Episode Details

Journalist Katherine Dee joins Simone and Malcolm for a deep dive on how the internet is impacting gender expression, identity, and sexuality. They discuss the origins of sissy hypno, disconnects between biology and gender theory, polyamory trends, and more effects of online disembodiment.

Katherine Dee: [00:00:00] I think maybe we overrate how much awareness people had of their gender identity in prior periods.

Katherine Dee: And just so much of it was related to things that we were doing and the way we were engaging in our communities. And now that those things are gone, and those people are much more isolated, it's also going to impact.

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Simone: Okay. Hello. We have a very special guest joining us today. Catherine Dee, aka Default Friend, who is one of my personal favorite writers, journalists, and general cultural commentators. She has some of the best insights on different cultural movements, debate, current events, people, groups that, that I've read.

Simone: She is incredibly thoughtful, incredibly clever. And Malcolm, you were saying there was something you actually wanted to ask her.

Malcolm: Yeah, so I'm excited to go into topic. But the way I would, I would frame her is she is like the from an anthropological perspective, sort of internet historian in the more academic context, not the internet historian, but just a really good [00:01:00] studier of internet cultures and how they evolve.

Malcolm: And I had heard you say a recent interest of yours that you delved into. was Sisyphication Hypnome, which actually dovetails with topics that we've talked about on the show recently, like the Trans Max Movement. We actually had the creator of the Trans Max Movement, we interviewed him. And it was so boring.

Malcolm: We've never aired it because I don't want to lose followers over it. But it is a topic that really interests us. So I'd love to dig deep on where you think, you know, how the movement originated, how it developed and how it plays with something that we've talked about in a very recent episode. The idea of human gender sort of transforming, potentially even at the biological level in terms of how they're engaging with sexuality and gender.

Katherine Dee: Yeah so origins, that's, that's sort of a hard question. I've heard people say that Oh,

Malcolm: let's start with definition, because people might

Katherine Dee: not know. Oh, sure. So, sissy hypno is, [00:02:00] are, they're hypnosis videos or audio. That is supposed, it's, they're usually for a male audience, but sometimes can be like unisex or for, for women.

Katherine Dee: And it's supposed to scissify you, right? Make you increasingly more feminized. And there's different genres of it. It can be You know, more or less violent or forced. Sometimes it's, it's more like brainwashing. Yeah, there's, and there's many different expressions of it. And it's interesting because recently NBC News did a piece on race change to another, which are like a sort of video, which is very Hypno, but it's like racial changes, right?

Katherine Dee: So over time.

Malcolm: The first question I have about it given the way that you've presented it is about what percent of sissy hypno would you say that the, the, the hypno itself is the pornographic material versus what percent would you say is consumed or created [00:03:00] specifically in order to change an individual's sexual preferences?

Katherine Dee: I don't, I don't know, I haven't done like an exhaustive I haven't done exhaustive research on it. I, but if I had to, to guess, I'd say the, the, The act of listening and convincing yourself that you are being, like, forc