How the Internet is Changing Gender and Sexuality with Katherine Dee (Default Friend)

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.

Would you like to know more?

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, forcibly changed into something you're not is the erotic component. And that's what people are sexualizing.

Katherine Dee: There's a lot of people who want to see themselves as either a woman or a bimbified woman an ultra feminine woman. And, you know, cis women can... Experience this as well. It's not it's not confined to natal, natal males. But yeah, I think there's something about the change and the force of the forcing that is like an erotic.

Malcolm: So, before we go deeper, something that I've noticed within, like, when I briefly looked into the Sissy Hypno movement. Is that historically, it seemed related to as you're saying like, bimbofication or [00:04:00] cisification, which was the idea that you know, through being forcibly changed into something else, maybe even transformation pornography types that is what is turning you on, and that is why you are consuming the content.

Malcolm: Whereas there is this growing new movement, I mean, chief among them being the trans maxers, but they're hardly the only group. Do you know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the trans maxers? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they are engaging with this content, not primarily because it turns them on, but because they actually want to permanently change their sexuality into something new that they feel will be easier to get access to.

Malcolm: Is specifically this belief that if it's really hard. To gain access to attractive women as a man, well then I need to change what I want instead of I need to change, you know, who I'm going after. And that's been a, to me at least, that's the most interesting new phenomenon within this, this sort of sissy hypno category.

Katherine Dee: I, I would imagine that that's [00:05:00] super rare. Mm. And I can see maybe a someone who's transitioning for, for whatever reason using sissy hypno in a non sexualized way as sort of, an act of desperation or a placebo, but I tend not to believe it's actually doing anything per se I've, I've listened to a whole bunch of audio and watched some of the videos, and it doesn't, I mean, it might just be because I wasn't open to it or, or whatever, and I was looking at it more as, research and not you know, without, not with the intention that I'm going to bimbofy myself.

Katherine Dee: But I, I, I just feel like there has to be you have there's something so crazy and desperate about using it as a, a tool if, with, especially outside of a sexual context and, and not using it as a fetish object. So I want to give people benefit of the doubt that If there is some percentage of people who are using it to learn or something they, it's like real desperation and like a real place of maybe like despair that they're doing that, because there's so many better[00:06:00] even, even if they are trying to like do some sort of like conversion therapy on themselves, there's obviously so many better avenues to, to do that, right?

Simone: Yeah, well and I think it you're totally onto something here because Ayla just released another Like visualization of her fetish data and hypnotism is right there in the center on a graph of reported interest versus average taboo rating. So it has like decent interest actually from both sides of the gender spectrum.

Simone: But also like it's, it's halfway there, like halfway to the most extreme stuff in terms of taboo ness. And like very close to that is also dubious consent and mind break. And these are all sort of like, you know, similar clusters, I think. So it, it could just be that this is something that really gets people excited.

Simone: And we have seen people argue that the trans maxing [00:07:00] movement is doesn't really represent a meaningful number of people that feels like, Hey, I'm

Malcolm: just going to This is