Faces of Internet Overexposure II: Sissy Hypno

porn on 4chan

Hello new Deeists,

default.blog is an emotional scrapbook of the Internet. I write about Internet culture from as intimate as possible a perspective. You’ll find all sorts of things here — a book club, a Coast to Coast AM-style call-in show, interviews, and essays.

What follows is an interview about how one person uses the Internet. You can find others under “case studies.”

If you’re in the Chicago area, I’m debating

Aella

and

Paul Bloom

tonight at Teatro ZinZanni about whether our sexual desires are innate or are being shaped by the Internet. Grab a ticket here.

from my zine, egirl. illustrated depiction of bailey jay.

This is a tricky topic to write about, because truthfully, I don’t want to make anyone angry. One of my biggest fears as a chronicler of the Internet is misrepresenting people’s home subcultures, which is why first-person accounts are so important to me. Needless to say, this is one area that I’m not native to and can’t be—so the fear is a little more pronounced.

Most people have no idea what trans subcultures online actually look like—something that a lot of people are asking about right now.

One area that’s always interested me is the complicated relationship between trans women and 4chan. It might surprise people to learn that the site was, for many, an early space to explore gender identity. It’s also where the term “trap”—originally anime slang for a male or androgynous character who looks female, later broadened to describe trans women—was popularized. At the same time, 4chan has long functioned as a massive repository of trans pornography.

a “trap”

This first interview, conducted in 2022 and previously posted on this blog, focuses on trans porn on 4chan, specifically, sissy hypno—pornographic content that claims to feminize its viewers through hypnotic suggestion. It’s a specific genre of porn, one with its own long history, both online and off, that exploded in popularity on 4chan in the 2000s, and slightly later, in the early 2010s, on Tumblr.

early forced feminization erotica, though not sissy hypno per se (1998)

In her 2018 essay “Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?”, Andrea Long Chu opens with that exact question. She argues that sissy porn is “a radical feminist’s worst nightmare.” According to Chu, by 2013, people were searching “sissy tumblr” twice as often as “sissy porn”—until Tumblr’s 2018 adult content ban scattered the community even further across cyberspace: Reddit, Discord, and YouTube.

There’s a link between disembodiment, masculinity, and heavy internet use that makes anonymous spaces fertile ground for experimenting with gender and sexuality. What follows is one person’s account of navigating that terrain through porn. The next installments will explore /v/ and /lgbt/ respectively.

If there’s a perspective you’d like to contribute on this topic or others, please feel free to reach out to me.

If you like this post, you might also like:

/d/: "4chan sexuality."

Hazy is a bisexual male in his 20s who visited sissy hypno sites in the late 2000s and 2010s.