Hypnosis and pornography: a cultural history

ABSTRACT

A major form of porn creativity in the digital age has been the ‘hypno video’: a user-generated film mashing up short clips from various porn sources, accompanied by hypnotic imagery and sound, often designed with the overt intent to alter the viewer’s gender, racial or sexual preferences. These videos are highly popular, judging from view counts, although in most cases their effectiveness as hypnotic inductions is dubious at best. In this article, we discuss the science of hypnosis, and the reasons why ‘reprogramming’ videos are unlikely to have any basis in hypnotic practice. To understand the prevalence of this form, therefore, we trace the deep connections between hypnosis and pornography, showing that the highly subjective practice of hypnosis has consistently been associated with the erotic over at least the last two centuries. We trace the origins of porn hypnosis, both in early cinema’s theorization of the hypnotic screen and also in mid-twentieth-century brainwashing paranoia, examining the ways that the evil hypnotist mythos built up during this period and then became a staple of hardcore cinema. Finally, we discuss the function of hypnosis in porn, and the ways that porn hypnosis enables the viewer to overcome shame.

KEYWORDS:

• Hypnosis
• pornography
• micropornography
• shame
• mind control
• transgender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These terms, emerging from the manosphere, are discussed in van Valkenburgh (2018) and Ging (2019).

2 We found examples of all these (and more) on Pornhub, prior to that site’s removal of most user-generated content in 2020 (Heater 2020).

3 The introduction to Mia Croft’s hypnodomme YouTube channel reads ‘You’re here because you’re exited [sic] or aroused by Tease and Denial, Chastity, Sexual Programming to submit and please a powerful Dominant Female, CFNM or light humiliation, JOI, CEI, Leather, Heels, Stockings, Foot Worship, Sexy Polished nails … ’ (Croft 2013).

4 We interviewed the pseudonymous ‘tantra goddess888’ (2021), who creates erotic hypnosis videos for YouTube. She rejected the idea that her work could be aligned with pornography, stating that ‘because it really engages the mind, and in some cases has some therapeutic value, I find it to be erotic rather than pornographic’.