Interview with a Sissy

case study #0A, male, 2010s

Hazy is a cis, bisexual male in his 20s who visited sissy hypno sites in the late 2000s and 2010s. What follows is our conversation about his experience.

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Katherine: You can share whatever you’d like.

Hazy: I started diving into sissy hypno back in the late 2000s, 2010s. I promptly left once I developed a career. I would use 4chan and Omegle. I started around high school, maybe late middle school—the hypno community was still pretty new. It’s become more robust.

Katherine: What's your gender identity and sexuality, if you don't mind me asking?

Hazy: Cis-male. Bisexual.  

Katherine: How do you think your identity impacts your relationship to sissy hypno?

Hazy: Well, I feel like because I found this stuff pretty young, it was more of a cause than an effect, really. So yeah… I know that’s taboo because we expect our identities to be kind of ingrained in our DNA. Nobody can say, “oh these cultural influences are what resulted in me changing my views.”

Katherine: I see that in myself. I mean, with other things, of course, but it's incredibly easy to be conditioned by the Internet. For better and for worse, I think. I don't like the term radicalization, but I do think that if you're around anything for long enough, it shapes you, right? Like, if you're around people speaking French, you’ll pick up some French. You may not become fluent. But you’ll pick some up. But that’s true of anything. … So you're not in these communities anymore because of work? Do you think it’s because you're more grounded in the physical world?

Hazy: I would say so, yeah. Because I feel like growing up, I was just like, in the suburbs and now I'm just like, busy with life. I don't know.

Katherine: What about it originally appealed to you?

Hazy: That's a good question. I might have buried this deep down…

Katherine: Why do you think that it was a cause of your sexuality? I’ve heard from people that it helps give language to something that was already there. How do you know it was one rather than the other?

Hazy: That's true, because I feel like my sexuality was so underdeveloped at the time that it's hard to say that it was already there. You know what I mean? … But that's interesting. Like, say for example, something appeals to you when you're at the age of ten or eleven. What do you think draws you in?

Katherine: It's hard to say because I don't think it's normal to have a self-conception of your sexual orientation at that age. Yeah, but there must have been something— like there must have been a more innocent part of you— that maybe there was something appealing about stepping into the feminine role, which is something that you were exposed to, right? In other ways.

Hazy: Yeah, I could definitely see that being true, especially looking at like just my family background too. But yeah, you mentioned that it gives us language to understand what we wanted. So, do you think that participating in this type of thing is sort of like it can be a net positive because it helps lead to a greater sense of self-actualization or liberation?

Katherine: I don't tend to think that, honestly, I don't think anyone should be engaging with pornography. That's my one extremist view. Porn is never helpful, even when it seems like it’s helpful.  

Hazy: I agree.

Katherine: But I do think that it’s complicated. It could help shape our desires or prolong something that would have been passing, by nurturing it.

But the other side of it is – you know– just making something up here— like say you're attracted to men and you have that moment of awakening, triggered by erotic content. I think that by suppressing conversations about how it shapes our desire, we're probably discrediting in the ways it gives us language or structure to understand and untease our desires.

It’s probably a little bit of both. Definitely, people become more perverse with these outside inputs. Right. For example, nobody is inherently attracted to a neotenous anime girl. Right. That's not a normal orientation. But what does that say about someone's more intrinsic desires? What is it gesturing towards, that’s not artificial?  

Hazy: Right.

Katherine: So in a healthier society, maybe anime girls wouldn’t play a role in someone’s erotic consciousness. Maybe something else would, though.

Hazy: So would you say that ethically, porn is not okay to produce or consume?

Katherine: For the most part, no. And I also think that there needs to be higher barriers of entry— regulation is really tricky, but like, just that a lot of this stuff is so easily accessible is a problem, so it doesn't need to be illegal. But I think there's something to be said about needing to physically go into a store and purchase pornography. Where it's like you're embodied in every step of that. So, there's no way to like, check out and just get lost down a rabbit hole.

Hazy: Yeah, like the store clinic will kick you out if you're eleven.

Katherine: Right. Or putting things on forums, I think is actually another way to do that because it's not easy to find forums. You need to sign up for an account. There's like all these steps you need to go through. So even if you're doing something bad or that you know is wrong, like, you're too young, you aren't just plugging yourself into it. You had to find the forum, you had to sign up for it. You needed to get an email address… I think even small changes like that are helpful. Do you feel negatively impacted by your experience?

Hazy: I do. I've just made everything way more complicated.

Katherine: Do you think that it's the stigma though, or do you think that there's something it made your life complicated in other ways?

Hazy: I don't think it's the stigma as much because I'm in a liberal environment, where this stuff is seen as okay, but I kind of wonder how much it took away from my more masculine side almost. And in that sense, I feel like it's complicated things for me because I do want to be in touch with both my masculine and feminine side.

Katherine: Do you think that you would have developed your masculinity more if you weren't preoccupied with sissy hypno?