This reddit post made me really think about what it means to create hypnosis and mind control content while keeping consent in mind. These are my thoughts a few days after running it all over in my mind.
Mind Control Stories
Writing hypnosis and mind control erotica can be quite complicated, assuming you want to go about it with the intent of not writing what amounts to non-consensual scenes.
How do you make it sexy and fun and erotic, while preserving the core concept of someone being mindfucked, manipulated and mentally dominated into something new, a slave or a toy or a robot or whatever the tale you wish to tell is.
We have plenty of associations from the media, of course, to draw upon. Poison Ivy from Batman is a popular example. Her powers of seduction through pheromones are well-established, and we see people do things wildly against their morals in service of her, once those powers are used.
Turning that to something erotic can create a layer of complexity. How do you make it appealing to lose your mind? How do you take the reader on a journey through a character they can relate to if that character loses all agency?
Mindfucked with Consent
This is a recurring issue with the concept of altered mindstates. If someone is unable to consent, then what are we saying is happening to them? I’ve read some stories down the years that have triggered an intense adverse reaction because it’s very, very clear that the character being mind controlled or hypnotized is doing things they despise, that disgust and upset them.
On a personal level – I want someone to surrender their mind to me because they’re excited by it, even if it’s dangerous or forbidden. I want to be desired as a dominant, so much of this is about me, as much as it is about storytelling.
Speaking of, those stories where the mind controller is not just hated by the subject, but making them to things they really, really don’t want to, I struggle to find those stories appealing. That’s obviously very personal, and very subjective. Of course some people are aroused by that complete loss of agency in themselves or in doing that to others. That’s a kink. I’m not here to moralise and tell you that you shouldn’t enjoy this side of things.
I am going to try to define the line between consent and non-consent, and how I keep both my files and my smut on the side that I personally enjoy.
I firmly believe you can write dark, dangerous erotic stories with hypnosis and mind control without leaning too heavily into non-consent. A little hint of it, of that interplay between resistance and surrender is good. Where the choice is not there, I think we’re into something that’s about kink over story. Where our protagonist has no agency, we’re breaking a fundamental element of the hero’s journey.
So I have two things that have to be present in a story, no matter how dark. Two factors that make sure that the person falling under the sway of the other is going somewhere that they at least somewhat agree to.
The first is desire.
Some stories set up an awful villainous character who controls someone else and uses and abuses them entirely against their will. The victim is just that, a victim. There is no desire. The entire story revolves around the controller, and as someone dominant you might say I should like that – but as I said, I want to be desired. I don’t want to take someone who hates me and make them love me.
The person being mind controlled or hypnotized should want the person doing that to them, or some element of it. Could be that they harbour a hidden lust for something they don’t get in a relationship. It could be that there’s something missing that the mind controller provides.
A foot fetishist whose partner doesn’t want him seeing her feet is a good example. If someone is shut off from what they want, they’re going to be susceptible to seeing it from someone else – cheating is immoral, of course, but temptation is real and desire is natural.
This creates a setting where someone can act beyond their morals, be compelled, be controlled, but only because they already want something. Their judgment is clouded by lust, or love, or pure temptation or just curiosity. Mind control, hypnosis, they just focus the desire. Narrow the vision. The desire should still exist.
They have to want to know what’s inside Pandora’s Box.
This is why certain themes really don’t land for me. Addiction is one. Someone just getting hooked on another person is not mind control, it’s depressingly close to reality. A story of someone acting like a junkie is sad. It’s not sexy, even if they’re having sex. Addiction is miserable and someone changing because they’ve been forced into one just feels terrible. Requiem for a Dream but with more sex is still horrific.
The other is instantly being changed, a snap of the fingers and suddenly a man is doing whatever his wife’s worst enemy wants, or a woman is turned into a bimbo because she gets hit with a mind control ray. No desire, no agency, nothing. Rather dull, I think, unless your fetish is to have a braindead sex doll. I prefer my partners with a bit of interest in what we’re doing, even if that’s being a footstool.
Again, I appreciate that there’s desire for that stuff, but it’s definitively non-consensual if your character has absolutely no say in what happens to them, and no desire for it to happen. Which leads me to the next element that is needed to keep things on the right side of that consent to be mindfucked line.
Choice.
Desire x time is how a good mind control story should work, for me. You expose someone enough times, in enough ways to corrupt them, then you’ve set the scene for something erotic.
But they have to have a choice. If there’s addiction, that doesn’t exist. If there’s immediate change, they never had a chance.
Where’s the tension?
A good, compelling story needs tension. Now that could be in someone trying to escape mind control, but there has to be hope, a chance – and that chance has to be within their power. The reason they fail needs to be their desire.
Choice running up against desire and forcing the wrong decision to be made is how we land at the climax. At the moment of full submission to the power of another.
Without the choice to walk away, what’s the point? Without the moments of clarity in between mindless desire, what’s the hook to keep reading? Maybe if the sex scenes are hot enough, sure, but sex alone does not make a great story.
For me, erotic hypnosis and mind control stories are all about the dance between being sensible and throwing all that away to surrender to someone compelling. Mundanity versus sexuality. Duty versus desire.
I am acutely aware that for some, this is not the case. That the part after the seduction is the fun. That being a mindless puppet under someone’s control is their fetish. And that’s totally valid, but that’s not the most exciting story, because it lacks the drive to move forward toward a conclusion.
It’s all about seduction
That means the meat of the story comes before, not after the mind control is complete. Once we’re past that point, honestly, we’re into potentially depressing or boring territory. If you keep the submissive trying to escape, then they’re in a non-consent situation, and it’ll feel sad. It’ll feel bleak. That can be powerful for telling a certain kind of story, but it’s not one about someone’s reluctant but consensual submission anymore.
The other issue is that submission into happiness is equally dull. Do you really want to keep reading another 20 chapters of how Tommy is serving Mindy on his knees every day? Or was the fun in how Mindy warped his mind and stole him away from the woman he thought he loved?
And that leads me back to desire and choice. Seduction is sexy, and seduction is about desire and choice. You have to choose to be seduced. You can just leave, you can just walk away. Once you accept the advance at all, then you’re falling into the trap.
The choice to stop being seduced is more erotic, for me. That makes the submission more delicious, the dominance more powerful.
It’s not some magic spell or a drug, though those can be woven in, but the desire of both characters to be with each other, to fulfil something, is what makes it sexy.
I’ve read some stories where the protagonist could escape, but only terrible decisions that aren’t related to arousal, or ridiculous contrivances keep them in the trap. That’s not only a bad way to get across that they’re giving in to someone, but it also veers into non-consent. If the trap is inescapable, then their feeling of having agency is not matched by real choice. We’re past that line.
Let me be clear – that doesn’t mean there isn’t a very powerfully sexy story to be told if someone thinks they can escape but slowly gets corrupted, but there is no consent there. That absolutely crosses that line.
Consent in hypnosis fiction
The consent is in the desire and the choice. The chance to escape, but choosing not to because they’re just too aroused to resist the dominant or the villain. That’s what makes the leadup sexy to me, that’s what allows for the foreplay of the story. In the end, they could choose to back out – they need at least a final choice. A moment, that point of no return. Even better if they have lots of chances but they keep letting their lust win.
When it’s not that, when one character is being pushed to do things while wanting nothing but to escape, to run, to go back to normal, we’re in horror movie territory. And if we are doing that, if the submissive subject of it all is being subjected to all of that nastiness they don’t want, but someone else does… sure it’s a kink for people, but in terms of storytelling – it’s not purely erotica, it’s something else. It’s being subjected to trauma that you can’t escape.
That’s the horror of ego death, of losing control of your own body and choices. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a great story there. It does mean we’re way outside the lines with consensual sex and the autonomy to choose the ‘wrong’ thing because it’s sexy.
But add a flash of desire for it. A little; ‘I shouldn’t want it, but I do’, and suddenly it’s not so scary. It’s enticing. It’s about temptation and resistance.
To give you an example, I wrote a story called Nurse several years ago. It’s dark, and the hypnotist/mind controller is definitely evil. She’s clearly the villain. The submissive/subject however, desires her. He’s missing something she provides. She’s caring and soft in many ways, and that’s appealing. There’s plenty of other things going on, some of them dubious, but in the end he gets the choice to escape. I think that’s important to making all that tension worthwhile.
I can’t say I’m the greatest writer though, and I apply a lot of this to making hypnosis files too. I want it all to feel like consensually surrendering your mind. Like you’re choosing to give in, even if it’s wrong, it’s just too sexy not to.
If you want the gold standard of the seduction and focus on that slow burn of desire becoming too much to resist, then please check out GigglingGoblin. There is no-one better, I think, at this kind of storytelling, of making every moment sexy. Of giving characters agency enough to choose their fate. Of making it seem inevitable that the protagonist submits, but them having full agency to say no at any point.
Agency Matters
Agency is important. It’s also, in my opinion, much hotter to have someone give in willingly, and then fall into all that mind control and brainwashing, than to have the mind control force them into it. To take a small desire and use hypnosis to ramp it up to 11, that’s where we get consensual surrender, with the feeling of still being mentally overpowered.
The temptation of getting what you really want, of unlocking your desires, and making you forget that maybe you shouldn’t be licking the feet of your academic rival, or kissing the supervillain’s ass.
I can’t say I’ve gotten it right in every piece of content I’ve made, especially early stories I wrote under a different name, but this is the standard I try to hold to now.
And I’ll re-iterate. This is my opinion. This is where I draw a line between consent and non-consent. Where someone can have these fantasies of becoming brainwashed and enslaved without giving up their agency and becoming a victim, and where the dominant can be villainous without being a monster. Where you get to explore a dark kink without it turning into a horror story where the monster wins in the first act and the rest is just the hero crying in a corner.
If you want the latter, your kink is your kink. It is, however, definitively non-consent. How you feel about that is up to you to figure out. Personally, the line is crossed when the subject has no choice, and they become a victim rather than a willing participant in their own downfall.
So if you are looking to create erotic content with mind control, hypnosis or brainwashing, and you’d like to keep it sexy and as consensual as is reasonable when you’re writing about minds being played with: Desire and choice. That’s what you need to remember.
Remove either and you’re into a different form of story. One that’s a significant amount darker, scarier, and more taboo. Your line may fall in a much different place to mine, but I hope that at least knowing those two elements can help you make your stories sexier and more seductive.