. I would never do it. One more thing on this: one thing I always worry about is getting disconnected. This comes from, I think, my Omegle experiences, also, because I would trance people on Omegle and they would disconnect at very random times, probably on purpose sometimes, probably accidentally other times – whatever, internet issues, people refreshing the page or whatever. But having somebody in trance and not being able to bring them up correctly and give them proper aftercare is not good. It’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the top, it’s not good for the bottom, it’s not good for the brain, really. So, even though the physical risks are usually pretty low – the brain will realize that’s happening and usually wake itself up and it’s fine – it doesn’t feel good. So I’m always worried we’ll get disconnected, and it has happened a few times, but usually not in the middle of a situation where you’re bound and wouldn’t be able to answer the phone. That’s the times I worry about it the most.

KS: Yeah. I think it would be okay.

SS: It would probably be fine.

KS: Yeah. What does hypno aftercare look like?

SS: Hypno aftercare is pretty verbal, in my experience. Touch, if you can do it, but if you’re long-distance, it’s pretty verbal. It’s a lot of making sure the person is actually awake, if they want to be. Sometimes we do hypno and then you immediately go to sleep – I hypnotize you in order to make you go to sleep for real – but in the cases that it’s not like that, and we’re doing aftercare, you wanna make sure the person is awake and able to go about their night or their day in a way where they’re not gonna hear suggestions in the world and still feel really suggestible. You wanna get them back to a rational baseline for their personality, and you want to uninstall any temporary triggers and make sure that you leave them in an operable state.

KS: Yeah. I actually don’t really like the times when you put me to sleep and then we immediately go to sleep. I’m only just thinking about this now. Because what ends up happening every single time is, the phone going dead startles me, and then I wake up and I’m alone and we haven’t done aftercare, and I’m really sad.

SS: Okay, so let’s not do that.

KS: Yeah. ‘Cause it’s also subspacey me feeling like a failure because I didn’t do the thing I was supposed to do. So it’s just a lot of bad feelings.

SS: Yeah, let’s not do that anymore.

KS: Yeah. Anything else we didn’t talk about?

SS: Resources!

KS: Yeah. ‘Cause we’re not doing any kind of introductory or instructional stuff in this interview, really.

SS: Right, yeah. Go read Mind Play by Mark Wiseman. Hypnotic Amnesia by Pynch and Lee Allure. If you’re in a big city, there’s probably either a conference or a regular hypnokinky meetup on FetLife that you can find. If you’re not, go to one in a big city. There’s a lot of hypnokinky people out there. A final thing on resources: the Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive is really great, and there’s tons of great stories there, and you should read them and enjoy them, but what they say is kind of true – it’s erotica, it’s porn, it’s not how you should actually conduct yourself, in terms of actually running real hypno scenes. So, read it, enjoy it, jerk off to it, but if you actually wanna do stuff, there are practical resources that I just mentioned.

KS: Oh, I wanted to ask you about your voice.

SS: [sexy voice] What about it?

KS: Have I asked you about your voice in every interview we’ve done for this series?

SS: Maybe.

KS: Tell me about the hypno voice. What’s up with the voice? What do you do differently?

SS: I don’t know! I don’t know. What do I do differently, little one?

KS: I don’t know. I thought you would have a description on tap.

SS: People who do a lot of hypnosis develop a voice, generally, to do it with, that is different from their normal voice. It’s useful to do that because, if you want to get somebody trancey, you can just drop into that voice and they’ll start going there right away. [deeper, slower voice] Like, if I start talking to Kate like this, she’ll probably already start to blink, and get a little bit sleepy, and that’s okay… [regular voice] Open. Good. So… I have a voice! It’s useful! But I don’t know how to describe it, really, ‘cause it’s sort of just a slower, more calming version of my voice. You know?

KS: Yeah. I like it. Oh, one more thing! You often have me smoke weed before we do hypno stuff, because we found that it makes me more suggestible and go into trance more easily.

SS: We did. Most people don’t find that. Most people find that alcohol and drugs make them less susceptible to hypnosis, not more, because for a lot of people, it makes it harder for them to focus, or it dulls their senses or whatever. So that’s a very individualized thing, and I would say, if you do stuff with drugs and also hypnosis, it’s partner-by-partner and you gotta experiment. We have found, in our very particular case of you being a subject, that it generally makes it easier for you to drop for me.

KS: But there are limits. If I get too high then that’s not always good. Then I can’t focus.

SS: Right, exactly.

KS: That’s all my questions, unless there’s something else you wanted to talk about. I feel like you just wanna go trance me right now.

SS: Mmhmm. I do. One other thing is, the common misconception is that hypnosis is mind control; there’s a lot of media that reinforces that idea. And it’s not. It’s giving someone suggestions that they are consenting to. On the flipside of that, there’s another misconception, which is that you can’t make somebody do anything in hypnosis that they don’t want to do, which a lot of abusers use in order to cover up consent violations, and is also not true. So the consent ethics are complicated, as they often are, and I would encourage people, if they’re trying this for the first time, to go into it with really highly highly negotiated scenes.

KS: Yeah. I think of it like subspace, in the sense that you can also make people do things they don’t wanna do, of their free will, in subspace, because that’s just how abusive dynamics work sometimes, and I don’t think it’s any different.

SS: Yeah. It’s a very good analogy. I think that’s basically right. And so you should treat hypno scenes like kink scenes, in terms of consent, and you shouldn’t do what the non-kinky erotic hypnosis community does, which is, like, ignore everything that the kink community has learned about consent negotiations and stuff.

KS: Yup. I very much appreciate that you’re always very careful about that stuff.

SS: Yeah.

KS: Okay. Thank you!

SS: You’re welcome, little one.

KS: I love you.

SS: I love you too.