Last time, we took a look at the nature of myth and metaphor in broad strokes. We used that base to explore the history and context of the Siren and some of the ways the mythological creature became an archetype and why it has persevered
You don’t have to read any of that to read this, I promise.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and we were talking about where this fetish comes from and what her origin story was.
It was different than mine, different than a lot of ours, but it was similar to some stories I had heard from other dominant women.
In the conversation we talked about fetishes in general and how we get them.
When I was 17, way back in 1999, I got to see Love Line live. Dr. Drew and Adam Carolla were on a national tour and they spoke/performed at one of the colleges in my city.
I went with a buddy and sat in rapt attention for every joke and every piece of insight and wisdom offered.
One such insight was offered by Dr. Drew when he said that a fetish is not a preference, it is more than that. Everybody has tastes but a fetish is something that is extra-sexual or compulsory depending on the severity of the fetish.
This was right around the time the internet had showed me I wasn’t alone in my desires, so I was paying extra close attention.
Dr. Drew being Dr. Drew, I think the definition of fetish that he has provided is a fairly solid and workable one.
He also discussed how fetishes are usually installed at a very young age, and serve as a signifier or representation of sexuality, intimacy, or desire.
Fetishes are, it is widely accepted, developed and that means they have an origination point and that point is fundamentally external.
Some fetishes are common, or have a common origination point. Body parts, articles of clothing, the traditionally feminine, and the traditionally masculine are easy to recognize. So too are fetishes that are iconic, or emblematic, deep rooted components of societal perceptions of what defines sexuality that are practically speaking extra-sexual.
As such, some fetishes are an attraction that is exacerbated past the practical and conventional sense.
Then, you have fetishes that are less common, fetishes like Erotic Hypnosis.
For myself, and for many people, we believe our point of origination came from childhood media exposure.
What follows is an exploration what this phenomenon entails and how it came to be not just as a result of consuming culture, but what in the culture enabled it in the first place.
First and foremost we need to understand what traditionally defines children’s entertainment and/or family and all ages entertainment.
Primarily this kind of entertainment is understood to be straightforward.
It doesn’t help to define it as simple or obvious as that fundamentally diminishes its value, instead it helps to understand it as direct.
It is also by and large what is referred to as traditional romance.
In this sense romance refers to narratives that live as external conflict and are peopled with traditional archetypal characters.
These are stories of good versus evil, pride versus humility, and honesty versus dishonesty. They are morality tales and they are cautionary tales.
As such, they communicate basic social values and perspectives, including but not limited to societal gender roles and norms.
(Note: This has been changing as the voices behind who creates this kind of content have changed.)
Often in these stories characters can be seen as follows:
Good men are strong and honest, and good women are compassionate and nurturing.
Good men are smart and humble, and good women are clever and unambitious.
If a good character is seemingly cowardly, then they will find their courage in a manner that makes them truly brave.
Good characters fight fair, and fight in a direct and noble fashion.
If a good character must be cunning or inventive to win the battle, their cunning is not the ends unto itself but a means of creating a fair fight or to undo the enemy’s advantage.
Good men fight evil men and do not hit women, good women fight evil men to show that they are just as tough as the boys sometimes, and fight evil women in part because it is never ok for men to hit a woman.
Good men and women fight with strength of body and mind, and are direct and fight fair. Fighting fair indicates that the better person wins, and in these stories the better person is always the one with the greater moral character.
Good characters fight to liberate and free people, and the tools they have at their disposal reflect that.
Evil men are mighty and wicked, evil women are deceitful and manipulative.
Evil men are malicious and cowardly, evil women are mysterious and opportunistic.
If an evil character seems to have a redeeming quality, it is either a ploy to fool the good guys or an indicator that they can and will be redeemed.
Evil characters only act if they have the advantage, and use whatever tools are at their disposal to gain that advantage. This includes but is not limited to lying, cheating, stealing, and all other conventionally morally bankrupt acts.
Evil characters fight indirectly and complicate the battle and battlefield to prevent the better quality of the good characters from shinning through.
Evil characters fight to enslave and dominate people, and the tools they have at their disposal reflect that.
By and large men fight with brawn, immediacy, and intellect, and women fight with emotion, abstract power and range, and cunning.
One of the reasons women fight with these weapons is because of gender roles.
Traditionally in these stories and narratives women are not as physically strong as men, women are not as capable of hand to hand combat as men, and women are not as smart as men, unless they are at which point their intelligence becomes a super power.
This is why the female character often has a bow, or another attack that lets them maintain the abstraction of distance, or a special power like telepathy, or telekinesis. This allows the character to fight with men but to be separated by distance and as such maintain the constant that men should not hit women and that women are not as physically capable as men.
This leads us to the following female villain archetypes: the witch, the poisoner, the hysterical destroyer, and the temptress:
The witch is an easily understood archetype and is built upon deep seated perceptions of female power, some of which has been briefly explored above. The witch can be all of these archetypes and is inherently villainous because she fights with the fundamentally mysterious tool of magic while representing the overall mysteriousness of women.
Women are, traditionally speaking, very mysterious after all.
The poisoner is a woman that can physically harm a man without fighting him on his terms. The poisoner is fairly straightforward.
The hysterical destroyer is a force of unhinged and irrational overt destruction. The manifestation of the commonly stated belief that women are crazy and can’t control themselves when they get emotional.
The temptress, who is the reason we are doing this, uses emotion, manipulation, and deception, and plays off of the inherent male fear of their own emotions and the influence that women can have one men. The temptress is an externalization of male desire and the percieved weakness desire can create.
This is an inherently sexual fear, as it reflects the potentially all consuming motivation and nature of sexual desire.
Further, as men are taught they are supposed to control their emotions and repress them, the temptress is not fighting fair by using emotion. As such, emotion is essentially an illegal weapon, it is not honorable, and it is not direct.
This is also why evil men uses emotion and manipulation as well; they are female weapons and women are the nature of original sin, because of course that factors heavily into all of this, because it factors so heavily into the history of western culture in general.
This is also why villains are often made to be effeminate, because women are evil, cowardly, and cunning while men are honest, brave and good.
(Also, because like women, queerness is bad; what I am referring to above is a “charitable” take on how this kind of othering and functional queer coding can come to happen without overt homophobic intentionality. Ah, the passive institutionalized expression of homophobia… good times…)
When taken as a whole we can see the following picture:
The temptress is an archetype that is the accumulation of male sexual fears about female sexual power, and this is clearly inherent in the character.
This core sexual component manifests in the visual representations of the character because it is a fundamental quality of the character. Be it from art design, to casting, to voice acting, all the way through passive reception of the character, the temptress’s sexuality is a constant.
(When it is not a constant, it becomes and different form of misogyny, where for example the women is not traditionally attractive/deemed ugly, she must use her evil mind powers to control her male victims to force them to love her, because how else would she ever receive love?)
Even though when we first experience these characters we are often not sexually active, the character still leaves an impression on us, and that impression is reinforced in part by the congruity between the archetype and the elements of society and humanity it embodies and reflects.
It is also instructive, because we learn about our society and our culture through its stories.
If we remain consistently exposed to these archetypes and these narratives as we progress into puberty then what we have seen as an early model of sexuality “can” mature with us into our recognition of what sexuality is.
The power the temptress has, the ability to control the mind, to seduce and enslave in a fundamentally sexual manner becomes a desired experience not simply because of who we associate it with, but with who we associate ourselves as.
It isn’t hard to imagine that we associate with the hero as we are intended to in these stories, and if we are hypnotized and dominated by the embodiment of the villain then in the simple binary of the narrative that we long to experience, we are in turn the hero.
It is our inherent goodness, our agency and self control that we want to lose to prove that we both have power, and have heroic value.
To be controlled is to be desired, to be seduced is to be needed.
This origination point of erotic hypnosis, hypnosis being the most tangible real world representation and correlation of mind control (and also a point of reference for narrative construction) , is essentially a wish fulfillment fantasy.
In the words of another pro hypno domme friend, “Erotic hypnosis makes you the star of your own story”.
Of course, this is one particular scenario and these are only a few components and theories. They do not factor in the human range of experiences, but serve only as one possible base of exploration.
Anyway, if you have questions or ideas for future articles, of if you just want to reach out and say hello, feel free to drop me a line.
Also, if you appreciated this article, I’ve created a $1.00 tip goody. I was thinking about selling the articles themselves like I do free stories, but this seems easier for everyone in the long and short run.
