Intimate Intercourse

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (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 the upsides and downsides of dating a sex writer, and his advice for anyone considering it.

KS: What are some of the things about dating a sex writer that are hard or weird?

SS: Okay, this answer is sort of like answering the “What is your biggest weakness?” job interview question, because it’s a problem that isn’t really a problem, but – if you’re dating a sex blogger that’s reviewed a lot of toys, and they have, like, 200, 300 sex toys, deciding what toy to use is actually kind of hard! There’s a lot of choices. There’s a lot of things to fuck you with, a lot of things to hit you with, and also stuff you haven’t reviewed yet that you might wanna use, even if you don’t like it or know you might not like it, because you have to. So that decision is a very frequent decision that I have to make, especially ‘cause I’m your dominant, and also there’s so many options. It’s a “paradox of choice” type of thing sometimes.

KS: [giggling] We mostly stay within a relatively small group of things, because it makes it easier to make those decisions.

SS: Exactly. I don’t have to, like, go pull up your toybox page every time we have phone sex, to be like, “Okay, let’s see here…”

KS: But I do think, like, I say a relatively small group but it actually isn’t that small, all things considered.

SS: No. It’s bigger than most people’s entire collection!

KS: Right. And you have an impressive grasp of not only the toys that I have but also kind of the function of each one and when it would be right for any particular moment, which I find really impressive.

SS: Yeah. What else is hard about it? There’s a difficult-to-ignore extra layer of minor anxiety about something going wrong. Stuff goes wrong in sex all the time – you’re tired, there’s boner issues, there’s whatever – and there’s a part of me that’s like, “I don’t really want to fuck this up.” But it’s not rational. I don’t think you’re trying to write about a particular person’s one-off boner issue. That’s not interesting.

KS: No.

SS: So I don’t know. It’s just a thing. I don’t know, is there anything else that I’ve said was hard in the past, or that you think makes it hard for you, as a sex blogger, to date people?

KS: I mean, it pisses us off when people try to involve themselves…

SS: Oh, yeah, it really does. When people are sort of trying to insert themselves or make non-complimentary comments about us, that is kind of rough.

KS: The problem with that is that, yes, I’m a sex writer, yes, part of my skillset is making private, intimate experiences palatable and comprehensible for outsiders, but inherently, I’m not writing about every detail of everything that happens, and my readers don’t have all the context of our relationship because they aren’t in it, and so you can’t assume that you know everything about somebody just because they write about their sex life. And likewise, you can’t assume they’re going to be willing to open up about everything. We’ve had people ask us really inappropriate questions and just be gross about it, and it’s like, “Guys. Just be chill.”

SS: How do you feel about the thing where people say, like, “I love him,” or “I’m so into your partner,” or whatever?

KS: I mean, I am only made uncomfortable by it to the extent that you are – except when people are, like, hitting on you, which is kind of rude, to me.

SS: Yeah, it is kind of weird. I’m very flirty, so it doesn’t usually register as weird to me; it usually registers as like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, cool.” But sometimes it crosses that line.

KS: I just get very protective and very, almost like, “mama lion energy” around that, because I feel this sense of responsibility for what happens to you in my spaces, because I brought you into this…

SS: Totally. That makes complete sense.

KS: Yeah, I’m just like, please stop. Because my worry – not just with you, but with past partners when this has happened also – is that someone will experience too much of that and will decide it’s too much and will have to end the relationship. So that’s always kind of where my mind goes.

SS: Oh, how has that happened?

KS: None of my other partners have really been out as my partner who weren’t in the sex industry already, but if I wrote something about someone that was very flattering or complimentary and people were saying gross, objectifying things about the person based on that, then I would try to keep those people from seeing those comments sometimes, or just try to protect them from that, because I didn’t want them to feel like dating me was a liability.

SS: Yeah. Makes sense.

KS: Yeah. What are some of the best or most fun things about dating a sex writer?

SS: Seeing yourself from another angle, especially an angle of somebody who’s really into you or in love with you, is a gigantic self-confidence boost. I’d recommend it to anyone! Even if it’s private, even if you can just get your partner to write a thing that is never published that they can share with you, or vice-versa, I think it’s great. Hell of a drug! What else? Being able to meet tons of other people in this industry, that I really enjoy their work and think they’re making a big difference in terms of sex-positivity and stuff, is really cool.

KS: Were you starstruck when you met Epiphora and Lilly?

SS: Yeaaaah. A little bit.

KS: [laughing]

SS: Also, getting to see you do your thing. I’ve been in relationships with people where I can’t see them doing their work and being really competent at the thing, and that is a huge turn-on, I think, for both of us, so being able to watch you do panels and listen to your podcast and read your writing, being able to consume all of that competence is also great. And the toys. Yeah. Yes.

KS: Yeah, it is a fun perk that I am able to acquire toys for you to use and for us to review.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And I appreciate that you take that task so seriously, ‘cause I’ve had partners in the past who just sort of would give me very vague, brief thoughts on the toy, and I would always be like, “Hey, I need more than that.” So you’re a good partner for me in that respect as well.

SS: Mhm.

KS: One more thing… What would you tell someone who was thinking about dating a sex writer but was kind of unsure about it or scared about it?

SS: A couple things. The first thing is, I think that a lot of people who’d be thinking about dating a sex writer are thinking about dating a sex writer’s public persona. They don’t actually know that person… yet. So, don’t assume that they’re gonna be having sex all the time, or that they’ll be exactly who they are in their sex writing. That’s just one side of them.

KS: Yeah, I’m frequently depressed or giggly. I’m not always a Sex Person.

SS: [laughing] Yes. And then, maybe you’re flirting with that person or you’ve met them at an event or whatever, and you think it’s more of a real possibility, not just a thing that you’re fantasizing about, like, you might actually get to go on a date with them – don’t make it entirely about that, either. If I was a sex writer, I wouldn’t want to be dated for my job, or for the clout or whatever. I’d want to be dated for who I am. So it’s just, again, it’s just one facet of this person’s life. And for some people, it’s just a job, it’s just an income source. So, be aware of that. And then, the last thing I would say is, think past just the next week or the next month about whether you are okay being public. Don’t be like, “Oh, that’s a problem for later,” or, “I don’t have to worry about that,” because if you can’t [be public], you really need to be upfront that it’s not going to happen. And if you think it’s a possibility, discuss that with the person that you’re dating as you’re working through that process. I would say that if you have worries about coming out and you want to talk about it ever, DM me, because I could talk about that forever. And I will try to convince you to do it.

KS: [giggling] That’s so cute. You’re an evangelist.

SS: Yeah.

KS: Okay. Thank you, I love you, I’m very glad we’re dating.

SS: I love you too, little one. You’re a very good sex blogger and I am glad we’re dating.

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (Part 2)

Kate Sloan

Hi 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 what it’s like to date a sex writer! This is part 2 of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here. In this instalment, we discuss his decision to “come out” as my partner last October, why he made that decision, how he did it, and what’s happened since.

KS: So you were anonymous to my readers and followers for the first several months that we were dating…

SS: Yeah.

KS: How did you start to feel that you didn’t want to be anonymous anymore?

SS: I started to feel like I didn’t want to be anonymous anymore over a period of a few months. It was like, mostly me thinking about how it would feel if we were in the reversed positions – if I was a sex writer and the long-distance partner of somebody who couldn’t be out about dating me. I think that that would hurt me, and even though you said that it was okay, and that it wouldn’t necessarily hurt you, I felt like it might start to. And it was starting to. So, even before I had made the decision to definitely do it, I was talking to people about it from a risk-assessment perspective, of like: “I’m feeling [like I want to come out], I don’t know if this feeling will grow or shrink or what, or if it’s New Relationship Energy, or what direction it’s gonna go, but if I did this, how would you feel about it? Would you support me doing this? Does this seem like a dumb idea to you?” And people were really supportive of it.

KS: Yeah. I had thought I was okay with it for several months, and I think it was just that New Relationship Energy thing where everything seems perfect and great – and then when that starts to dissipate a little bit, you have to start thinking about real-world, real-life things. And I was noticing that there were a number of different ways that I was feeling like a secondary partner, one of which is the distance, one of which is being a fairly new relationship, and a major one was being a secret. Or feeling like I was being kept a secret, in that you weren’t talking about me publicly anywhere.

SS: And we’re both people that talk about a lot of things publicly. Maybe if I didn’t use social media at all, or that wasn’t as important a thing to both of us as it is, it might’ve felt different, but me being able to talk about other things, and wanting to talk about other things, and [being unable to] talk about you publicly, or even post a photo of you, or anything, was really bizarre, in terms of my life. That’s not a thing that I’m used to having.

KS: Yeah, and I would try to CBT myself out of feeling that way. I would go, well, look at all this evidence, privately, of you loving me and valuing our relationship. But it was this cognitive dissonance that I found really difficult to overcome, because I’ve been in so many relationships where people would say, “Yeah, I love you, I value you, you’re very important to me,” and then their behavior was just very different from that, because I think it wasn’t actually true.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And so I started to react with this sort of anxiety and fear that you were lying about it, in some sense, because you hadn’t made yourself vulnerable enough to go public with it. Some part of me felt like, if you really, truly loved me and cared about me, you would do that – which I recognize is shitty if it were an ultimatum, because not everybody is able to do that.

SS: Yes. Right.

KS: But I did get to a point where… I don’t think I would’ve broken up with you over it, at least not right away, but I was kind of like… This is important to me. I need you to at least start thinking about this.

SS: Yeah. What strikes me is that we were both kind of wrestling with that question in our own ways, and it only got better and easier when we started talking about it more, instead of just trying to deal with this in our own brains. That’s how we were able to solve it.

KS: Yeah. It was weird because it hit me kind of all at once, very quickly. I remember someone asked me on Instagram, I think a month or two before we started talking about this, “Will we ever see your boyfriend? I’m so curious about him!” and I wrote, at the time, what I honestly felt, which was: “No. He’s anonymous and I choose to respect that, and I hope that you all will too.” At the time, I remember feeling really confident, like I really believed what I was writing – and then, only a month or two later, I started to feel like, “Actually, this is like, ‘emergency’ levels of distress. I don’t actually think I can do this.” Because I also had the realization, around the same time, that this had been a recurring pattern in my relationships, and that it was just sort of slowly eroding my sense of self-worth, and my sense of deserving to have a partner who was proud of me.

SS: Yeah. It also makes me think back on some of the other sex bloggers that I’ve read for a long time, or read a long time ago, where they had many many many anonymous partners in a row – you know, ten, twenty anonymous partners that their audience never really got to know – and how they must have felt, or how they could’ve felt about that. I haven’t really read a lot of writing about that, about the feeling of not being able to talk about who your partners are.

KS: Yeah, because I think the assumption is that that’s just how you do it, that that’s just how sex writing works.

SS: Right, it’s a convention of the genre.

KS: And a lot of sex writers themselves are anonymous, so maybe they have less of a problem with it, because they understand it directly. But I have been not-anonymous for… almost 4 years now? So I’m just not in that world anymore, and I’m kind of past wanting my partners to be in that world too.

SS: Mhm.

KS: I remember being in the NoMad with you and we were waiting for an Uber that was gonna take us wherever we were going next… Oh, we were going to the Hippo Campus concert. And you were like, “Should I just do this now?” and you took out your phone and you had written this tweet draft where you called me your girlfriend. And we chose a photo to go with the tweet, and you sent it out, and then I had this intense sense of exhilaration, like: we just did this really important thing together.

SS: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that moment too, and I remember pulling to refresh a lot of times.

KS: [laughing]

SS: …Because, even after talking to my other partner, and my friends, and my business partners, and random people in my industry, and my family, I still had this sense that at least one person was gonna be really mean.

KS: Yeah.

SS: I didn’t think it was gonna be the primary reaction; I didn’t think it was gonna be a big deal, and I knew how I wanted to handle it. But I was like, “Okay, where is the mean person? Where is the troll?” And they just never showed up.

KS: Yeah, that was kind of how it was for me too, when I came out and started showing my face and using my name. For a short period of time, I lived in terror. I was like, “When’s the other shoe gonna drop? What’s gonna happen?”

SS: Exactly.

KS: And nothing happened. Everybody was perfectly lovely. It was more surprising than it would’ve been if people were awful.

SS: It’s super surprising, because we see so much negativity online and sex-negativity in culture, and it’s just expected that if you’re admitting to being a sexual person, having a bunch of stuff about your sex life online, that something bad is going to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily happen.

KS: Yeah. So you’ve been out now as my partner for five-ish months. What has the reaction been like?

SS: Let’s see. We went to a party together with a bunch of my friends, and apparently, before we arrived, people had been reading and discussing a bunch of your posts about me, and saying stuff like, “Oh, I could never do that sex act,” or whatever, and then when we got there, it kind of just vanished. I only heard about it later. [laughing] So I think there’s probably a decent amount of that going on – people just reading stuff quietly, not saying anything to me about it. Or waiting for me to bring things up, instead of bringing them up, which I think is a really respectful way to approach that.

KS: Yeah.

SS: There’s no way to prevent people from reading this stuff. You can say, “Hey, I’d prefer if you don’t read it,” or you can say, “I’ll send you the stuff that I want you to read,” but that’s really not workable. People are curious, especially about the sex lives of people they know, even if they don’t admit it publicly, and so I’ve kind of just said, “Hey, if you want to read it, read it. If you want to talk about it, talk about it.” But people have been pretty reluctant to do that, I think. What else? People were really excited to meet you. My sister, when I told her about it, I was like, “[Kate’s] a writer, she writes about sex,” and she asked, “Where does she write? What’s her site?” and I was like, “Well, I could tell you that, but I don’t know that you necessarily want to read it.” And she was like, “Oh, yeah, I just realized after I said that that I probably don’t wanna read it.”

KS: [laughing] My brother doesn’t follow me on Snapchat, for the same reason.

SS: Yeah. What else? I have gotten, lately, one or two kind of “off” comments about it. Just things that struck me. Not from friends, but… I’m thinking of one comment from somebody who said, “On Twitter, it seems like your life is pretty complicated.” And like, that just strikes me as either someone who’s uncomfortable with polyamory or someone who’s uncomfortable with being public about sex, or whatever, but who doesn’t want to go so far as to say what makes them uncomfortable – and that’s kinda sad.

KS: Yeah, that sounds like it’s probably a poly thing.

SS: It could be, yeah.

KS: What about your own feelings on it? How has it felt to be out as my partner?

SS: Great! It feels great. It’s just a thing that I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I was talking about it in therapy most weeks, and it was causing me a decent amount of consternation internally, of like, “Can I like this Instagram photo? Will someone look at all the likes and figure out the New York app developer that is in there?” It was causing me to behave in ways that I don’t want to have to think about. I want to be able to just talk to my girlfriend online and post about my girlfriend if it’s our anniversary or whatever. So, it’s great!

KS: Did it feel different from how you were expecting?

SS: The major difference was just that people weren’t mean. The positives were as positive as I was expecting. It’s great. How did it feel for you? Not just the moment of it, but how has it felt since?

KS: It has made me feel like our relationship is a lot more real and important to you, and also to me, which is something that I was struggling with. It has made me really happy to be able to show you off, not only to people in person but also online. It raised a lot of questions for me about, is it shallow or shitty or wrong somehow to glean enjoyment from this sort of exhibitionistic mode of expressing my love externally? But I think the conclusion I’ve come to on that, ultimately, is that that’s the age we’re living in, and that is a way that people express their love now, and that is valid even if it maybe seems kind of weird or unnecessary to some folks.

SS: Yeah, I feel that way too. It’s just another one of the consequences of living in a super connected, very online world, is that ways you might’ve been seen with your partner before are augmented by seeing people with their partners online. And it generally makes me really happy to see people in love and enjoying each other online. The times that it doesn’t are when I’m going through really hard romantic stuff myself, and then I think it’s kind of on me to moderate that.

KS: Yeah. I also have found it really satisfying and uplifting to watch how you have become more confident and relaxed about your kinks and your kink orientations since coming out – which I didn’t anticipate because I already think of you as a very confident person and someone who is very relaxed about your own kinks. But I did notice a marked difference in your willingness to accept identities like “dominant” or “sadist” or “hypnokinkster” very casually, and in some cases publicly, and that’s been really nice to see.

Check back on Friday for the last instalment of this interview, in which we’ll be talking about the upsides and downsides of dating a sex writer, and his advice for anyone considering it.

Intimate Intercourse: Dating a Sex Writer (Part 1)

Kate Sloan

Hello! Intimate Intercourse is a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. Previously we’ve talked about phone sex,Daddy Dom/little girl kink, and erotic hypnosis; this time we’re discussing what it’s like to date a sex writer! I’ve split this interview up into 3 parts, which will go up over the course of this week. In this first part, we touch on his history consuming sex media, how he felt about my work when we first started dating, how we initially navigated consent in my writing, the perils of dating people who don’t want to be written about, and how he feels now about the stuff I’ve written about him. Hope you like it!

Kate Sloan: We’re gonna talk about dating a sex writer. Me! That’s me! I’m a sex writer.

Super Sleepy: You are a sex writer.

KS: So, you have a long-standing history as a consumer of sex writing.

SS: It’s true. I have been reading sex writing as long as I have been interested in sex, because I was a kid that had access to the internet, and when I started thinking about wanting to have sex or masturbation or whatever, I naturally gravitated toward it. So I’ve consumed lots of different types of sex writing. I always remember having a category in my RSS reader of sex blogs, sex webcomics, sex podcasts, and erotica.

KS: Did you ever envision yourself dating or fucking a sex writer?

SS: In fantasy, yes. Definitely when I would read some of the more erotica-heavy sex blogs, I would jerk off to, and fantasize about, dating/fucking the authors of those things. But never thought about it as a realistic thing.

KS: Why did it appeal to you?

SS: I think because I was somebody that was interested in sex not just from a perspective of “I’ll have it and then it’s over and then I’ll never talk about it” – I was, and am, somebody who wants to talk about the sex that my friends and partners are having, and want to talk about it beforehand and afterward, and want to know more about it from a scientific perspective and experiential perspectives… I think the fantasy of fucking somebody that was really good at it, knew a lot about it, and would be able to write really eloquently about it was just hot for me.

KS: Yeah. I think that the fact that you and I are similarly analytical about sex is one of the things that makes you a good partner for me, because I don’t feel like I’m bugging you or inconveniencing you by asking you really weird detailed questions about the sex and kink we do together for posts and stuff, because you’re always happy to talk about it.

SS: Yeah. Yeah. You’re not at all inconveniencing me. In fact, that’s a really important part of the experience for me. When I talk about what I need in terms of aftercare, it’s mostly the recapping and talking about it is the most important thing.

KS: When we went on our first date, were you conscious of the possibility that I might write about it?

SS: Let me think about that… In the back of my head, I suppose. There was a lot going on that day. I was not 100% sure if it was a date. I thought it might be. [giggling] It was in the middle of the day, so I didn’t think that there would be very much worth writing about. And, from following your tweets and reading posts on your blog, I didn’t get the sense that you would write about it without talking to me about it first, so I wasn’t nervous about that.

KS: And then we got to the Breather and I, for some reason, was like, “I wanna take pictures of this.” Did I say “for a post”? I don’t remember.

SS: You said they “might come in handy for something someday.” I don’t think you said “for a post” but I intuited that that’s what it would be useful for.

KS: Did that seem weird to you?

SS: No, that didn’t seem weird to me at all.

KS: [laughing] Okay. But you still didn’t want to be in the pictures.

SS: No, I didn’t want to be in the pictures, because, if you were gonna use it for a post, I didn’t want to be outed by it.

KS: Right. Yeah, I know. We’ll talk more about that in a bit… Do you remember the first thing I wrote about you?

SS: The first thing you wrote about me was that post. “Slow Burn.”

KS: Yeah. How did you feel about that?

SS: I was elated. I was over the moon when I read it, not just because it was about me, although that helps, but because it was so well-conceptualized and executed and it was beautiful. It made me smile really big and I wanted to send it to everybody in the world, but I had to pick and choose at that point. And everybody else that read it felt the same way.

KS: I was very careful about having you read it before I published it. I was very nervous about it, at that point, that you might feel uncomfortable about it.

SS: Yeah. Do you remember what you said to me?

KS: I think I said that I wanted you to check, in particular, the direct quotes, because it would be bad to get those wrong.

SS: Yeah.

KS: Yeah. Do you remember our conversations about consent around my writing?

SS: Yeah, I do. I remember us talking about it first in the abstract – like, how do you approach this? As a curious consumer of this stuff, I wanted to know how you approached this, just in your life, not assuming that it would be super relevant to me, necessarily. And then, as we got more into it, figuring out, oh, this might actually be a thing that applies to me, so I should think about how I feel about it. What am I comfortable having written about me? I remember I said that I don’t want you to only write positive things about me. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t write negative, true things about me – which I think some people might struggle with. But I think it doesn’t feel real to me if you’re only writing the good stuff.

KS: Yeah. I appreciated that a lot, because I’ve had so many people in the past who would be mean to me and then say, “Don’t write about that,” which feels insulting on many levels, one of which is like… I kinda feel like they knew what they were getting into. Not to victim-blame… but at this point, I only want to be with people who understand what I do and are at least somewhat on board with it and with being part of it.

SS: So at this point, you don’t think you would date somebody that said, “I don’t want you to write about me”?

KS: I think that even if I said okay to that initially, the amount of resentment that that would gradually breed would be too much.

SS: I think so too. I mean, maybe there’s a person who it’s not under their direct control, and they would want you to write about them, but they would get fired, or whatever, where it’s more of a grey area, and I don’t know how that would go.

KS: That, I feel, is a different issue, because that’s an issue of me identifying them, which I do with hardly anyone. But if they just didn’t want to be written about, even in abstract or anonymized terms, then that would be an issue for me.

SS: Yeah. Good point.

KS: Do you think that when I write about you, I capture you well and accurately?

SS: Yeah! I do. I think the mode in which you capture me the most accurately is actually on Twitter [laughing], because you get these little tiny slices of how silly I am and how my sexuality works. Slices of my dirty talk, but also slices of my silliness and my desire to make you laugh and make you smile and take care of you. If you read all the tweets that mention me, I think you get a really good sense of all the interesting parts of my personality.

KS: Yeah. I enjoy live-tweeting you. It makes me happy. Have I ever written anything about you that you felt was unfair or untrue?

SS: No, I don’t think you’ve ever written anything about me that’s unfair or untrue, but sometimes… so, I have tweet notifications on for you, and sometimes I get a tweet of something and I have an immediate “Uhhh, I don’t know if that’s quite right” reaction, but usually it’s just a momentary thing while I re-read it and am like, “Okay, I see what she’s going for here.” It’s like a flash of insecurity about it. But I can’t remember of those in particular, because it fades so quickly, and I’m like, “Okay, I get it.”

KS: Yeah. And I would delete things if you thought that they were wrong or bad.

SS: Yeah. I think I’ve asked you to delete one or two things. It was very early on, but I don’t remember what they were.

KS: Yeah. I don’t remember any. When we go on dates or have sex or do kink things, are you thinking about how I might write about it, and does that make you self-conscious about it?

SS: It doesn’t make me self-conscious about it. I think about it sometimes as another reason to push into new areas, another reason to explore things I haven’t done before, or things you haven’t done before, because it might make a good, interesting experience and a good thing to share. But I think about that in terms of, like, going to new cities and trying new restaurants… Everything in my life is sometimes looked at through the lens of, “What’s a thing I haven’t done before that might be cool, that I might wanna try?” Like, if I’m looking at a menu and there’s a bunch of things I’ve had before and something that sounds good to me that I’ve never had, maybe I’ll pick that thing this time. And we also plan our sex more than maybe most people might. [laughing] So there’s some thought that goes into that, too. Like when we’re trying to decide how we want to fuck each other on a particular weekend – like, “Let’s do some stuff that we know we like, let’s do some stuff that we’ve never done, or let’s do that thing that we did a while ago but you haven’t written about yet, to see if we can find a new angle of it.”

KS: Yeah. This is one of the reasons that you’re such a great partner for me in particular. I’ve had partners in the past who either clearly were uncomfortable that I might write about them, or that wanted it, in a way that made me uncomfortable. I could see that they were sort of playing up their sexual persona or their romantic loverboy persona because they knew that I might write about it, and that artifice is really easy to pick up on. It also makes me feel sort of like, “Oh, you don’t like me enough to do this for me, but you like the attention or the thought of how you’ll be perceived by my readers, and so that’s why you’re doing it,” and that’s sort of gross to me.

SS: Oh, yeah, no, I don’t feel that way at all. What is an example of a time that you noticed that, or a thing that tipped you off to that?

KS: If someone who doesn’t ordinarily do a lot of dirty talk suddenly says something really dommy, in a way that almost feels scripted or rehearsed, that’s always weird to me. And I understand it. I think, honestly, that if I was dating someone who wrote about sex, that I would have a hard time shutting off that self-critical part of my brain that’s like, “Oh, is this good writing fodder?” So I get it. But I think it’s one of the reasons that you’re a good match for me, because you’re just more relaxed about that stuff.

SS: Yeah. I know that if we’re in a good relationship and having good sex, then the stories will come out of that. You don’t have to invent them.

KS: Yeah. I think a lot of people who I’ve dated wanted to seem really interesting in my writing, and the thing is, if sex or kink are really good, then they are interesting. They’re worth writing about. They don’t have to be wacky to be worth writing about.

SS: Right. Exactly.

KS: You mentioned earlier, showing my writing to your friends, which I find really interesting. What is your motivation for doing that?

SS: It’s similar to the feeling that I get when, like, I was interviewed on a podcast, or somebody quote-tweeted something I said on Twitter and it got a lot of likes. If I’m close with people, I want to share those types of accomplishments and appearances and stuff with them, so they can see where I’m at and what I’m up to. Texting a friend a new piece that you put out, that includes some stuff about me or is entirely about me and what we’ve done together, is a way to give them a window into a more private and vulnerable side of my life, and connect and discuss the things that happened in it, also, which is nice. Instead of just texting somebody, “I hypnotized my girlfriend the other night,” and then forcing them to figure out what that means and come up with all the questions, I’m like, “Here’s this beautiful thousand-word essay about it.” It gives you a million jumping-off points, you know?

KS: Yeah. It makes me happy that you do that, because I feel like a lot of people would be inclined to actively try to keep their friends from seeing stuff like that, and you’re just like, “Here, check it out!” It makes me feel like you’re proud of me and my work.

SS: I am!

To be continued on Wednesday, when we’ll discuss his decision to “come out” as my partner last October, why he made that decision, how he did it, and what’s happened since.

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.

Intimate Intercourse: Hypnokink (Part 2)

Kate Sloan

Hi 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 part 2 of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here. In this instalment, we discuss the difficulties of disclosing a hypnosis kink, our first hypno scene together, what makes someone a good hypnotic subject, trance triggers, hypnotherapy, and some of the sexy things we like to do with hypnosis. Enjoy! Content notes for this post: hypnosis (obviously), anxiety, consensually “drugging” someone’s drink, bondage, face-slapping, addiction, bullying, medical play, and doing kink in public.

Kate Sloan: Were you nervous to tell me that this was a kink of yours when we started dating?

Super Sleepy: I am always nervous to tell people that, yeah.

KS: Why?

SS: I’m always nervous about it because there’s a lot of misconceptions, and the first time I told a partner about it, they didn’t react very well, so I think, because of that, I’m extra cautious. But even if that hadn’t happened, I know about the misconceptions, and I know that a lot of people, especially people that aren’t that experienced with kink, might not know how to take it.

KS: Yeah. You told me pretty casually. I think I said something about how you were staring into my soul on our first date, and you were like, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about my hypnosis kink.” And I thought you were joking, ‘cause you said it so casually. I was like, “Wait, really?”

SS: [laughing] Why did you think that was a joke? Like, why would that be funny?

KS: ‘Cause, I dunno, we were just casually talking about how you were staring me down, and we had been texting about our kinks and stuff already, so… I also don’t think I had met anyone before that who was into it, to my knowledge, so I wasn’t sure whether or not to take you seriously.

SS: Yeah, that makes sense.

KS: And then we did our first trance scene over the phone, by accident. How did that make you feel?

SS: Uhh, a lot of ways. So, what happened was, you have a winking kink – I think people that read your blog probably know that, if they’re paying attention! – and I had been practicing winking at you and sending you lots of videos of that, because I was very into you. Still am. And for some reason, you decided to open those all in QuickTime Player and have them all open at once, in little video player windows, and then one night you were experimenting with turning the loop mode on and playing them all at once, and we were talking about how that could potentially be hypnotic, or we could do a scene with that. And I guess I dropped a little bit into a hypno-toppy kind of voice while I was describing what I would do if we were doing that, hypothetically. And then… what happened from your end?

KS: I got really trancey, but I didn’t really have any experience with that, so I knew what it was, but I was like, “Ahh! What do I do? Is this okay?”

SS: Yeah. So I felt a little weird about that, because we hadn’t specifically negotiated it, and I didn’t want to be unsafe and I didn’t want you to go to a place that you didn’t want to go to, but at the same time, I felt like, I don’t want to make your first experience of this thing a scary thing. So I felt like the right thing to do would be – ‘cause we’d talked about it a little bit – to guide you into it, and out of it, calmly and safely, without panicking. So that’s what I did, and didn’t do any suggestions or anything, just really in and out of it, and then we talked about how it felt.

KS: Were you surprised at how easily I went into trance?

SS: Yes, very.

KS: Is that uncommon?

SS: I don’t know. I’ve only done trance in person with 4 partners. That’s not a very large sample size, so I don’t really know how common it is. Especially when you’re playing with another person’s kink and looping video, like, it was the first time I’d done any of that, so I don’t know. But I was definitely surprised that you got trancey so fast, and without a lot of pre-talk and without a lot of the other setup that I would normally do.

KS: Yeah. I wonder… I have been in flow state a lot of times, because I’m a musician and a writer, and that’s a large part of how I do that, so I wonder if that played into it at all.

SS: Yeah. From what I know about it, people who are more imaginative, creative, intelligent, capable of flow state, are easier subjects in general, because their brains are practiced at going there.

KS: And I’m also just… I go into subspace really easily, and I go into little space really easily, so maybe that’s just a thing about me. I don’t know why.

SS: Right.

KS: I feel like, when you wanted to give me a trance trigger, it was almost like when you wanted to give me a collar. It was equivalent in some ways. So tell me about that. Why and how did you want to do that?

SS: I gave you a trance trigger that I can use to make you trancey whenever I want, and it was a similar decision to collaring you or deciding on honorifics or stuff like that. Putting something in someone’s brain, semi-permanently, that will let you control them is a pretty big decision. It’s a pretty big mutual decision, ideally. And I wanted it, not because I didn’t want to do inductions anymore – most of the time, we still do inductions, even though it’s not technically necessary. I wanted it because I wanted the ability to drop you whenever I wanted to. I wanted that comfortable level of control over you. As a dominant-leaning person, and a very hypnokinky person, it means a lot to me.

KS: Yeah, I like it. I like that it feels like it proves our trust in each other.

SS: Yeah. How did you feel about it when we discussed it?

KS: I remember being surprised that you hadn’t brought it up earlier. But I think that I didn’t know enough about hypnokink to know that that’s kind of a big deal, at least for some people, so to me it was just like, “Why didn’t you do this before?” but I mean, it makes sense that you waited.

SS: How long did I wait? I don’t remember.

KS: I don’t know. I don’t think I have any journal entries about that.

SS: I think a couple months?

KS: Yeah, two or three months. So, you mentioned being dominant-leaning, and you’re switchy, and you’re switchy in this kink as well. Do you prefer trancing people, or being in trance?

SS: Uhh, they’re both great. Such a fuckin’ switch! They’re both really good. When I started exploring this kink, I read primarily male-submissive fantasy stuff. That is because I didn’t think I would ever be able to do it, so, as a fantasy, being controlled and having my mind be taken away, or my thoughts be taken away, was very attractive to me, because I think a lot, and I’m very in my head, very cerebral. But once I started exploring real-life kink communities and online kink communities with real people instead of just fantasies, I was almost immediately on the other side of the slash. The nights that I would try to be a subject [on Omegle] never went very well, and the nights that I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna study up and try to be a top tonight” were much more satisfying, sexually and in terms of what I actually got to talk to people about and experience. I don’t know; it’s very good either way, but in terms of my real-life experience, I’ve been a top far more.

KS: You mentioned being cerebral, and that, I think, is a large part of why I enjoy hypnosis, now, too. I have anxiety and depression and stuff, so a lot of times, I have thoughts that I don’t want to be having.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And I find it really helpful in that way. So I guess I want to know how you view it as a tool, not just for sexy kink stuff but for the more lifestyle-kink side of our relationship.

SS: That’s an area that I’m still not 100% comfortable with, because a lot of people in the erotic hypnosis/hypnokink community – like a lot of kink communities – are like, “This can be therapeutic, but it’s not therapy.” And hypnotherapy is an entire field. There’s a lot of training involved in it, and it’s very complicated. There have been some books written by people that have seemed to take concepts from hypnotherapy and try to apply them to sexy things, which included age regression and other stuff that a lot of people consider far too risky to do in kink contexts, and I consider a lot of things that would be used by hypnotherapists to be far too risky to do in kink contexts. If you’re manipulating and playing with somebody’s body, you can see what you’re doing, in a lot of ways. You can see and feel and sense what you’re doing. If you are messing around inside of somebody’s brain that is not your brain, you really don’t know what you’re doing, and so there’s a lot of psychological risks in this kind of play if you don’t limit the kinds of suggestions that you’re doing and the kinds of places that you’re taking somebody when they’re in a suggestible state. So, for me, I think I’ve kept the lifestyle, non-sexy suggestions to very simple, positive, affirmation-style stuff, like, not anything involving re-experiencing or regressing into specific memories, because I know that there are risks to that, or behavior modification and addiction are kinks for some people, and I’m nervous about those… I’m nervous about any permanent personality changes… All of that stuff, I don’t know enough to mess around with it.

KS: Yeah. I was thinking of stuff like, when I’m having a bad anxiety day and you tell me I’m safe, which, in some ways, is like foreplay for me, because my anxiety is a huge part of what Emily Nagoski would call my “sexual brakes,” so I find that helpful for both sexy and non-sexy reasons – which is true of most of my kinks.

SS: Yeah. I think that’s pretty low-risk. I think hypnotizing someone and telling them that they’re safe, or that they’re okay, or that it’s okay for them to be happy, or that they’re comfortable, is pretty low-risk. I think modifying somebody’s personality, or telling them in trance that they’re getting more and more addicted to you as a person, or even the feeling of you being together, is a lot riskier.

KS: I always appreciate how conscientious you are about this stuff. It makes me feel much safer doing it.

SS: Thanks!

KS: Okay. What are your favorite things to do with me that are sexy in hypnosis?

SS: Hmm. Okay. I like making you really blank, like your brain is just this total empty blank slate that I can fuck, because I also have a sleepy kink, and I also just like when you’re compliant and useable for me. So if your brain is blank, and your body is splayed out, and I can use it however I want, that is very good. I like the times that we’ve done anything involving hypnotic drug play stuff – so like, a couple of times, I’ve tied a food item of yours, or water or something, to some kind of post-hypnotic response, like having your water turn you on more the more of it you drink, because it’s been drugged. That’s very good. I like the few times that we’ve played with amnesia a lot. It’s not overtly sexy to have somebody forget something, but there’s a lot of sexy things you can do with it, like making somebody forget that they’re naked, or forget that they’re wearing clothes, or make somebody forget their name, or your name, and then tease them about that in a D/s way… Arousal triggers are incredibly useful; that’s probably the most common thing we do, is having some word or phrase or set of numbers turn you on more and more, and then less. Like, occasionally I’ve used a 1-to-10 scale to turn you on, and then I’ve teased you by turning it down when you really wanted to be turned on more. It’s frustrating and useful. One of the things that we also do a lot, because we’re long-distance, is what is often called I guess like a guided-meditation style of trance, or a guided-roleplay style of trance, where you’re in trance and, because you’re in trance, your brain interprets words in a different way and can create sensations from that, so you can do sensation play where, because we’re far apart, I can tell you that I’m touching parts of you, or that you’re feeling certain touches on your body that you’re not physically feeling, but you can feel them in a more real way than normally if we were just having phone sex. So I like that a lot.

KS: Yup. Hypnosis is very good for long-distance. It’s a handy kink to have.

SS: Yeah. What are some ones I didn’t mention that you’ve really enjoyed?

KS: Bondage.

SS: Oh, yeah. Fuck yes.

KS: Yeah. It took me a really long time to realize that I have a bondage kink, because it just seemed so basic and obvious, and also I was often pairing it with other things that I also enjoyed, so I didn’t know where the arousal was coming from, but it’s become increasingly clear that I’m turned on by even just the sensation of being restrained, even if nothing else is happening. So it’s been fun to play with that. It makes me feel really submissive, which is nice.

SS: Hypnotic bondage is sort of like, telling somebody in trance that parts of their body are immobile, or feel like they’re tied down or restrained, and a brain that’s in trance is usually very cooperative with that. So if you tell somebody in trance that their arms are tied down and they can’t move them, and you ask them to try, it’s very likely that they won’t be able to move those limbs.

KS: Yeah. I also really like fractionation, which is not really a sexy suggestion, like what we’re talking about, but being pulled in and out of trance really fast makes me feel like you’re literally fucking my brain.

SS: Yup.

KS: It’s really disorienting, in much the same way that getting slapped across the face can be, which is nice, ‘cause I really like being in subspace, and you really like when I’m in subspace.

SS: Yeah. The sounds you make when I fractionate you are as good as the sounds you make when I fuck you.

KS: [giggling] It’s always the same sounds, too.

SS: Mmhmm!

KS: I can’t even change them. We’ve also occasionally enjoyed mixing hypnosis with roleplay – like, hysteria stuff and other types of roleplay.

SS: Yeah, there are certain roleplay scenarios where it’s even more exciting if the person roleplaying the dominant or toppy role also knows how to hypnotize you. So like, a school bully that pushes you into a closet, that also can hypnotize you to give him your homework, or a doctor that is trying to get you to come because it’s part of your treatment plan, but also can hypnotize you to make you feel a little more comfortable spreading your legs. You know?

KS: [giggling subbily] Yeah. I know.

SS: Aww.

KS: We also, in the past few months, have been playing with doing hypno stuff in public – which is really interesting, because I think there are very few kinks that you could do in public and be reasonably confident that no one’s gonna know what you’re doing, and you’re not gonna rope anyone into it without their consent. ‘Cause it can really just look like two people having a conversation, or one person taking a nap in the other person’s lap. It looks very innocuous. And I know you really enjoy doing that. What do you like about those public scenes?

SS: Yeah. I don’t really think I have an exhibitionism kink at all. I just like the totality of the control of that. I like that I can be out with you and I can use your trigger, or I can induce you quietly by looking at you or touching your shoulder or your hair, and make you fall asleep on me. Once, we played with hypnosis in addition to a remote-controlled vibe in your cunt, and that’s just a very discreet, very hot fucking thing, to be able to whisper in someone’s ear about how they’re feeling like you’re fucking them, and also have something on their clit. I mean, I don’t know. If people don’t get why that’s hot, I don’t know, I don’t get it.

KS: [laughing] Yeah, that’s fun. We should do that more.

SS: Yeah.

KS: It’s getting cold now, though. We’re gonna have to go to, like, a mall or something.

SS: Okay.

Check back on Friday for the last instalment of this interview, in which we’ll be talking about 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!