There was a blog I thought I wanted to write, one about what Customers and Providers owe each other in this business, and every time I tried I didn’t like its shape or tone. It came down to me saying, everyone should be doing better, and everyone should be more aware of the realities and driving forces of this marketplace.
Why marketplace? Because, again, I think about things in these terms and because my work is based on the commercial retail side of things.
But no provider wants to read a screed from some guy talking about how no one is giving you money because you’re a powerful woman, they’re giving you their dick dollars because your presentation speaks to their cocks. It’s not a conversation, it’s not wholly accurate or reflective of the power, business, and emotional dynamics of our scene, and more than anything, it’s a guy talking about how important dicks are in a femdom world.
(Like I said, I never liked how it started to come together.)
Then, I saw a tweet about marketing, and that was what finally filled in the missing pieces, and what finally made what I was trying to get at make sense.
You see, what we owe each other in this market is honesty (and dignity, and not sending dick picks, or wasting time, and more stuff too).
We owe it to ourselves to attract the customers we want, to find the experiences we want, and to communicate with others what our expectations are.
We can dot his by examining our relationships to 3 separate words, the raw ingredients that make up this scene. They are:
FEMDOM.
EROTIC.
-and-
HYPNOSIS.
Let’s do the boring thing first and touch on definitions here so we’re all on the same page.
FEMDOM
Female Domination, or Female led Domination, or the Dominance of a Female, be they a Princess, a Mistress, a Goddess, or simply a Boss. Femdom can mean a lot of things in an interpersonal sense, and it can mean a lot of different things to the women who engage in it, but the long and the short of it is, She is in Charge.
EROTIC
Something of a sexual nature, be it titillation to overt pornographic content. Erotic connotes material generated to sexually arouse.
HYPNOSIS
The act of and practice of techniques designed to put the subject into a state of trance wherein the subject experiences a great state of suggestibility.
Clearly, FEMDOM is the most complex of these 3 terms, and if it is not self-evident as to why, hopefully it will be made clear in further discussion.
So, every Content Provider (we’re using this term instead of Domme, just for ease of communication, as not everyone who makes this stuff sees themselves as a Domme, you’ll see) has a different relationship to these words in terms of interest and priority, and these factors inform how they shape their material and why they do what they do.
When you think of the sort of basic model of FEMDOM EROTIC HYPNOSIS, all three of those elements are mixed together in even parts. You’re being hypnotized by a woman who is controlling you, and it is designed to cause you sexual pleasure and arousal as this happens while she takes more control over you. That’s what a lot of us sort of assume everyone is doing in this scene, it’s the assumption that we all work off of when buying content etc.
If you’re buying this: you like how it all fits together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and/or this is how you like your HYPNOSIS. This is also where most D/s driven HYPNOSIS occurs.
BUT!
That’s not true.
Some people are more interested in the EROTIC, then FEMDOM, with the HYPNOSIS part being the least important. This is basically role-play content, or themed porn, whatever you want to call it. It may even be earnest ‘let’s see if I can hypnotize someone with my sexuality and my authority’ content.
Basically, it’s light on (or absent of) technique.
If you’re buying this: you want to masturbate, and you like the themes.
Oh, did you figure out that I’m going to do a bunch of combinations of the three? Yeah, that’s happening; so let’s skip the framing devices.
FEMDOM-HYPNOSIS-EROTIC (if at all)
This can be the quintessential ‘your dick doesn’t matter, pay and obey’ combination. The eroticism is a second order effect of this Content Provider asserting herself. She’s not doing anything to you to enhance your arousal or pleasure, she’s just pressing your buttons by being in-charge.
Honestly, she may not really be bothering with that much HYPNOSIS either, she kind of doesn’t have to, she just plays off your desire to be bossed around and dominated.
It can also be the kind of hypnosis that is just permission based approval, and not so much a trance state as a state of cooperative behavior devoid of deliberate technique.
But, there’s still something hypnotic to it, in that it plays on the heightened suggestibility of arousal, and often times there is a systematic approach to it too, ranging from call and response, to HYPNOSIS via repetition.
If you’re buying this: FEMDOM is your thing, and chances are so is findom, or maybe humiliation (too). You enjoy a woman bossing you around, imposing herself on you, and denying you your agency, and that raw force of will probably matters more to you than technique.
HYPNOSIS-EROTIC-FEMDOM
Here, the hypnosis is the most important part. The Content Provider here may not see themselves as particularly much of a FEMDOM, at least no more dominant than any hypnotist with any subject, and their content may be explicitly EROTIC or is simply based on the fetishes of you the listener. This Content Provider has seen that there is an audience for HYPNOSIS and may enjoy the process of getting in someone’s head etc. but it is not about power exchange with them.
If you’re buying this: you really like HYPNOSIS, technique matters, and being hypnotized is in and of itself the most erotic thing for you.
So this is all well and good, but where is the practicality in this?
Okay, let’s move on and get to that!
(By the way, the other combinations are essentially redundant, and when I went through the whole ‘mix and match every order, I didn’t find anything interesting to explore.)
If you are a Content Provider, you need to figure out what your content priorities are (other than getting paid). If you were to stack rank these things in order, what’s the most important, what’s the least?
If you were going to give them 1-10 values, what would they be?
Which parts do you hate the most?
Which kinds of content attract the customers you are the least interested in?
What gives you the most creative and intellectual satisfaction?
What bores you?
Do you need/use/value all three things in your work, or is one of them useless to you, or not that important?
(And obviously, if the HYPNOSIS part isn’t that important, maybe rethink your advertising and branding.)
The ‘why’ of why you ‘need’ do this is a matter of perspective, both for yourself to help you sharpen and focus your product and content, and to examine what you are doing to get the customers you want.
We can never really choose all our customers, but we can focus on markets we want, and types of client engagement we value.
If what you want is to get paid (well duh, that’s the end result of being in business) then this is a tool to examine the product you make and how it performs.
Knowing and understanding your focus can help you with your advertising and messaging, in turn helping you to differentiate yourself from your peers.
I think, ‘I THINK’ we’ve hit maximum saturation with the HYPNO/MESMERIZE/ETC. wave that’s been going on for the last 5-7 years, which means there’s a lot of people making a lot of content now that all has something in common with each other, can be hard to differentiate, and can make finding content that is actual HYPNOSIS driven hard to find.
Combined with the fact that the scene itself has become decentralized, it can make communicating what you are and what you offer even more difficult because you are now one of many Many MANY more people interested in the hypno-fetishist’s dollars than there were in 2010.
(I have thoughts on how to cut through the noise of theme porn, and insta-dommes, and all that, but that’s for another day.)
Anyhow, I hope this was helpful, or at very least interesting.