Latex depersonalization vs. punk rock

It seems that somebody's had the temerity to turn Neil Gaiman's award-winning short story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" into a film. Judging by the trailer, the film is going to be a very loose adaptation of the story; but it's directed by John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame, so that gives me hope. If anyone can make a premise like this work, it's him. Plus we've got the adorable/slightly kinky Elle Fanning on board, as well as Nicole Kidman cosplaying an opposite-sex David Bowie from Labyrinth. Her character certainly wasn't in the short story, but the girl with the doubled middle finger was. Make of that what you will. Anyway, here's the latex-slick movie trailer, and here is the original (very funny) short story, which you can read online for free.

Just a little something I found by accident

via LXXT on Deviant Art

Very nearly all that I'd hoped for

Back in February, I made a half queasy, half hopeful post about the upcoming album from Muse. It's called Drones, and all the hints dropped by the band before the album's debut led me to believe it would feature a lot of brainwashing, hypnosis, and depersonalization. And yes, fortunately, it does. The drones of the title are military drones, but Matt Bellamy has a lot of fun riffing on the dual meaning of the word. Almost every song on the album mentions some form of mind control. Take these lyrics from "The Handler," for instance:



You were my oppressor 
And I, I have been programmed to obey 
Now, you are my handler 
And I, I will execute your demands 

Leave me alone 
I must disassociate from you 

Behold my trance formation 
And you are empowered to do as you please 
My mind was lost in translation 
And my heart has become a cold and impassive machine 

I won't spend much time actually reviewing the album on my blog since I know you've come here to read about mind control, not music. But if you're wondering what I think about Drones overall, I'll say this much: it's very hard and very good. If you want proof, look no further than the lyrics video for "The Handler":

We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way

copyright Melinda Gebbie

I'm not always sure which posts - or parts of posts - will be most interesting to my readers, but I suspect the image I'm starting with here will grab everyone's attention. It's not the most blissful scene in the book I'm about to discuss, but it will appeal to the robot and BDSM fetishists.

So anyway, the book in question is actually a graphic novel: Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. It's been out since 2006 and has gained huge (and totally justified) notoriety in that time, but I've only just now gotten around to reading it. I'll try to discuss it on the most superficial, porn-y-est levels first and then dig into the darker stuff. That way, you can bail out any time you decide I'm getting too deep...but I hope you'll hang on until the end.

copyright Melinda Gebbie

Lost Girls tells the story of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz as if they're real, grown women meeting up at a hotel in Austria and discussing their sexual awakenings...while simultaneously becoming more sexually inventive with each other and with the rest of the hotel staff. Alan Moore has described this book as pornography, and you really can't argue with him. There are X-rated acts in every chapter and X-rated images on almost every page. These include thing that seem intentionally designed to shock those (like me, I must confess) who bought the book with the idea that it was just particularly edgy erotica. Nope. Parts of it are erotica - and beautifully written erotica at that. I'll give you an example in just a moment. But before I go on, I need to warn you that the book also contains some truly horrible sex acts which Moore and Gebbie do not intend for you to enjoy. I'm not a serious student of Moore's work, so I could be wrong about this, but I think part of his intent in writing this story is to slap you across the face and shout, "Do you really get off on this, you sick motherfucker?" That's pretty much what he implied in an interview I read about Lost Girls. He's trying to say a lot of different things about sex and pornography here, and sometimes the messages contradict each other.

copyright Melinda Gebbie

But let's keep things light for a little while longer. For me, one of the most erotic passages in Lost Girls is Alice's journal entry about her trip to the ballet with Dorothy (Miss Gale) and Wendy (Mrs. Potter). They're watching the debut of The Rite of Spring, which was so shocking for its time that it caused a riot among the audience. But our heroines are too caught up in each other to notice much about their surroundings:

Between my pearl incisors, Miss Gale's lip was plump; the sweetest segment of a tangerine. Nobody noticed save for Mrs. Potter with her eyes upon my back, two small hot points of stifled longing and anxiety. Withdrawing from Miss Gale, I turned to smile at Mrs. Potter. When she looked surprised yet unoffended, I leaned in and kissed her neck. A gorgeous shudder left her body like some heavy soul escaping....

The audience were whooping, crying. Did that really happen? Did I lean back Mrs. Potter like a cello sloped across my lap and kiss the smoked and olive dark between her breasts while Miss Gale licked tart powder from her cheek?

I think I pressed my hand against their wetness, there beyond the footlights; think we shifted and moaned like aching continents....

copyright Melinda Gebbie

I cut that quote where I did for a reason. See, Rite of Spring portrays the ritual sacrifice of a maiden to bring in the springtime; so Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy are basically getting off in the face of death. This is the point where I start my descent into the darker aspects of Lost Girls.

The book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the heroines' sexual awakenings, the second bringing in complications and conflict, and the third delving into some seriously sick shit. I'll give you a summary of the sections one and two first. They both include some lovely erotica, but the second section gives you a sense of impending doom.

Dorothy's sexual awakening is the happiest of the three: when the tornado strikes her farm and she thinks she's about to die, she realizes she can do whatever she wants in the time she has left. So she frigs herself into the first - and probably best ever - orgasm of her life. Then later she starts messing around with the farm hands. At first it seems she's helping them over their sexual hangups, but as the story progresses, she loses her sense of self and becomes just a sex toy for the men, not the real person she wants to be seen as.

Wendy's - and her brothers' - sexual awakening occurs when they encounter a group of homeless children whose leader is a slightly older boy named Peter. His group has no taboos whatsoever; in fact, the first time Wendy sees Peter, he's screwing his own sister. Before long he's climbed up Wendy's drainpipe to finger her in her bed while her brothers watch and wank each other off (This is one of those bits Alan Moore does not want you to condone - but the worst is yet to come, so bail out now if you need to). Later Wendy plays a very twisted game of "mother" with the other homeless boys and fantasizes about being ravished by a pedophile who spies on them.

copyright Melinda Gebbie

Alice's story is the saddest. Her first experience of sex is being raped by a friend of her father's - an experience she copes with by staring into a mirror and fantasizing that she's with herself and no one else. Later she falls in with a predatory teacher at her boarding school, and after graduation she moves in with her as a "personal assistant." In reality she becomes a "kept woman" - and an opium addict too.


Now, all this time, Europe has been edging toward the first World War. As the final section of the book begins, all the steadier-minded guests are fleeing the hotel and the rest have decided to go out with a bang - a gang bang. I'm not sure how much detail I want to give you about this section. Let's just say that if you don't get squicked out before it's over, you really are a sick motherfucker.

But everything in this section is contradictions. A character who writes pornography argues that it's fine to enjoy any story, no matter how dirty it gets, because the characters aren't real...but then he follows that up by noting that he's screwing a 13-year-old while arguing this point. This is Alan Moore getting meta and fucking with your brain like a drunk monkey. I'm sitting there reading that passage and thinking about my own MC erotica, which I always feel a little guilty about because yes, it's fantasy and I'd never approve of that stuff in real life; but I realize at heart that my fantasy involves rape. Reading that passage, I wondered whether Alan Moore was calling me out for my hypocrisy or telling me it's okay to fantasize but I have to keep fantasy and reality separate. Then I told myself that no matter what he was saying, he's not an infallible judge of human morality. And then I just got my brain all tied in knots and kept reading in the hope that everything would make sense in the end. And mostly did.

Copyright Melinda Gebbie

Again, I don't want to get too specific about details. Some of what happens in the last section is too unsettling to describe, and some of it's just spoilers. But if you've gotten this far into my post, I will say this: by telling each other their stories - and not hiding the most sordid parts - Alice, Dorothy and Wendy rescue the "Lost Girls" inside themselves. Sexual abandon allows them to shed the neuroses they'd developed about sex and become free again. That being the case, I don't think Moore is calling me out for hypocrisy. I think he's saying we find healing in turning our hangups into stories. And that pornography is good. ;-)

Now I'll hint at one more thing: this isn't just a story about sex and pornography; it's also a story about violence and war. By the end of the book, Moore has presented you with two very different worlds, and he's asked you which one you'd rather live in. Me, I'll take sex over death any day of the week.

After all, real-world drones are male

This post is a two-fer, with both halves involving drones. First I'll give you a tantalizing book passage, and then I'll share some personal stuff.

My fetishist friends and I write about female drones because we get off on the idea of women being depersonalized and controlled. But of course, in real life, the drones in a hive are male. The bees that leave the hive and actually work are female, while the drones are pretty much just sex toys for the queen.

With that in mind, let me share a passage from a book I read recently called The Honey Month. The author received a month's worth of exotic honey samples, tried one a day, and used its color/smell/taste as inspiration for some pretty freaky vignettes. Some are fantasy, some are SF, some are skewed just a little bit off normal, and then there's this one - which I'd say classifies as horror. Don't be fooled by the badassery at the beginning of the story. This man's fate is not what you expect.

---

Cranberry Creamed Honey

Colour: Dark amber, cognac. Funny to me how I have such boozy associations, but they are apt.

Smell: There’s a sharpness, a resinousness to this. It’s also very liquidy.

Taste: A definite cranberry tartness, but the honey taste dominates; the tartness limns it, darts around its edges, makes it one of the more refreshing honeys I’ve tried. I think of pine, strangely, redwood; tasting it is like walking a forest path.

     There is fire in his wrists, fire in his sharp-shod walk, fire beneath his fingernails. He is red, redder than rowan berries, for rowan doesn’t bleed as cranberries do, and it is cranberries that he gathers, that he stews and crushes, cranberries in which he steeps his skin. Lacking a Mithrasian bull, he takes them, bathes in them, rinses his hair red-black, seeking transcendence.

     It is not white, he says, that is pure. It is not black. It is red, because it moves, it changes, and it keeps itself always. It is not static as fossilized wood, not delicate as new-fallen snow. When red seeks to be its truest self, it is in motion. It fears no change.

     He has shrugged at Paracelsus, at Tarot cards, at accusations of devilry. Red is his religion. He squeezes berry juice onto his eyelids, swallows it nine times a day, thrice at each meal. He wants the redness to spill from him like a scent, that in walking the forest paths the sleeping deer and wolves and rabbits will come to dream in garnet tones, will tremble and flush at the thought of pursuit, the game of the chase.

     The bees dream red when he passes.

     When they wake, their queen begins to wail. She needs it, she says, that red of reds that walks the woods like a shadow. The bees are dutiful, and go.

     They find him, but do not know how to scrape the redness from him, cannot brush it against their bodies, cannot gather it like pollen. In vain they stamp his cranberry cheeks, in vain they buzz his cranberry ears. They cannot take a piece of him back to the hive.

     Meantime he is beset by a phalanx of black-ribbed gold, drowns in the drone of their discontent. He swats at them, rages at them, gathers stings against the back of his hand, the curve of his elbow. What are these that come to gild his redness, limn his red thoughts with their bright noise? What are these that dare change his red shadow’s shape, settling and rising like clouds at sea?

     They madden him. They do not mean to. They hardly know that they are pushing him, driving him, herding the redness of him homeward.

     Enough, says the queen, while he weeps in great red sobs. Enough, that is enough. She does not need to leave her childbed to imbibe him, only needs him to stay in the comb of her children’s bodies, stay and share his colour with her. He cannot but comply.

     She dreams, and her workers pour red into their gold, raise larvae with rust-red bodies, make honey heady as the setting sun. They weave it into their songs and dance its colour into the air they breathe. There is an orange to them, an amber, now – never quite red, for it is not the cranberry they love, but the shaping of their gold, the change, the sharpened edges to their queen’s dreams.

     He is in all they do, their most precious drone; they love him like a fine day. They look after him in their fashion. The bees go out, burrow into their sisters’ bodies, sing their gladdest thanks against his lips. They go bearing their darkest honey, the densest, the best, the closest to the red they can never quite achieve, the redness that is his, only his. One by one, they place a drop on his tongue like a sacrament.

    It is never red enough.

---

And now for something more personal. If you've been following my blog long enough, you know I'm a gigantic Muse fan. Well, the band has a new album coming out soon, and apparently it's going to be called Drones. They've been releasing teaser art with the guys sporting glistening black eyes and all the identifying information from the original pictures scribbled out.

I'm not just imagining, am I, that the theme of the new album is depersonalization? In fact, it might even be about outright brainwashing. That's a topic the band has explored before. Front man Matt Bellamy is a fan of conspiracy theories; claims to have learned from a book how to brainwash people in real life; and once wrote a song about MK Ultra, a real but thankfully dismantled project by the US military that attempted to rewrite people's minds (I've posted the "MK Ultra" video here a couple of times before, but naturally, I now have to post it again. You're welcome.).

But here's where it gets really personal. You might think I'm thrilled to have my favorite band making an album about my fetish. But seeing pictures of the guys with drone eyes makes me squirm in a way that's not entirely pleasant. It's like having one of those "naked in public" dreams. I feel exposed and kind of...guilty. See, I wouldn't care about seeing celebrities I hate turned into mindless drones, but these are my boys. They're supposed to be the heroes, not the victims. I almost feel like I'm the one doing this to them.

I have no idea whether that makes sense to anyone else or not. Probably it doesn't, but what do you think?

Perfectly faceless

Have you heard of Maison Martin Margiela? It's a fashion house so committed to drone-like depersonalization that the labels it puts on its clothes are just a series of numbers. But its biggest claim to fame is the masks you see in these pictures. They turn their models into faceless objects, less than human but oh so beautiful. That's how I see it, anyway.

Let's ignore the fact that a certain famous somebody (who's so conceited already that I won't lower myself to say his name) is a big part of why these masks became famous. Instead, let's revel in the idea of people whose individuality has been stolen from them. These models been reduced to living mannequins, objects of art - and they've been put on display in all their mindless glory, so that we can admire the skill of the ones who made them that way.

On display

There's a train track just behind where I live. I've grown used to the whistle and the way the building shakes, and sometimes I even use them to give an added kick to my "morning" Virtual Hypnotist program. As I'm sagging there in my chair, deep in trance, I sometimes feel the rumble of a train going by (I can't actually hear it with my earbuds in place). Then I tell myself the rumbles are actually explosions: my friends know I've been captured by an evil brainwasher and they're trying to rescue me. Unfortunately for them, I'm too far gone to save. I'm bound in place by nothing more than a flashing monitor and the oh-so-thin cord of my earbuds. I could escape so easily, if only my brain weren't bound.

After awhile - and this is the most important part - my would-be rescuers break into the bunker far enough to see me in my chair. They can't reach me, because my Mistress is still in control, and they'd never have gotten this far if she hadn't allowed it. But they can see me.

I'd been describing myself as a closet exhibitionist years before I learned anyone else used the term. It's a central part of my fetish: the idea of being put on display, sometimes as a brainwashed slave whom my friends are powerless to help, and sometimes as a drone who's been so thoroughly depersonalized that people don't even realize she's human.

The train came by this morning while I was running my VH session, and the extra enjoyment it provided left me wanting to reread trilby's else's Dark Forest. I did, and it didn't disappoint. If ever a story deserved the "exhibitionism" code, it's "Dark Forest." I sooo want to be Veronica, or better yet, Bridget. And thanks to my VH "morning" program, I at least know what Bridget's stare feels like. I stared that way again as I was reading the story.

Later I scrounged through my folders of saved images, trying to find something suitable for this post, but I couldn't settle on just one. So here are three photos, all came from Model Mayhem. From left to right, we have shots by Steve Prue, Uberdog, and Rebecca's Rubber Room.

A Peek Beneath the Duct Tape: What to Expect from Your Alien Brainwashing

So now you see why, in a previous post, I said the picture at left had influenced a part of my latest story. ;-) I think I'm going to have to create a new tag for gas masks. Yes, I really will. I know a lot of people fetishize about gas masks, and to a certain extent, I'm one of them. For me, they have to have an organic quality and/or a hood and goggles that hide the entire face. As always, it's the robotization, depersonalization and voicelessness that most appeals to me.

So anyway, about What to Expect from your Alien Brainwashing. The first bit that occurred to me (in a dream, as is often the case), was the title. And the first title that occurred to me was, "What to Expect from Your Alien Overlords." I liked the idea because it had an inherent humor based on the popular meme, and I could tweak it to be more MC-specific while still keeping some of the humor. Of course, the first tweak had to come with the title.

The idea developed gradually, with the part I'm proudest of - Tinker Toy sex lattices - coming to me again in a dream. Gah, I love my subconscious!

I wasn't sure what my aliens would look like until I found the picture above (all credit to Kimatica). Then, of course, they had to be Greys so I could fit in the huge eyes and pointy faces. Sorry if that's a let-down for anyone expecting more exotic aliens, but it's been my experience in reading SF that it's really, really hard to come up with truly alien species. Vernor Vinge did a great job in A Fire Upon the Deep, of course, but I still fault him for not making the most of the MC possibilities. ;-) As for me, I knew my audience was more interested in the MC than whether my aliens had fur or scales, so I decided to take a pass.

When it comes to the wall installations, I was probably subconsciously influenced by all those weird '80's videos that had people running along corridors where human hands or heads stuck out of the walls. Funnily enough, though, I stumbled across this just yesterday, via Oddee.

Another funny thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that I chose this story out of the three percolating in my brain because I thought it was the lightest; and yet it turned out pretty grim in the end. I hope you still find some humor in it (I do; I always find it funny when MC victims blather earnestly about the favors they're doing their recruits), but the story as a whole got pretty dark. It seemed that with each successive polish, I came up with creepy new ideas that slotted in just perfectly with the plot.

For instance, the idea of elites creating a presentation for their processees was originally just a joke: that's their notion of waiting room reading material. And I had to make my processee desperate enough to read it, so I came up with "wait times might be longer than usual" - a common recorded message Americans hear when they dial toll-free numbers for any sort of assistance. It was only later that I realized why the wait times would be longer than usual: the new architectural craze was sucking up more slaves than ever. That added a whole new layer of horror to the ending. Our poor processee will probably end up a mindless bit of X-rated wall decoration.

Is it just me, or does anyone else now have Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" running through their heads?

spotlighting another classic

I remember when Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on the air. I used to watch it from time to time, but somehow I missed the two-parter where Captain Picard was assimilated by the Borg and used as a weapon against his own people. I don't remember why I missed it: I just reading reviews of the episodes and kicking myself for losing out on the awesomeness.

Eventually I got to see the episodes in syndication, and they were everything I'd hoped for...in short bursts, anyway. I wanted to see less Picard-as-Picard and more Picard-as-Locutus. Or better yet, more of Picard's transformation into Locutus. Even after all this time, I have a distinct memory of him lying motionless and blank-eyed while alien technology sucks all the free will from him brain and his face pales slowly from human flesh to Borg gray. I've just spent some over on YouTube trying to find that scene, and I finally came up with it - jammed in with nearly ten minutes of trance music and a bunch of repetitive space battles.

On the other hand, I found another, shorter video that a) has everything but the face-paling bit and b) must have been created by someone who appreciates the same stuff you and I do. S/he has edited the clips in a way that makes for a perfect EMC story: First we see Picard's hubris in defying the Borg, then his capture and assimilation, his revelation to his horrified former comrades, a bit of space battling, and finally a slightly ambiguous conclusion (Okay, it could have been more ambiguous, but the editor seems to be more of a Star Trek fan than an MC fan, so the Borg Cube had to be destroyed).

So here's what I recommend. Watch the video below first. This is the short, good clip without the trance music. Then click over to YouTube for the longer video, but only watch seconds 0:32-0:37. You can even turn the sound off if you like. I don't recommend watching the full 9+ minutes unless you're really bored or under the influence.

Enjoy!

Things on my mind

Well, I've started writing again, sporadically. I'm working on one of the three stories I mentioned in my last post, but I won't say which one just yet. After all, I have three ideas in my head; it's possible I could switch over to one of the others and get it finished first.

Anyway, the picture at left has inspired a portion of the story I'm working on now. I found it here, along with plenty of other goodies for fans of robots, altered eyes, etc. In fact, you'll even find a few shots from another post I made once upon a time.

Giving credit where credit is due, the bodypainting and prosthetics are by a design team called Kimatica.This is not the same Kimatica you can elsewhere on the net, so don't go to YouTube expecting a bunch of fetishy videos. Sorry. ;-)

The Domme Gives a Tour

This post was always meant to center on the photography of John Tisbury, but I debated for awhile over the layout and whether or not to include similar pics from other photographers. In the end, though, I decided just to splash you with almost everything from my folder of saved Tisbury pictures. I don't think I even need to set up an MC scenario for these, do I? They speak so clearly for themselves. ;-)

        

Dilbert does MC/robofetishism

Finally someone in the mainstream gets it!

These are a few of my favorite things: Seduced and Engulfed

The "My Favorite Things" sets I talked about in this post have continued to multiply. Now it looks like I'll have three or four different depersonalization posts alone. The theme of this one is people (not just women - looks can be deceiving!) who've been overwhelmed and/or seduced to the point where they've become something less than human. But since you know me, you can be sure there will be plenty of other "less than human" posts down the road. ;-)

Above is one of a set of pictures that's been floating around the fetish web for years, even though the site on which it originated no longer exists. I have no idea who the model is. In fact, I have no idea who many of these models are, which should probably come as no surprise, given the topic. Several of them appear to have been weaponized as well as depersonalized, but then again, that should probably come as no surprise, either. This whole set is pretty much a Tabico story in the making, isn't it?

Anyway, next up are Marie-Kalista, photographed by Phoebuz; an unknown model photographed by Ehren Howland; and (in one of my all-time favorite pics) an unknown model Kandy Kane (Thanks, Sly Speaker!) photographed by Gil Perron.

Then we have anonymous models shot by Marcus Gloger, Grenze, and Gwen Media.

And lastly, we have a photo by Rhae Mare, a shot of Rubberdoll Emma Lee, and a shot of Vanessa Murphy by Sean Hartgrove.

Tune in next time for more seduction, engulfing, encasing, brainwashing, and whatever the hell else my kinky little mind can come up with.