"Female Gaze" Hypnosis

“Female Gaze” Hypnosis by sleepingirl

The terms “male gaze” and “female gaze” are not my favorite. They are gendered, generalized, heteronormative, binary. However, they attempt to describe something very important to me. I grew up as a fandom teen, entrenched in writing and reading fanfic -- traditionally “female gaze” media. I’m an anime fan and any non-cishetmale person in anime spaces is hyperaware of the skew of quantity of anime that is more aimed towards straight cis men than women or anyone who does not fit that category. Sexuality and interest that is coded “for women'' in all media is suppressed, ridiculed, seen as more taboo, and not catered to in the same mainstream way.

Caveats apply. I hate how these terms can alienate people whose genders or interests do not align along binary lines. Of course, I love “male gaze” media too. I think these terms serve a purpose like “shounen/shoujo” demographic categories do in anime -- dated, with lines that blur more and more over time, but overall descriptive of various themes, topics, and tropes in a piece of media (which shouldn’t necessarily be connected to gender, but for various reasons were and still are).

But.

I think generally our community needs a lot, a lot more “female gaze” hypnosis -- regardless of either partner’s gender. And I want to be clear that I don’t mean this in the traditional sense of themes, tropes, etc -- I mean there are ways to do hypnosis specifically that are just coded more like this.

I easily acknowledge that part of the issue is that I see a limited slice of what people are actually doing with hypnosis. I see the public scripts and flirts, I see erotica, I see things mostly from spaces where people are both very online-only and cismale with little-to-no experience in kink/sex spaces, or people for whom this is mostly a fantasy. I see some public play. I don’t see people’s private play, either in their bedrooms or DMs.

And to be fair, I see a lot of female gaze fantasies too. My Twitter feed is at least 50% transwomen sharing Kafkaesque scenarios of sexualized human sacrifice or pilots falling in tender tragic love with their mechs. This too is female gaze.

But I get the impression that as a whole, we could stand to benefit from expressing our hypnosis more in this way, and we have a lot to learn from it.

Female Gaze Qualities

Media like this -- or a stereotype/average of it -- has some common predictable tropes and qualities:

• The sex is almost never directly about sex

• The “climactic” moments are not sex -- it may be the “surrender,” or “discovering something,” or “catching them,” or the culmination of seduction or the protagonist ultimately consenting

• There is a careful balance between the sex/etc being about the protagonist’s pleasure but also the love interest taking what they want for their own pleasure

• The love interest is deeply interested in the protagonist, who they are, learning about them

• Many scenarios that are “metaphors” for sex: the kiss of the hand in Pride and Prejudice, getting someone to blush, fantasy metaphorical activities like consumption of the soul or a representation of “ownership”

• The love interest can mind-read to some degree -- they often magically know what the protagonist is thinking and what they want

• The lead-up, foreplay, and flirtation/teasing is emphasized

• Emphasis on verbal interaction, usually poetic/skillful words

• Focused very much on the protagonist’s internal POV

• Attention is given to ambiance and tone

• The love interest is motivated to share things about themselves and do things in a way that is appealing and attractive to the protagonist

• The seduction is generally about building intense intimacy -- intimacy that is about specifically knowing and growing close to a person

• There is no rush towards sex -- it’s a slow burn

When we instinctively try to mirror this to reality, it seems sort of like a mixed bag. Some of it may feel like regular D/s, like a focus on control or other “nonsexual” parts of intimacy. Some of it may feel like an unrealistically idealized version of intimacy, like mind reading, or simultaneously “only taking what you want” but also pleasing the other person. Some of it may feel like things we already do, like flirting and teasing. Some of it may feel simply impossible -- whether for ethical reasons, as reticence is so romanticized, or the idea of a partner who is practically a poet or interested in another person to such an intense degree, or fantasy scenarios like questionably-contracted D/s or magic. Perhaps it also feels like some of this is feasible in long-term, intimate relationships, but we’re ignoring pick-up play, casual play, or content creation.

But even so, we are working with hypnosis where many of these qualities we can manifest by the nature of what we do. We mind-read, we build intimacy as part of rapport, and language is our bread and butter.

In general, this is a call to step away from hypnosis that is either a means to an end or overly clinical. Whether or not you fetishize hypnosis, the actual process of hypnotizing someone can be made to be a sex act in and of itself. Some of this is a simple shift of mindset -- whether that’s imagining that you’re a romance novel love interest, that you’re fucking your partner with your words, or even simply that you have a profound care towards the person you are playing with and that you aren’t taking hypnosis in and of itself for granted. But we’ll explore some more technical ideas to get the creativity flowing.

Hot Language Patterns

Commonly, hypnosis follows a formula that includes specific ways to phrase suggestions. We talk about direct language, hedging language, indirect suggestions, and language patterns from NLP or the like. These are useful, and can be hot in their own right, especially to emphasize “we are doing hypnosis” for people who get off on hypnosis. But they tend to be based out of clinical hypnosis or other places where eroticism is specifically deemphasized.

Often, newer hypnotists will fall into a trap when they go from flirting or building up to play to actually doing their hypnosis. The flirtation is stimulating, exciting, and then the hypnosis falls back to this kind of clinical tone. Part of this may come from an inexperience in giving suggestions in a more conversational (but not necessarily covert) way, but part of it may come from this idea that this is just the way to do hypnosis.

Hypnosis needs no special language patterns -- it is just communication, and any effective communication can work. For example, we might think of a standard suggestion being something like, “And now, as you look into my eyes, you may find your own eyes beginning to pleasantly relax.” But we could also simply say something like, “OK, so please look at my eyes, and pay attention to the way your own eyes feel. See if you can notice what happens and what changes, and if you can feel them relaxing as you focus.”

With this in mind, perhaps instead of focusing on codified language, we should focus on communicating in a way that is hot. How would a romance novel love interest talk to hypnotize the protagonist?

There are several elements to this that we can identify -- and of course we should strive to understand how they will contextually fit into our unique relationships with both long-term or one-off partners.

• Showing Interest

Showing interest in who someone is and in what you are doing together is hot and intimate. “I want to know who you are,” “I want to see your eyes,” “I care about your responses” are all sentiments that can pack quite a punch.

Of course in hypnokink, we acknowledge that these “I” statements can add D/s or a level of intimacy that is not always wanted. We might say that there are stereotypical examples of this kind of language that works for some relationships but not others, depending on the level and style of intimacy, or even where you are in the beginning of a trance. Some examples of suggestions like this might be:

• “I want you to go deep for me”

• “I want to learn about you”

• “Show me how you respond”

• “I care about your desires”

However, a more casual tone and general/ambiguous framing can make this work for more casual relationships or times where you are still building trust, vulnerability, and intimacy.

• “I love learning about the people I play with, it adds a lot for me”

• “I love watching someone go deep”

• “As a hypnotist, I really enjoy paying attention to my partner’s responses”

• “I want to see what is going to happen next”

Sometimes, this tone can make D/s work for people even in more intimate relationships where “traditional” D/s language feels forced or awkward. It’s impossible to convey tone through text, but there is also a big difference in a tone and focus that feels like it is deeply centered on the person you are with, as opposed to one where you are more broadly and casually talking about your interests and what you enjoy. Being authentic to the way you talk -- or more specifically, authentic to how you would talk in a hot way to this person -- is key.

Asking questions is important too -- both in negotiation and in the scene itself. Even someone who goes nonverbal in trance can respond nonverbally to “Don’t you like that?” or “I wonder what’s turning you on most right now.” If your partner can answer you verbally, that’s great, and you should pay attention -- even if they’re nonverbal, they will likely give you a nonverbal answer. But even just expressing curiosity and care for what their thoughts, feelings, and desires are is great.

• Proving Interest

Showing interest also means proving your interest -- utilizing the things you learn about a person in the trance that you do with them. There are things you will know simply by knowing the person or through the negotiation, and of course there are things that you will learn through the course of the scene.

Again, we have options for tone. If you know your partner is into language that talks about how dreamy or dazed they are, you can certainly pull them out and use them in your scene. (Perhaps not right away -- giving them some time to anticipate is nice.)

We want to communicate two separate but connected ideas: “I know what you want” and “I care about what you want.” There is a third, more D/s idea too: “I will use what you want (‘against’ you).” If the above section was about communicating genuine curiosity, this section is about when your curiosity has led to a satisfying discovery.

Your satisfaction is both important to you and your partner. There is a lot to be said about learning how to find your own pleasure as a hypnotist instead of doing what you think you should be doing as the Top in a scene. Your desires matter, and the key to a great scene is when both partners are getting to engage in something they find mutually enjoyable. Many subjects get a lot of pleasure when they feel like they know that the hypnotist is getting something out of playing with them. Developing the skill of identifying what is giving you pleasure from hypnosis -- and then communicating about it mid-scene -- is really important.

The sweet spot is when your desires overlap. When someone gasps or has a big response to some words you said that you find hot too; when someone reveals an interest in a topic or transformation that you share. Honoring that moment of discovery and expressing how it excites you too is hugely intense.

“I know you want to feel dazed out of your head” is good. Spending the time to focus on that and do it in a way that excites you too is great. You can build someone’s confidence that you care about their desires by always acknowledging the moments where someone shares something with you. We know that people will be more vulnerable when they feel like they are safe, and being heard.

Sometimes, service topping is what both partners want. But for when it’s not, be expressive of yourself -- and don’t be afraid to play with tension and teasing, which we will get into more.

• Mind Reading/Teasing

I have talked extensively about mind-reading in my articles -- it’s no secret that I think it’s one of the most important skills a hypnotist should have. Pacing and cold reading specifically are two of the best tools available to us to facilitate suggestibility, rapport, and magical, intense hypnosis. Mind reading is not hard to “fake” when you make verbal observations based on things you know about someone’s current experience, or general statements that apply to a person in their situation.

Mind reading also is included when we talk about proving your interest in a person. “You want this” is a very powerful sentiment and one that should be treated with respect -- not as a throwaway line. This is doubly true when we do “real” mind reading -- we hit on something we know or discover about someone’s experience or desires. It is private before we say it, and then we make it “public.” This even is true when these desires are openly negotiated ahead of time. It is a different space when someone is mid-scene and has all their intelligence drained out and you bring their enjoyment of that to light -- or afterwards.

An entire scene can be based on phrases that start with “I know” or “You want.” These phrases are hypnotic and suggestive. “I know you are desperate for trance. I know you want to feel it starting to pull at the edges of your awareness. I know you have secret desires that manifest and change your experience when I talk about them. I know you want to feel that depth increasing and starting to swallow you whole.”

Teasing is like a partner to mind reading. If mind reading is making statements and suggestions about what you know, teasing is what you do to either gain more information or play with the information you actually have. We might think of a few different ways we can tease people:

• Hinting, Guessing, Extrapolating

Teasing can help you draw out more specifics about information you already have. If for example you know that your partner is into bimbofication and enjoys the body-transformation aspects of it, there’s still a lot more to discover. You could show where you are aiming and make them squirm: “I wonder what it is about your body changing that really turns you on?” You can throw out generalizations to hint towards finding your target: “Some people really love the act of transformation itself, or having their body and its shape under someone else’s control…” You can also more directly guess and try to extrapolate their desires, using their affirmative responses as leads: “Aw, do you like it when your body turns into more of a sexual object?”

• Dangling

When we think of “tease and denial,” we think of a kind of teasing where we are taking something wanted and dangling it in front of someone. This kind of teasing can lead to either denial or fulfillment, and is a useful tool to build desire or desperation while simultaneously establishing power: “I know what you want, and I can give it to you -- if I want to.” Your classic, “You want to go deep for me so badly, don’t you?” is an example of this. But you can also lean into the meta message itself: “This is something you want so badly, something you’ve wanted for such a long time, and here it is in front of you -- something I can do to you in this moment, as soon as I choose to. So easy for me to play with the things I know you want, and so difficult for you, in a way.” Pay attention to how this changes someone’s behavior, and what you learn about them through it -- you can learn a lot about a person when you are offering them something that they want. (This kind of teasing, when you play with moments of denial, can lead to a sort of fractionation of desire where a person becomes increasingly desperate, then “disappointed,” and you can repeat the cycle until you decide to give them what they want [or don’t]. Be aware that the more you repeat this, eventually they will likely stop “getting their hopes up.”)

• Commentary

Sometimes, teasing someone is about making fun of them -- or otherwise offering a kind of commentary on their desires. This is when you take a mind-read and put it into a context where you can talk about different perspectives on it. For example, “I know you’re starting to drop even just staring into my eyes… Isn’t that embarrassing that you’re so easily hypnotized?” Or, “Isn’t that wonderful that it takes so little for you to get what you need?” You can talk about the things you read from your perspective, from an “objective” perspective, from a cultural/societal perspective. The commentary might be something about their identity (“what it says about them”), or perhaps something about yourself and your feelings.

Identifying/Creating Climactic Moments

It is a trope in kink education to teach about scenes as being like storytelling, or jazz. But this is a useful metaphor, especially when we are able to apply it more broadly.

It is not just that your scene should tell a holistic story -- or even that it has to at all. It is that you can pick any moment in a scene and turn it into a climax. And you should -- you should build intensity during your scene by recognizing the moments that carry weight and emphasizing them.

There may be some obvious opportunities for this -- certainly the first time someone goes into trance in a scene, or a suggested orgasm. In female gaze media, a kiss or even an intense stare can be the climactic moment. Let’s look at some other places that can easily become a climax:

• Firsts

  • First moment they notice a response, first moment they make prolonged eye contact, first moment their eyes flutter, first dipping into trance, first tingles of arousal, first external vocal response, etc

• Acquisition of something desired by you or your partner

  • You getting something you want, or them getting something they want -- hypnosis, a specific feeling/suggestion, intimacy, etc

• Denial of something desired by you or your partner

  • You denying them something that they want, or denying them the pleasure of giving you something that you want

• Changes/transformations

  • Feeling changed or controlled to change, body transformations, mental transformations, a change in the way their trance experience feels

• Discovery

  • The moment of “catching” them revealing a desire through their responses, or honoring them revealing a desire more explicitly

As hypnotists, we should create environments where these moments are emphasized. A lot of this is about lead-up, and then a special kind of acknowledgement when the moment happens.

• The Lead-Up: Desire

The lead-up is about acknowledging and creating desire.

Much of what we discussed above are methods to be able to play with desire in this way. Utilizing your partner’s existing desire is a great way to show that you’re interested in playing with them.

Sometimes, creating desire can mean that someone has an interest that you expand over the course of your scene. For many of us, it can sometimes be difficult to feel like we are “in the moment” of a scene -- to have that “oh my God, it’s really happening to me” realization.

If someone is heading towards a climactic moment of becoming stuck or frozen, perhaps this is a new experience and something they’re anticipating heavily -- but they’re stuck analyzing and checking to see if it’s happening instead of processing their real feelings in the moment. On the other hand, maybe this is someone who’s been hypnotized a lot and is used to the feeling of being cataleptic, and so their brain doesn’t really trigger that something amazing is happening.

Teasing as we discussed above is useful for this, but also spending time to let someone really focus on what they are feeling in their body and mind in the moment. As always, part of good hypnosis is when a subject feels like they are in a unique space and capable of recognizing what is “different” about their experience. This may be about hypnotically intensifying those feelings, or their capacity to self-process what is happening internally. You can use each change of their notice in their experience as an opportunity for them to focus and intensify what they feel.

For a desire that someone already has, or for a desire that you are creating from scratch, opening up feelings of curiosity and longing is a powerful tool. We all know what it is like to want something, to be excited about something.

None of this has to be goal-oriented; you don’t have to know and build to something specific. In fact, this should generally be a broad ethos you cultivate in your scenes. Someone who is confident that amazing things are going to happen -- that you are making happen -- is going to have more intense experiences.

Part of this is just about slowing down and thinking ahead: Instead of immediately going to touch someone on the shoulder, think about how that act of intentional touch could be powerful, and maybe talk about it. Instead of immediately triggering someone into trance, think and talk about slowing down to really anticipate the moment of it actually happening.

• Playing with Tension

Tension is a beautiful thing to play with, especially to build anticipation. Romance media can be gripping because that first kiss is never simple: “What does this make us?” “What would my best friend think about this?” “Do they really like me this way?” “Isn’t making myself vulnerable to love risky?” “We’re in public, who is going to see?” “I feel so complicated about them.” “I don’t want them to know how excited I am!”

Tension in hypnosis may look different than this, and it may not be appropriate for every scene, especially with someone who is new to hypnosis and probably needs more reassurance. But in the right scene, feeling a little conflicted about what’s going to happen can be extremely hot. This doesn’t necessarily mean a CNC lean -- here are some examples of what this tension could look like:

• The unknown

We don’t really ever know what is going to happen in hypnosis, big or small. This doesn’t have to be scary -- it is beautiful when someone feels like they can’t expect how they’re going to respond, and they do so in intense and exciting ways. Reminding a subject that they don’t really know what it’s going to feel like the moment when they drop into trance, they don’t really know how to anticipate the quality of pleasure that they’re going to feel can create curiosity and tension.

• “Threats”

It is hot for many people to suggest something like “When you finally drop really deep, maybe a part of you will be more vulnerable than ever before to suggestions.” These “threats” can be as nefarious (“your ego will disintegrate”) or mild (“you will feel intense arousal”) as the scene calls for. This connects to future pacing -- verbally building scenarios about what will happen that someone has to process that prime them for experiencing something intense when it finally does happen.

• Friction

Almost everyone feels friction about their sexual desires. They compare themselves to the perceived norm (either in kink or outside of it), they’ve been on a life-long journey to process their sexual feelings and perhaps shame, and they probably have complicated feelings about doing hypnosis. You can be quite sadistic about this when it is safe to do so, but there are ways to (more) comfortably play with this complexity too (again, when it is ok to do so). Even just acknowledging to someone that they have these complicated frictions with their sexuality -- being general, not calling out what they are -- can add this. If someone is coming up on a moment where they are about to sink into trance while staring at your eyes, you can talk about the complexity of prolonged eye contact. If someone is moaning, you can talk about the complexity of displaying their desire for another person to see -- whether or no they’re an exhibitionist.

• The Acknowledgment

No matter how long you’ve been doing hypnosis, it always comes back to “That’s right.”

There is very little technical technique I can outline here. We want to honor and emphasize the intense moments people have -- we want to treat them with respect, we want to use them, we want to take advantage of them, we want to let our partners know that we see them and that there’s permission; it’s OK and wanted for them to respond intensely. All of this can be said explicitly or implicitly.

Sometimes this can just be an emphatic “That’s right.” Sometimes this means using more words to tell your partner what you saw and how much it excited you. Sometimes this means taking the time to extrapolate something out of it: “Yes, I saw the way you clenched your eyes and gasped when I said I was going to slowly change your brain to submit to me -- what else are you going to reveal to me that I can use against you? If I start even mentioning transforming your mind, is it going to automatically yield to me? Are you secretly, deep down, that submissive?”

From these moments come more moments. A full arc of a scene could be based on any of those example suggestions -- you could spend a long time talking about how vulnerable they feel that they are nonverbally revealing desires, or how their mind automatically defaults to submission, or comment on revealing “who they really are” inside as someone who wants to give in to another person.

This acknowledgement can be of a moment that you led up to, and often even if you are not intentionally leading up to it. We also can’t always anticipate what’s going to hit our partners hard or be something they take in stride as part of a larger interaction. But in general, the more you play, the more you will have a feel for the kinds of patterns of intensity that emerge -- and also how to best allow for someone to feel comfortable expressing intense responses.

What is Hypnosis About? And Other Skills

This essay is getting long, and I don’t feel like I have time or room to address some auxiliary skills that might fit inside of it. Some things I’ve been thinking about are how to get hypnotists comfortable simply talking -- the never-ending challenge of teaching someone how to not worry about what to say next. I think to some degree there is a skill in knowing how to say one thing in many, many different ways, and how you can use something you’ve said as a springboard to maintain or up the intensity even if you are just basically repeating the same thing in different words. I think skills of poetry are connected -- having access to tons of metaphors and synonyms. I think also learning how to craft metaphorical fantasies that are erotic without necessarily being about sex is important.

So much of this article is attempting to distill some techniques out of the “vibe” of female gaze media. But the general message I want to impart is a perspective shift akin to the way female gaze media treats sex.

Sex in female gaze media isn’t really about sex, and yet good erotic female gaze media makes its nonsexual interactions between characters erotic. Intimacy, power, and discovery are core themes, and it’s not that they aren’t sexual -- to the contrary, they are the sexual content. It is a different, not lesser, version of sex. Physical penetration is simply an activity that can act as a conduit for them, or a representation of one climax.

Being able to see hypnosis in this way is important too. Hypnosis isn’t about the orgasm, or the transformation, or the bad-end enslavement. Many of us love for hypnosis to be about the Hypnosis -- but it doesn’t even have to be that. Hypnosis is about the entire process. It is about slowing down and finding the heights of intensity and pleasure in what might feel like a mundane or nonsexual process.

Rope people like to say that if you don’t love rope for itself, you should probably just use handcuffs. I would say that it is ideal to love hypnosis, to innately want to savor it, but sometimes that takes time to figure out what you love about it -- and what you love about building intimacy with a partner. Some of this is just a faulty perspective of hypnosis as a tool, and some of this is that hypnotists don’t always feel like they are “allowed” to chase their own pleasure.

Hypnotists aren’t the only ones who fall into this trap, either -- many prospective subjects come to hypnosis because they are interested in effects and hands-free orgasms. Personally, I think part of this is because many people simply don’t understand how hypnosis itself can be made to be akin to a sex act. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of “let’s get through the induction and get to the good part.” In all of my education, I teach about technique because I want people to feel like they have the capabilities to speak and hypnotize more freely, and thus open up the erotic possibilities of a simple induction.

To say something silly, I think we all have a romance novel love interest inside of us. They’re not the same and they don’t have to fit the often cringey-in-reality stereotype. But a part of us who drips with sensuality and excitement for our partners -- in a way that feels natural and authentic to our unique selves. I want more people to be able to tap into that!