Disaster Sissy porn, the gender movement's dirty secret - Pornography’s Influence on Transgenderism and The Proliferation of Sissy Hypno on Social Media

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Sissy porn, the gender movement's dirty secret
Pornography’s Influence on Transgenderism and The Proliferation of Sissy Hypno on Social Media

Graham Linehan
Nov 29
by Genevieve Gluck

Twitter: @womenreadwomen

This article contains descriptions of pornographic content. While I have tried to avoid graphic details, it’s not possible to discuss the influence of pornography on the gender movement without providing descriptions. Furthermore, this is not written with the intention of denying the existence of gender dysphoria, but to call attention to the phenomenon of pornography-induced dysphoria that simultaneously promotes extreme sexual objectification and the degradation of womanhood. This is a brief overview highlighting the prevalence of sissification content available publicly, without age restrictions, across social media platforms.


In recent years, trans pornography has soared in popularity. According to Pornhub’s metadata, both “trans” and “transgender” porn searches have more than quadrupled in the three years between 2014 to 2017 and, by 2018, “trans” was ranked the fifth highest search term of the year.

During this same period, a subset of transgender pornography emerged, and increased in popularity and prevalence. “Sissy hypno” -- a shortening of “sissification hypnosis” -- is a term for pornography targeted at men that can be found online in three main forms: pornographic videos, audio files, and captioned images. The pornography typically involves men wearing lingerie and engaged in “forced feminization” -- eroticizing the illusion of being made to “become women” through dress, makeup, and sexual submissiveness, and the fetishizing of the humiliation this brings. Though sissy hypno as a term seems to have only gained popularity recently -- increasing significantly since 2016 according to Google search data -- there are already several websites dedicated to the genre, including sissytube.net, sissy.tube, and hypnotube.com.

In May, Duke University’s Transgender Studies Quarterly published an academic article titled, “Sissy Remix: Trans Porno Remix and Constructing the Trans Subject,” by Aster Gilbert, a Ph.D. student in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. A male who identifies as a woman, Aster’s student profile describes his dissertation as centered on “online pornography fan communities, specifically fans who create their own pornography through remixing and re-editing available material found online,” and states he has presented research on trans and “micropornography” at the National Women’s Studies Association.

In the article, Aster defines sissification and feminization as “forms of gender play in which the subject takes on the dress of the “opposite gender” and explains that “sissy is also claimed by trans women as an identity.” Aster then goes on to describe how sissy hypno videos, especially those made by men who identify as trans, instruct men to transform into women (though the pornography industry term “girl” is often used instead). Mantras are repeated -- often a variation of “you are the girl,” commanding the viewer to imagine themselves as female.

Aster uses specific videos as examples, citing one in particular, referred to as “Video 2,” which opens with a woman repeating, “You’re not really a man. You’ve always been a girl, haven’t you?” Then, “You’ve been a woman longer than you’ve ever known,” and, “You are a woman right now. Just by listening to me right now you have already become a woman.” The speaker then directs the viewer to shave his legs, paint his fingernails, and to “feminize” himself.

Aster concludes that “it is possible to conceive of this video as drawing out a suppressed identification, encouraging transition, as well as acknowledging the already present reality of womanhood” [emphasis added].

In his book Females, trans-identifying male writer, Andrea Long Chu, writes:

“Sissy porn’s central conceit is that the women it depicts are in fact former men who have been feminized (‘sissified’) by being forced to wear makeup, wear lingerie, and perform acts of sexual submission. Captions further instruct viewers to understand that the very act of looking at sissy porn itself constitutes an act of sexual degradation, with the implication that, whether they like it or not, viewers will inevitably be transformed into females themselves. This makes sissy porn a kind of metapornography, that is, porn about what happens to you when you watch porn. At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. Getting f*cked makes you female because f*cked is what a female is.”

The fundamental assertion of sissification pornography is that being a woman is inherently degrading -- that men who are insecure about the size of their genitalia must be transformed into women through “forced feminization.” In these scenarios, the penis is referred to as a “clitty,” and the anus is referred to as a “pussy.” Prostate orgasms are referred to as “sissygasms.” Often, men who produce this content, as well as those who use it, implement a device called a “chastity cage” which prevents erections, and anal plugs are used to stretch the anus in an attempt to resemble a vulva. Extremely feminine attire may be incorporated, including pink, frilly dresses that resemble a variation on children’s clothing with an added sexualized element, like high heels or a garter belt. BDSM also plays a role in sissy porn, and often a woman in a dominatrix role -- referred to as a mistress -- humiliates the male “sub” (submissive) by mocking him as a failed man who must be feminized.

Transgender advocates, when confronted with the paraphilias of the sissification community, typically say these men do not fall under the trans umbrella, despite Stonewall UK’s inclusion of crossdressing in a definition posted on their website: “Trans people may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, cross dresser, non-binary, gender queer.” The overlap between the sissy community and the transgender male-to-female (MTF) community can easily be seen on social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, where “sissy captions” proliferate: images of women in sexualized clothing with text added, instructing men to take female hormones and “feminize” themselves to look like the women in the photos.

On Instagram, for instance, the hashtag #sissification has been used in 110k posts. There are a variety of related hashtags, as well: #sissyhypno, #sissytraining, #sissygirl, #sissycaption, #sissymaid, all of which overlap with other hashtags like #trans, #tgirl, #mtftransgender, #trap, and #genderqueer. An account called, “The Sissy Corner,” run by an anonymous LGBTQ activist in India, posts images captioned with phrases like, “You have reached the point when words like bimbo, beta, bitch, sissy, feels like a sweet compliment,” or “Take hormones until you look like her,” and “You let a guy f*ck you like a girl, then why do you still think that you are a man?” A Facebook page called, “Sissy Kiss,” which has nearly 40k followers, describes itself: “We are transgender girls who love being very girly, sweet, kinky, and cute. Anyone into sissies are [sic] welcome!” Posts read: “My goal is to feminize you till your p*nis is useless and you [sic] crying to remove it,” “If you’re gonna dress like a slut, I’m gonna watched you get f*cked like one,” and, “We need to up your hormones and waist training drastically.”

Men openly discuss the sissy/transgender overlap on social media and in public forums. There are many subreddits where men gather to discuss the sissy lifestyle on Reddit. These subreddits are dedicated to the proliferation of sissy porn, as well as advice and tips on how to better “feminize.” The subreddit, “Sissy Hypno,” which currently has 146k members, is described as a community dedicated to “hypnosis media that turn participants into sexy, c*cksucking sissies.” There are numerous related subreddits: r/sissy has 80.5k members; r/sissypersonals, nearly 100k; r/sissydating, 36k; r/sissies, 233k; and r/traps, 413k (“trap” is a term that refers to men who “pass” as women so convincingly, they are able to trick straight men into sexual relationships). It should be noted that there is no age verification required to access these groups, which host pornography. They are openly accessible to children, and it is not uncommon to see reddit posts from those claiming to be underage boys in sissification groups.

On reddit, there are countless threads questioning whether gender dysphoria is brought on by exposure to pornography and the development of a sissy fetish. One example of this crossover between sissification and trans identity can be seen in a thread posted to r/sissy in October, titled “Falling Down the Sissy Rabbit Hole”:

“I started watching trans porn initially five or so years ago and I remember I had post orgasm regret. Back then, I imagined myself as the guy… About a year and a half ago, I started to imagine the possibility of being the girl in these scenarios. I… wanted to be 'forced' to be f*cked by a man because I was turned on by the submissiveness of it. I dreamed about going to gloryholes or being blindfolded as men used me as an object for sex. Recently, I've started to really question everything. I love the attention and consequently feeling like the woman. This has lead [sic] me to have some gender dysphoria, as I would love to be the woman and see where that would take me in my life (fully transitioned transwoman). TL;DR my sexual and gender identity has been completely flipped on its head because of sissy porn/hypno.”

Another r/sissy thread asks, “Am I trans, or am I a sissy? Perhaps both or neither?”

“I became interested in sissy porn around age 16-17. I was blown away by it! I loved the idea of someone (whether it be a man or a woman) 'forcing' me to become a sissy slut considered with nothing but pleasing 'real men'. I want to be treated like a man's c*m-dumpster and c*cksleeve. As of late, however, my fantasies have been less about someone forcing me to be a girl and simply me being a girl. I usually fantasize about having sex with a man as a woman.”

Notably, subreddits which questioned the misogyny of the gender movement and its overlap with the fetish community were banned, without warning, at the end of June and beginning of July for the vague charge of promoting hate. Among these were r/GenderCritical, r/TERFisaslur, and r/itsafetish, the latter of which was dedicated to documenting the connection between pornography and trans identity and mainly featured screenshots -- or quoted material -- from sissy and trans subreddits.


Twitter is similarly saturated with sissy accounts and posts which include sissy pornography, often bypassing the sensitive content filter through the use of gifs. A Twitter user with the handle, @tsnicole3, who describes themselves as “a closeted transgender” with “a fantasy to become pregnant,” tweeted: “My dream is to live in a society where sissy males are feminized and subjugated to alpha males. I want to dress in pretty lingerie, get pregnant, and be a wife and mother.” A trans activist with over 76k followers and an OnlyFans account, going by “BoringKate” (@boringnerdykate), tweets almost exclusively about sex and pornography and has a particular interest in sissy hypno. In April, he tweeted: “If advertisers are gonna monitor everyone’s internet activity then they should at least start aggressively promoting hormone replacement therapy to any 'boy' that’s searched for sissy hypno porn.”

There are also books that serve as both erotica and instruction manuals, and this type of media is where the influence of the incel movement is most apparent. Terminology used in the “manosphere” (men’s rights activist and incel forums) like “alpha male” and “beta male” can be found in instruction guides. In incel slang, “beta” refers disparagingly to a man who is considered to be unsuccessful with women, owing to having a less aggressive disposition, an effeminate physique, or lacking stereotypically masculine qualities in general. The 10 Steps to Become a Sissy: Forced Feminization, self-published on Amazon by a user named, “Hotwife Kim,” claims, in its description, to turn “beta males” into women, and that this is the only way such men can be sexually desirable:

“If you continue to live as a beta male, you will be destined to a life of celibacy and sadness. When you become a girl, you'll have lots of sex -- all girls do. The real mark of anyone who truly admires female beauty isn't simply a desire to possess it, to have a girlfriend or a wife, to have sex with a woman. Your love is greater. You want to become a woman yourself. There is nothing wrong or even unusual about this desire, and thanks to modern technology, it's is [sic] increasingly possible to make your dreams come true.


In fact, a great transition is taking place in our larger culture as well. Beta-males are becoming softer and more feminine, while women are becoming more assertive and confident in our sense of sexuality. I really can't blame you for being jealous. I wouldn't be happy as a beta-male, either. You probably get rejected by girls all the time, all while you are forced to watch them on dates with Alpha-males. And you know that they are having lots of amazing sex, the kind you will always been denied. Or, you'll be forced into a life of humiliating celibacy -- unless you accept your fate as a sissy.”

These types of materials are becoming more widely available thanks to self-publication. In addition to Amazon, Walmart also carries forced feminization erotica manuals online. A search on their website turns up over a dozen titles, including, Feminization from Alpha to Sissy Due to His Inadequate Sized Manhood! and, Forced Feminization: Abduction, Hypnosis Training, Sissy Slave Maid, which features the following description:

“Greg awakes to find himself restrained and dolled up. A mysterious female hypnotizer tells Greg his new name is Ashley, and with a whip, he forgets all about his past. Every idea Ashley had of ‘Greg’ vanished into thin air. The latex hypnotist reveals that Ashley is now part of a feminization cult. Sissy maid training soon starts... The Don is the powerful alpha behind the whole transformation cult, clearly asserting and demonstrating his dominance time and time again. Every lunar eclipse, he chooses one freshly transformed sissy to live in his private mansion. What Don thought would just be another live-in sissy maid, turns out to be more than just that. Ashley... transforms his life for good.”

“To be a sissy is always to lose your mind. The technical term for this is bimboification. Captions often instruct viewers to submit themselves to hypnosis, brainwashing, brain-melting, dumbing down, and other techniques for scooping out intelligence.

The gestures most often looped in GIF format almost always register the evacuation of will: wilting faces, trembling legs, eyes rolled back into heads. Even the GIF format itself communicates this, a kind of centrifuge for distilling the femaleness to its barest essentials — an open mouth, an expectant a**hole, blank, blank eyes. Sissy porn did make me trans.”

- Andrea Long Chu, Females

Sissy hypno incorporates audio files that aim to “brainwash” male listeners into believing they are women. Through repeated mantras, sissy hypno content creators claim to turn men into “bimbos” and “f*ck dolls.” One example of sissy hypno audio content can be found on the website, BambiSleep.com. On its front page, the tagline, “Deep Bimbo Erotic Hypnosis,” is accompanied by a description which reads, “Bambi sleep is for ANYONE that wishes to become a sexy bimbo girl. The files are not specific to what gender the listener is.” A more detailed explanation is provided in the “How to Get Started” tab:

“Bambi Sleep is one of the most advanced and complete systems in the erotic hypnosis genres. These sessions will turn you, regardless of gender, into a brainless, beautiful, bimbo named Bambi.

Bambi loves to wear high heels, tight clothes and perfect make-up. Left to her own devices, she will alter her body with large implants and lip injections. If your job will not allow for changes to your outward appearance -- this may not be [sic] place for you.”

The first video released by Bambi Sleep was published on Youtube in 2018 and has garnered over 100k views. Titled, “Bambi Bimbo Doll Conditioning,” the description promises it is “a complete and powerful training program that will transform the listener into a perfect dumb slutty bimbo girl called Bambi.” It features only a still photo of a woman in sunglasses as a black and white spiral spins slowly in the background. There is a distant hum and an obviously fake computer-generated female voice instructing the listener to relax, and to snap back into a state of hypnosis upon hearing the phrase “bimbo doll,” which is accompanied by the sound of a female moan. In the background, quieter voices repeat the words, “bimbo doll.”

The video continues for two and a half hours, commanding the listener to “obey without question, obey without any concept of free will,” and to become “an eager, willing puppet, your own desires instantly, effortlessly replaced by a need to obey, a puppet with no concept of free will,” suggesting the listener’s IQ will go “spiralling downward as tits inflate.”

A comment on the video by a user named, “Diaper Lover” says, “I’m addicted to watching these hypnosis videos every night now, i [sic] feel so amazing … it feels so good to be a mindless fuck puppet.” Another comment, by a user called Amanda Grey, whose profile photo is a man wearing makeup and stereotypically feminine attire, explains that he is now unable to take off his underwear without first putting a sex toy in his mouth: “I just can't use the facilities without a c*ck in my mouth. Now I'm going to have to carry a d*ldo in my purse.” Considering the nature of this brand of pornography, it’s not difficult to imagine that this man, and others like him, would prefer to use the women’s facilities while engaging in their sexual fetish.

Another commenter said their father had become addicted to sissy hypno:

“He's been doing this for years, it possesses his every waking moment and it's literally driving my mom insane. They're both senior citizens and he can barely walk or make it to the restroom on time, but somehow he finds the time to do this nonsense and buy poppers… This... has ruined my family and possessed my dad for the twighlight [sic] years of his life.”

“Poppers” is a slang term that refers to drugs that are inhaled in order to relax smooth muscles, especially the sphincter, and increase the heart rate, resulting in a sensation of heat and excitement. References to the use of poppers can often be found accompanying online discussions of sissy hypno pornography.

******

The subreddit r/TGandSissyRecovery is a support group for men quitting sissy hypno and transgender porn with about 5k members. Most posts center around personal stories of addiction, and how the sissy addiction in particular led group members to believe they were transgender.

A November 13 post titled, “I don’t know if I am trans or it’s just a kink,” reads:

“I would like to transition but I'm still in the closet, but still I have tried cross-dressing and I get turned on by that, also I want to go with men to f*ck me when I am crossdressed, I have tried gay sex and I think I am more interested in women but when I am a girl, I want to get f*cked.”

A November 21 post titled simply, “Advice?” says:

“I think I suffer from Transvestic fetishism. It started at a young age, really young, and turned into sexual desire as I went through puberty. The first time I masturbated was wearing my stepmom's clothes, and now it feels like I need to masturbate wearing feminine clothes to relieve the thoughts, sometimes not being able to focus at all until I wear the clothes. I've been to my current therapist several times dressed femininely, so it feels wrong to talk to her about the fact that it brings me sexual pleasure… Like me doing that… would make her incredibly uncomfortable.”

A thread posted to r/sissy in October, titled, “Unprogramming and realizing I miss the old me,” which has since been deleted, read:

“I think this sh*t is sinister and grooming. I was in my teens when I made it to sissy hypno. I used to have better relationships with females. Now I hate them. I used to be cis now I’m having gender confusion. I hate sissy hypno porn now… porn has a negative impact on many of us. Before you got into this, what were you like? What were any of us like? I refuse to call my d*ck a lady d*ck anymore… you were groomed by porn into becoming this way… It really is brainwashing and I’d rather have my mind back.”

******

Sissy hypno differs from mainstream pornography in that it addresses the viewer and gives instructions, deliberately wielding the power of the medium in an attempt to alter one’s self-identity and encourage dysphoria. Multiple studies across decades have demonstrated a correlation between pornography viewership, sexist attitudes towards women, and increased instances of violence and assault. The regions of the brain activated by pornography are the same regions activated as though one were actually engaging in intercourse, due to the brain’s mirror neurons. Marco Iacoboni, a professor at University of California Los Angeles, proposes this is why pornography has a strong impact on our minds, including the potential to encourage violent behavior, saying: “The mirror mechanism in the brain also suggests that we are automatically influenced by what we perceive, thus proposing a plausible neurobiological mechanism for contagion of violent behavior.”

Recent studies have shown that pornography can hijack the brain’s dopamine reward center. As pornography results in sharp bursts of dopamine, the brain develops tolerance to the content, requiring more shocking media to elicit the same thrill. As a result, pornography can lead to sexual dysfunctions and depression. In addition, there is some research to suggest that consuming pornography can lead to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), and in particular, penis dysmorphia among men. Given that gender dysphoria is a type of BDD that is characterized by unease with primary and secondary sexual characteristics, it follows that pornography can distort self-perception and reasonably be assumed to induce gender dysphoria, rather than simply drawing out a pre-existing condition.

It used to be taken as undisputed fact that the media we consume can shape our minds and behavior. Yet, as our lives become ever more media-saturated, our ability to think critically about its impact on identity and selfhood have been constrained and often reduced to individual, rather than societal, observations. We must therefore consider the recent extreme popularity of claiming a transgender identity as connected to the tremendous rise in online streaming pornography and its accessibility. The phenomenon and trend is too great to ignore.

Genevieve Gluck is a writer and advocate for women’s sex-based rights and creator of Women’s Voices, an audio library dedicated to bringing awareness to feminist texts and speeches.
 
We have a thread on the sissy question.

It all boils down to porn being an insidious poison. It's just another aspect of the total oversexualisation of society. Could you imagine an internet without any reference to sex? In the 2000s I was told that half the internet was porn. How much is it today, including soft core stuff like titty streamers and instathots?
 
In May, Duke University’s Transgender Studies Quarterly published an academic article titled, “Sissy Remix: Trans Porno Remix and Constructing the Trans Subject,” by Aster Gilbert, a Ph.D. student in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. A male who identifies as a woman, Aster’s student profile describes his dissertation as centered on “online pornography fan communities, specifically fans who create their own pornography through remixing and re-editing available material found online,” and states he has presented research on trans and “micropornography” at the National Women’s Studies Association.

spit take

Fucking WHAT? There are troons going to university and writing their PHD DISSERTATION on their own porn fetishes? And people accept this as academic, do they?
 
spit take

Fucking WHAT? There are troons going to university and writing their PHD DISSERTATION on their own porn fetishes? And people accept this as academic, do they?
You're a few decades too late here. In humanities it's been long accepted as "standard" that your papers and dissertations for whatever degree you're going for at the time can just be literal schizoposting, as long as its well structured and formatted schizoposting.
 
I mean the sissy shit is wild and a lot of MTFs these days probably are just dudes with a sissy kink, but the last couple paragraphs where it devolved into "porn bad!" Moral Majority fundie housewife shit made me roll my eyes.
 
Related:

The Mystery of Larry Wachowski

Could the co-creator of The Matrix real life truly be stranger than fiction?

(Now memory-holed by Rolling Stone)
One night in January 2001, Larry Wachowski, co-director of the blockbuster Matrix movies, walked into a dark club in West Hollywood, where the rules of identity easily blurred, just like in his films. The Dungeon served the devoted BDSM -- bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism -- community in Los Angeles. It was a place where power dynamics between two different types of people were regularly played out: eager submissives, or slaves, and the dominatrixes who, for an hour or for a night, took complete charge of their minds and bodies, using ropes, whips, chains, knives and needles. Wachowski fell into the former category. And, friends say, he liked engaging in his pastime while dressed like a woman.

One of the people Wachowski met that night was among L.A.'s highest-profile dominatrixes, a tall, imposing blonde with a traffic-stopping figure who used the nom de kink Ilsa Strix. Inflicting extreme pain seemed to be Strix's specialty: "My greatest accomplishment in some ways," she once said, "[was] putting 333 needles into a single penis." Strix cracked a bullwhip on her slaves like no other. She ran the Dungeon with her handsome and strapping partner Buck Angel, a partial female-to-male transsexual known today in the porn world as "The Dude With a Pussy."

In the weeks following their first encounter, Larry Wachowski returned to the Dungeon to see Mistress Strix. Boundaries fell swiftly, stunning the Los Angeles bondage community, which prides itself on the fact that mistresses keep their submissives at arm's length. The relationship between Larry and Ilsa, both in their thirties, would eventually destroy two marriages and possibly alter the creative course of one of the most influential movie trilogies of the past quarter-century, co-created with his brother, Andy: the original Matrix, released in 1999, and its two inferior sequels, which both hit theaters, six months apart, in 2003. Once hailed as the kings of geek-chic Hollywood, the Wachowski brothers disappeared from the scene, becoming virtual recluses. Both turned down interview requests for this story.

The brothers are now planning to re-emerge -- professionally, anyway. March will see the release of V for Vendetta, carrying the vaunted Wachowski imprint, this time as screenwriters and producers. Based on a well-known graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd about vigilantism in a fascist state, the material is reportedly a searing indictment of Bush administration policies. Though the brothers did not direct Vendetta, a project that has been in the works since the Matrix days, the picture feels like a Wachowski film: dark and dangerous, according to those who have seen it. The online film-geek community is eagerly buzzing after some carefully orchestrated sneak screenings. And in an early review, Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff called the film "spectacular and exhilarating." But the $50 million-plus film was also originally planned as one of Warner Bros.' big fall '05 movies. It was pushed back from its initial, blockbuster-friendly November release date into March, traditionally a dumping ground for troubled films. Ironically, that's also the month The Matrix was released. It is the first Wachowski brothers film in three years, and there isn't another one in sight.

The performance of Vendetta is sure to be watched closely by fans and industry observers alike. What is the future of the most successful and visionary moviemaking team in recent history? Where did they go? And what on earth happened to Larry Wachowski?

* * *

When The Matrix premiered in 1999, viewers were floored by the new world the Wachowskis had conjured. The genius of the movie was that it married an old idea -- that humans inhabit an alternate universe controlled by machines -- with spectacular fight scenes and visionary special effects. Besides borrowing from Hong Kong martial-arts movies and Japanese anime, The Matrix alluded to events in the Bible and mythology and addressed the ever-popular concept of artificial intelligence -- something for every sci-fi fan. It was Star Wars for the brightly twisted.

Nothing in the Wachowski brothers' past suggested that they were on the verge of becoming the new nerd titans of Hollywood. Their only previous credit, the kinky $4 million lesbian noir thriller Bound, featured some of the steamiest girl-girl action ever seen in a studio film but didn't find a wide audience. What Bound did signal, however, were themes that became recurring Wachowski obsessions: how easily and naturally, in a rigid world, social and sexual identities can shift.

During their Bound period, the brothers struck friends and colleagues as inveterate jokesters, refreshingly open. After a lifetime of striving for film success -- first as comic-book-obsessed kids, then as neophyte screenwriters -- the Midwesterners seemed unaffected by the seductive trappings of the movie business. "Larry and Andy were the kinds of guys you'd want to have a beer with," says a film writer who spent time with them during the Bound press tour. "Very approachable. Very normal."

Then came The Matrix. Made for $70 million, from a script that blew away producer Joel Silver on first reading, the first film in the series was the definition of a modern cult classic. It took in $470 million in worldwide ticket sales and won four Academy Awards, as hundreds of devoted fan sites fueled a Matrix mania that would last for years. A video game based on the film, Enter the Matrix, sold 1 million copies in the first eighteen days of its release, becoming the fastest-selling movie-based video game in history. The DVD version of the film was the first disc to sell 1 million copies. The entire franchise would eventually bring in more than $1 billion to Warner Bros. And it did something else: It introduced viewers to a private, never-before-seen universe -- weirdly asexual but also awash in references to androgyny, leather and S&M.

In addition to their lucrative salaries as directors, Larry and Andy earned millions as screenwriters and also received a share of the gross profits and royalties on the video game. It was an incredible cash infusion for two former house painters from Chicago, who cut their teeth in the entertainment industry as writers for Marvel Comics and who studied Roger Corman's 1990 trash biography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, as a primer for success. The Wachowski brothers, in fact, had never finished college. Larry dropped out of Bard College, in upstate New York, and younger brother Andy left Emerson College, in Boston, without graduating.

They made an odd pair. Larry drank wine and collected antiquarian books. Andy, the stockier of the two, preferred beer and professional sports, and liked to dress like a biker. They wrote their scripts together, longhand, on yellow legal pads, and rarely argued. "In my time with them, there might have been three diverging positions out of 3,856,293 creative issues on four movies," says sound designer Dane A. Davis, who has worked with the brothers since Bound and won an Oscar for his work on The Matrix. "I guess it would be impossible otherwise."

In 2000, flush with cash from the unexpected success of the first Matrix, Larry and his college sweetheart turned wife Thea Bloom, bought a $1.9 million home on the beach in Venice, California, with a commanding view of the Pacific Ocean. The brothers moved their production company, Anarchos Entertainment, into a cavernous building a few minutes from Larry and Thea's place, with vague but ambitious plans to produce a slate of movies that would bring their skewed visions to the world.

Along the way, the Wachowski brothers put away their chummy attitudes and carefully cloaked themselves in a veil of mystery. They gave fewer and fewer interviews and eventually stopped talking to the press altogether. "Larry and Andy Wachowski have been working together for thirty-two years," reads one of their official bios, in its entirety. "Little else is known about them."

Still, in elitist Hollywood, the brothers emerged as working-class heroes. The Wachowskis did things their way. They didn't rant or scream or break furniture. They cast, shot and edited their films the way they wanted. Confident in their vision, they never wavered from it. They worked with the same tightknit crew on all three Matrix movies and rewarded the loyalty of their team with holiday gifts and even a generous cut of game profits. "It's impossible not to like Larry," says Davis. "Just when it seems that preciousness or self-seriousness will push us over the edge [on set], Larry's humor pops out of the plasma and back into the land of mere humans making a mere movie."

But sometimes, the mood on the set took a darker tone. "Larry and Andy were always into the concept of suppression, of suppressing oneself," says Marcus Chong, who played Tank, the driver of Morpheus' ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, in the first Matrix film. "One of their big directorial notes was 'Be stoic. Never show your true self.'"

* * *

Born Karin Ingrid Winslow in 1967 in Connecticut, a teenage punk rocker and a runaway whose mother died when she was a young girl, Mistress Strix virtually willed herself to become a superstar in the world of BDSM. Besides running the Dungeon, where she established a wide following among Hollywood's power elite, Ilsa gave advanced piercing classes to aspiring dominants, or masters, and stood at the forefront of a vigorous effort to spread the BDSM philosophy around not only Los Angeles but the world, via the Internet. A Web site she founded, Pro-domination.com, allocates a portion of subscriber dues to a legal defense fund that benefits professional dominants who run afoul of law enforcement. "Ilsa became the blond bombshell of domination," says former porn star Porsche Lynn, who has worked as a dominatrix for many years in Los Angeles and Phoenix. "Very respected. Very experienced. Very knowledgeable."

Ilsa arrived in Los Angeles around 1997, having risen through the bondage communities of San Francisco and New York. "I started playing with BDSM from my very first intimate relationships, just after high school," she said in a 2001 interview with the BDSM Web site DickieVirgin.com. "It took me until my early twenties to understand that sadomasochism was an integral part of who I was, and define myself as part of the leather community." In a 1996 interview, Ilsa described one particular client: "I wrestle [with him]. We enact scenes from Hong Kong videos where women throw men around."

Mistress Ilsa could be harsh, even cruel. "If her submissive said, 'I don't really think I'm interested in needles,' she might just come up and, boom, put a couple of needles under their fingernails," says Mistress Jenna King, an L.A. dominatrix. "She had the ability to bring a true submissive or slave to levels that they never thought they could reach. She expanded their limits, and they were happy about that. It was a power exchange." Ilsa made a number of videos, including Transsexual Extreme 2, Hellcats in High Heels 3, Behind the Whip and Queen of Pain -- all best sellers in the BDSM world, and all showing Ilsa having her way with both male and female slaves.

Part of the master/slave playbook -- a hard-and-fast rule of conduct in this parallel universe of trust and surrender -- is the concept of boundaries, limiting the bondage encounter solely to mind-fucking. Consequently, no sexual intercourse is supposed to take place and no dating outside of a "session." Ilsa Strix strictly adhered to these basic rules, even to the point of being aloof to most clients. "She attracted a certain type of guy who objectified her as this distant figure," says Mistress Nicolette, an L.A. dominatrix and a close friend at the time. "They like that unattainability. And she had this regal, cold demeanor."

Ilsa's domestic life was as unconventional as her professional life. She had been married since 1998 to Buck Angel, a female-to-male transsexual, a woman who had turned to surgeons to have her breasts removed and had her chest expanded, via testosterone injections, to the size of a muscular man's. From below the waist, however, Buck remained female.

Ilsa and Buck Angel shared a compact house in the then-gritty L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz. Buck spent his days as Ilsa's assistant, tending to her Web site and her marketing, when he wasn't running the Dungeon or working out at the gym, four or five times a week. Every two weeks, he gave himself another testosterone shot to keep his muscles growing.

As a young girl, Buck had never felt like one. Instead of obsessing over clothes and makeup, she hung out with guys, drank beer and worked on cars. Ilsa and Buck married two years after Buck, then in his midtwenties, had the $6,000 surgeries that transitioned him. His forearms are massive, his head bald, his entire body inked with tattoos. Also an avid "player" in the S&M underground, Buck is partial to leather jackets, cowboy hats, aviator sunglasses and good cigars.

"Ilsa never got excited about her clients," says Buck. "She would see politicians and powerful men, and it was never a big deal; it was just a job. But then one night, she said, 'Oh, my God, you're not going to believe who's in this room -- the director of The Matrix!'"

A fan of the first Matrix movie, Buck walked into the room and exchanged pleasantries with its co-director and screenwriter. "I saw Larry dressed in panties, nylons and a wig, with full-blown makeup," Buck recalls. "He was lying there very much at peace, looking very, very happy.

"In the beginning, I didn't consider Ilsa and Larry's relationship to be sexual, because I understood the dynamics there," he claims. "Larry is a cross-dresser, and his wife was not comfortable with him dressing as a woman. I trusted Larry to be just a client, and Ilsa to be just a dominatrix." Sources in the Los Angeles BDSM community say Ilsa Strix was not the first "pro dom" that Larry Wachowski visited.

Psychiatrists disagree about what forces are at work in men who cross-dress and take the ultimate step of having gender-reassignment surgery. One camp considers men of this type to have a "gender-identity disorder," to be "women trapped in men's bodies." In recent years, another group of doctors labeled some men who demonstrate these tendencies to be autogynephiles -- straight men who are essentially sexual fetishists, aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women.

J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and the author of The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, is a vocal proponent of the science behind autogynephilia, and although he declined to comment about Larry Wachowski, he did describe typical autogynephilic behaviors. "Autogynephiles frequently mention having a longing to be a girl that begins in childhood," says Bailey. "But the first outward manifestation of it usually crops up in early adolescence, when they discover that it turns them on to wear women's clothing. What you do not see, despite frequent claims to the contrary, is evidence that these folks were notably feminine in childhood."

And some experts believe that men who want to be women also tend to be what Larry Wachowski appears to be: a guy with a jones for technology. In 1974, Donald Laub, a plastic surgeon, and Norman Fisk, a psychiatrist, conducted a study at the Stanford University School of Medicine of 769 patients considering sex reassignment. Of the male patients, Laub and Fisk discovered an interesting predisposition: "Observation of the male-to-female group showed them . . . to be interested in mathematics and computer sciences."

Larry sent Ilsa elaborate bouquets of flowers and bought her books, clothes and shoes. Ilsa would stay up late at night, researching Larry's history on the Internet. According to Buck, Ilsa offered Larry free bondage sessions that would sometimes last overnight, forgoing thousands of dollars in income and raising Buck's ire and suspicions. Within two weeks of meeting Larry, friends say, Ilsa seemed a changed woman.

In time, she flew to Australia, in first class, to be with Larry on location for the two Matrix sequels, for weeks at a time. "Larry would pick her up at the airport dressed as 'Lana,'" a friend recalls. "He would get depressed and moody when he had to go to the set dressed as a man."

Around the Los Angeles bondage scene, news of Larry Wachowski's relationship with Ilsa Strix spread swiftly. Surely, the cynics reasoned, Ilsa, as smart a businesswoman as she was, had hooked up with Larry purely because of his money. To her, Larry must have represented the ultimate sugar daddy. Why else, they wondered, had Ilsa suddenly decided not to play by the BDSM rules? "Everyone in the community referred to it as the Six Million Dollar Session," says Mistress Jenna King. "People made jokes about it."

By the time Larry and Ilsa first appeared in public, at the L.A. premiere of Matrix Reloaded in 2003, the Wachowski brothers were running into the first critical drubbing of their career. Though Reloaded was one of 2003's highest-grossing movies, with $281 million in ticket sales, it cost $150 million to make and contained one of the most widely derided sequences in recent movie history, the so-called rave scene, in which hundreds of dancers writhe interminably, as if in a soft-core porn film, and Keanu Reeves bares his ass. Matrix Revolutions, also a $150 million picture, took in only $138 million and sacrificed crisp fight scenes for overblown CG effects and sentimental religiosity. Wrote Manohla Dargis in The Los Angeles Times, "Neo has left the Matrix only to land in an episode of Touched by an Angel. How did something that started out so cool get so dorky?"

Some in Hollywood put all this down to sophomore slump. Others saw a different reason: Larry Wachowski's mind was elsewhere. Says a bondage-world source, "Larry was totally concentrating on Ilsa."

* * *

In denial at first, Buck Angel demanded some answers. Ilsa arranged for Larry and her to meet Buck at a transsexual club on Santa Monica Boulevard one Friday night in early 2001 to talk things over. At midnight, in walked two tall blondes wearing almost identical wigs, fur jackets and high-heeled shoes. It was Larry and Ilsa, but Larry was virtually unrecognizable.

Buck Angel cooled his heels at the bar, while his wife and Larry Wachowski took a turn on the dance floor. "When they came over to me, Larry would not look me in the eye," Buck recalls. "In the shoes, he's, like, six foot three, a big, tall drag queen. I tried to talk to Larry, but he wouldn't talk to me. His wig was over his eyes, and I told him, 'Man, you should pull your wig up, because you look like a dude in a dress.'"

Soon afterward, Buck kicked Ilsa out of the home they shared on Kenmore Avenue and later filed for divorce. "Let Larry take care of you," he told her. When their meager property was divided up, Ilsa got the PlayStation and silverware, while Buck received the gas grille, a Cape Cod etching and "all remaining kitchen supplies." A Ford truck, on which the couple owed $17,000, went back to the dealer. Buck Angel left Los Angeles for New Orleans.

Thea Bloom, furious, had also had enough. In July 2002, she separated from Larry and sought to end their nine-year marriage. Amid charges by Bloom that Larry had secreted away millions of dollars earned from various Matrix projects, a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court, in May 2003, ordered a freeze on Larry's considerable assets, just as Matrix Reloaded was being released. "Larry has been extremely dishonest with me in our personal life, and I believe he is hiding information from me regarding our financial affairs," said Bloom in an affidavit. The split, she said, was "based on very intimate circumstances, concerning which I do not elaborate at this time for reasons of his personal privacy."

Papers filed by Bloom, however, do provide a glimpse into Larry Wachowski's secretive world. Bloom alleged that the Wachowski brothers received $16 million for Reloaded and Revisited alone, including $5 million for scripts, $2.2 million for preproduction services and $6.6 million to be disbursed while principal photography was under way. In addition to half of Larry's money, she requested $29,819 per month in expenses.

At the Cannes Film Festival that year, when Larry and Ilsa appeared together on the red carpet, Ilsa looked stunning, like a movie star -- perfect skin, blond hair falling to her shoulders, white teeth gleaming. Larry Wachowski did not look like Larry Wachowski. His face looked feminized; his eyebrows were plucked, he wore large teardrop earrings, and a knit cap covered his head. His fingernails were manicured. Both Larry and Ilsa seemed ecstatic. The press, including columnist Liz Smith, reported that Larry might be taking female hormones, in anticipation of sex-change surgery. Leaving Los Angeles, he and Ilsa moved into a $2.7 million home in San Francisco, on a steep hill in the Castro, with sweeping views of San Francisco Bay. (As of last month, work was still under way on an expensive addition to the house, and a sparkling new red Lexus was parked in the indoor garage.)

On the transfer deed for the Castro home, the name Laurence Wachowski does not appear. Instead, it's "Laurenca" Wachowski. And in a judge's order, filed in the divorce proceeding, he is similarly identified as Laurence Wachowski, a.k.a. Laurenca Wachowski.

That same year, Larry, together with his brother, reluctantly showed up at the Screen Actors Guild building on Wilshire Boulevard to testify at a SAG arbitration hearing. Marcus Chong, whose character of Tank had been written out of the sequels after a bitter dispute over money, claimed he had been unfairly treated during salary negotiations for the Matrix sequels.

For the hearing, Larry dressed entirely in black and was constantly shadowed by a team of four beefy, stone-faced, black-clad bodyguards, because Chong had allegedly made threats against the brothers. "They created their own movie set," one observer recalled, who remembered the arbitrator, an old SAG hand, shaking his head at all the drama.

The Larry Wachowski who appeared that day shocked Chong: a decidedly feminine-looking man, with porcelain skin and rosy cheeks, a far cry from the balding, masculine six-footer from Chicago he'd known on the set in Australia. "His face looked like it was melting," says Chong, "and he had a head of hair like Raquel Welch." Noting Larry's frequent trips to the bathroom, Chong's lawyer, Sean Erenstoft, asked Wachowski if he was under the influence of drugs. Larry denied it, under oath.

Larry testified for four hours. "Sometimes he was mouthy and rude," says Erenstoft. "Sometimes he was clear and linear, other times he was amorphous and foggy." Wachowski left the SAG building with his goon squad and disappeared again. The outcome of the hearing was never publicly disclosed.

* * *

An anonymous apartment complex, in a blue-collar neighborhood in Sherman Oaks, California, on a sweltering afternoon in late August. Bald head perspiring, Tom Moore opens the door to the dungeon operated by his partner, Mistress Nicolette. Moore, a former professional dominant, now makes transsexual porn movies, while Nicolette travels the world to meet with eager clients. They knew Ilsa Strix for years and feel that she betrayed the BDSM community in order to be with Larry Wachowski.

"Ilsa had nothing to do with anything that didn't make her money," Nicolette says. She is a curvy blonde, with a gym-toned body, a dominatrix who also enjoys BDSM in her personal life. Nicolette picks up a bullwhip and, with a flick of her wrist, cuts a neat line in a yellow Post-It stuck on the back of the front door. Target practice.

"Larry decided to live the life full-time, and he had millions, so she just dropped her husband like a hot potato," says Moore, who also shoots gay porn movies in a small room off Nicolette's dungeon. "She pulled down her Web site and made it very clear to everybody that she was out of the game. Once Ilsa found Larry, she was gone." He and Nicolette have tried, unsuccessfully, to get a hold of her private number in San Francisco.

"I know she was happy," says Nicolette. "Right before she went to the Cannes Film Festival, she called me and said, 'I have my own place. I feel like a different person. I feel renewed. I'm exercising again, I'm doing yoga, I'm being healthy.'"

Later, I called Buck Angel again in New Orleans, days before floodwaters ravaged the city and forced him to flee his condo in the French Quarter. "Ilsa told me that she fell in love with Larry, and he fell in love with her -- I don't believe it," Buck said. "I think she saw a way out of doing professional domination, and a way to be taken care of. And Larry was willing to risk everything to do this."

In New Orleans, after the bitter breakup with Ilsa, Buck Angel has married a pioneering body-piercing artist, Elayne Angel -- who has pierced Lenny Kravitz's nostril and nipples -- and carved out a specific niche for himself in porn. Buck stars in transsexual movies, primarily having sex with women and gay men, and maintains a Web site, buckangel.com. In February, as part of a twelve-picture deal, he released a film called Buck's Beaver. In August, he made porn history when he filmed a scene in which he has sex with a male-to-female transsexual -- purportedly the first onscreen coupling of its type.

Many friends of Ilsa and Larry refuse to speak of them. "They want their privacy respected," says Sabrina Belladonna, a leading Los Angeles dominatrix who knew Karin Winslow for years, before hanging up the telephone. "Otherwise they would have made a public statement, don't you think?"

Hardly a word has been heard from the Wachowski camp in two years, and that remains the case even as Warner Bros. prepares for the release of V for Vendetta, directed by their protege, James McTeigue, an assistant director on the Matrix films. Why didn't the Wachowskis stay behind the camera? "They've always directed their own scripts, and this was an adaptation of somebody else's work," claims a Vendetta insider. "They didn't see this as a Wachowski Brothers Picture to follow the Matrix trilogy, although they're very involved in the picture."

Into this vacuum, more rumors fly. "Ilsa took him to a party about a year ago dressed as a woman, and he was stunning from the neck down," reports Paul Barresi, a porn director and self-styled private eye with deep contacts in the Los Angeles sexual underground. "Larry had a hood on his head, so nobody knew who he was."

Other sources in the Los Angeles BDSM community can't seem to agree on what has become of Ilsa Strix and Larry Wachowski. One swears Larry recently dumped Ilsa. Another indicates that the couple spends much of their time in London now. The Wachowskis' tightknit group remains protective. Sound designer Davis says, "Nothing about their personal lives is anybody else's fucking business. The work and working relationships aren't impacted at all, except by the distraction and disappointment in our species."

The attitude of some in Hollywood toward the brothers seems to be that they may be yesterday's news. "They're not that interested in movies right now," says Eric Feig, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. "V for Vendetta was set in motion before The Matrix. They're focusing exclusively on comic books and video games." According to Larry's own filings in his divorce from Thea Bloom, there are no new Wachowski brothers scripts in the pipeline. Another industry source, however, says the Wachowskis' enormous influence remains undiminished: "They'd be hired tomorrow by anybody."

No matter what happens with Vendetta, Larry Wachowski has again demonstrated his willingness to take risks, to make movies as dangerous and transgressive as his life. V, the film's hero, isn't a crusading law enforcer. He's a terrorist. He blows up subways and buildings. Ever the working-class heroes, the Wachowskis are still challenging the system.

But until Larry Wachowski emerges from his self-imposed exile, if he ever does, nobody will know how deeply into his own personal Matrix the director has gone. "As far as I know," says Porsche Lynn, who remains in touch with Karin Winslow, "they're living happily ever after."

PETER WILKINSON
 
What makes this gayer is hypnosis isn't even a real thing. These people might as well believe in magic and Santa clause. It's no wonder they think getting pierogi titties is equivalent to being feminized like a women.

Whatever happened to just playing the guitar, doing drugs, and having a good time? Maybe you grow your hair out a little, wear some tight pants, and you just feel chill with the vibes of the world.

Your body is this masterful machine refined over millions of years and you want to wreck it up with cancerous pierogi titties and a flaccid dick.

And the articles whole thing about beta males.. you know what beta males used to do? Make fucking killer music, start companies like Microsoft, spend years working on their masters.

Then they get chicks hotter than you could fucking imagine, and brilliant children, and contribute to man's destiny.

Oh no wait sorry I guess they pretend hypnosis is real and let men ejaculate in their assholes.

Boring, lame, gay, fucking uninspired.
 
Most of this shit is fake as hell or overhyped by trannies who have a weak will to begin with like bambi sleep. Hypnosis cant actually make you do anything you dont want to but the fact that it is so popular with trannies (r/sissyhypno has 10x the subs of the normal hypno subreddit) helps prove my pet theory that many trannies are just submissive types who buy into gender stereotypes.
 
I dunno what's worse, the "scholarly" articles by trannies about their fetishes or the Karens who get their panties in a twist and write longer articles about it.
 
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Recent studies have shown that pornography can hijack the brain’s dopamine reward center. As pornography results in sharp bursts of dopamine, the brain develops tolerance to the content, requiring more shocking media to elicit the same thrill. As a result, pornography can lead to sexual dysfunctions and depression. In addition, there is some research to suggest that consuming pornography can lead to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), and in particular, penis dysmorphia among men. Given that gender dysphoria is a type of BDD that is characterized by unease with primary and secondary sexual characteristics, it follows that pornography can distort self-perception and reasonably be assumed to induce gender dysphoria, rather than simply drawing out a pre-existing condition.
The feminist penchant for dry snitching never ceases to amaze. You'd think after Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's quixotic quest to get porn banned in the 1980s, the rest would have learned that it's not a hill worth dying on. And now they have the audacity to suggest that they want to ban porn again, but it's for your own good so that you don't turn into a tranny (which like born of other causes and only exaggerated by exposure to porn), rather than to satisfy their own authoritarian tendencies?
 
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