My concern is less about overt mind control as messing with someone’s psyche. You can do that even by traditional means like gaslighting, verbal abuse, lying, and so forth. (Ask me how I know.) Add hypnosis to the above and it becomes a rather potent mix.
If someone’s willing to practice covert/unethical hypnosis without explicit permission, that suggests to me that they have no qualms about manipulating their subject in a myriad of ways as well, while their only real concern is getting their own dick hard before moving on to another subject. We’ve seen evidence of this sort of thing in the hypnosis community, and it’s why there are some very legitimate blacklists that get circulated there.
Quite the opposite, I switched from using a pen name to using my traditional online name many years ago. I’ve been in the closet once and it wasn’t a pleasant experience; I most certainly won’t do it again. The idea of putting a disclaimer was mostly to say what’s already been said here: that there is a difference between fantasy and reality and that the two should never intermix.
I wanted to drop back into this discussion to make one suggestion regarding disclaimers: You have to mean them or they come across as misleading and insulting.
I started reading a BDSM series on nifty today and it starts off with a disclaimer stating that it’s a fantasy (yes, for sure) and that the story depicts “consensual slavery”, OK check. Then went on to say that in real life BDSM needs to be consensual - yes of course it does, didn’t you just say that?
But the story doesn’t depict consent, it depicts people tricked into signing slavery contracts and then being raped and tortured very non-consensually. And that’s extreme, but it would actually be fine for a story if the author had given an honest disclaimer. Instead it gave me whiplash because the disclaimer was so obviously false.
So if you’re considering adding disclaimers to your work, I would suggest honesty. In this case, no disclaimer would have been better than having a misleading one.
Hey Rob,
First and foremost, disclaimers are legal constructs to avoid legal repercussions of naming actual people and places and against prosecution for anyone acting on anything depicted in a story. Check out the credits of any movie and you’ll see very precise language used in these for them be acceptable coverage. Aside from all of that, regarding stories that anyone finds offensive for any reason, you can usually find out pretty quickly if the author is going down a dark rabbit-hole that you find distasteful and simply ignore it and move on to another one. Personally I am disturbed and disgusted by stories where the authors whole intention is only to inflict depravity, violence, degradation, or even death on a character as the ultimate and only goal of the story line. Experiencing adversity to develop a character or further a plot line, that the character ultimately rises above successfully and the bad guys get punished, is not exactly the same thing.