Dr. Steven Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump and specialist in the intervention and rescue of people ensnared by cults, apparently recently discovered sissy hypnosis porn and seems to think it’s a genuine attempt at brainwashing people.
In response to a tweet by Motherboard journalist Samantha Cole announcing that Pornhub is removing unverified content from its site, Hassan said: “I hope they are deleting all hypnosis videos. I watched two videos to convince people they were another gender. What I saw was highly sophisticated mind control. Detransitioners pointed me to them!”
Erotic hypnosis is a common fetish involving people doing or becoming, through a medium of hypnosis, a variety of things—from bimbofication (becoming a hypersexualized, dimwitted sex doll) to dronification (becoming a mindless drone controlled by a hive mind).
The genre of erotic hypnosis Hassan is talking about is known as sissification, a fetish that extends beyond the hypnosis community and revolves around men, usually cis men, being “forced” in a number of different ways—blackmail, hypnosis, kidnapping fantasies—to dress and behave like highly sexed caricatures of women (it’s basically bimbofication porn with a gender-bending twist).
While hypnosis can get people to carry out specific actions, it can’t force them to do those things if they’re genuinely unwilling to. Additionally, much of the content isn’t actually intended to hypnotize the viewer, it’s just a pornographic fantasy for the viewer to get off to.
The sissy fetish is also actually largely unpopular with the trans community. While a small number of trans people have engaged with the kink as a safe means of exploring their gender identity at the beginning of their journey, many more see it as fetishization and a transphobic caricature of them and their experiences. Basically, anyone who comes away from watching a sissy porn hypnosis video, even if it’s a genuine hypnotic product instead of aesthetic wank material, is still going to have the same gender they started out with.
Most people familiar with sissy porn responded to Hassan’s tweet with humor. “Buddy this is main,” one Twitter user jokingly reminded him.
Some were admittedly more savage than others.
However, Hassan’s remarks aren’t just a funny mistake by an out-of-the-loop, 66-year-old man. Hassan stated in his tweet he was sent the videos by detranisitioners, people who realize after beginning the social and/or medical transition process that they are wrong about their gender identity and really are the gender they were assigned to at birth.
While detransitioners are very rare among those who undergo or start to undergo a transition, a small but outspoken number of them align with the TERF and gender-critical movements, spreading misinformation about the trans community and working to make it more difficult for people to transition. Given the deeply misleading way they seem to have framed these videos when sending them to Hassan, it would appear the detransitioners he’s talking about had transphobic motives in doing so.
While Hassan hasn’t responded to any of the criticism, he did respond to a Twitter user, @karengeier, agreeing to let her send him a copy of her show in which a trans woman speaks about her experiences with the gender critical “cult.” So perhaps, Hassan will be educating himself on the matter soon.
