Hypnosis and pornography: a cultural history

A major form of porn creativity in the digital age has been the ‘hypno video’: a user-generated film mashing up short clips from various porn sources, accompanied by hypnotic imagery and sound, often designed with the overt intent to alter the viewer’s gender, racial or sexual preferences. These videos are highly popular, judging from view counts, although in most cases their effectiveness as hypnotic inductions is dubious at best. In this article, we discuss the science of hypnosis, and the reasons why ‘reprogramming’ videos are unlikely to have any basis in hypnotic practice. To understand the prevalence of this form, therefore, we trace the deep connections between hypnosis and pornography, showing that the highly subjective practice of hypnosis has consistently been associated with the erotic over at least the last two centuries. We trace the origins of porn hypnosis, both in early cinema’s theorization of the hypnotic screen and also in mid-twentieth-century brainwashing paranoia, examining the ways that the evil hypnotist mythos built up during this period and then became a staple of hardcore cinema. Finally, we discuss the function of hypnosis in porn, and the ways that porn hypnosis enables the viewer to overcome shame.