SEXUAL DISPLEASURE
Hypnosis and Sexual Pleasure – Judon Riordan
Well, this is a terrible book; and a short blog post because there isn’t much point diving into every way in which it is wrong. Unless you happen to be a famous children’s author with a trans pen name, you’re probably too progressive for the regressive perspectives this book has to offer. The title was titillation. Even the cover photo is titillating to some degree. And the promise of “intimate case histories” is just old-fashioned fraud.
I can’t find anything on the author, other than they wrote another book on peeping Toms. And there is nothing of the author in the book – at no point do they profess to be a hypnotist or psychiatrist, appearing instead as a journalistic observer, which is exactly what I think they are. It’s possible they’d written a couple of handfuls of articles on sex and hypnosis, separately or together, and this book is a cash-in compilation. It would explain the unevenness with which topics are covered, and the random straying into bulleted lists (like a fact box in a magazine).
Although I can easily imagine another reason for the unevenness – the author has devoted time and pages to the topics closest to their heart, and given scant coverage to others. The longest chapter, for example, is entitled “Homosexuality” and consists of two, in-depth, case studies, one about a man and one about a woman (10 pages and 12 pages respectively). Case studies in other chapters are lucky to make it to two paragraphs! There are, of course, exceptions, such as the case study about transvestism, that made a whole page.
The whole book is presented as advice and as statements of fact, with no referencing; and influential quotes used sparingly are the only thing coming close to evidence or justification for the claims made. It’s almost as if the author is queer (gay/bi and/or trans?) and really, really, really, wants to be a boring straight man, who has successful, military-style sex with a wife. A female wife who isn’t a man. Who does womanly things. Like women do. Not like those sexy, sexy men who they can’t stop thinking about. Why, God, must there be so many sexy men? So, so many, that poor old Judson has to get conversion therapy from a hypno-analysis psychiatrist (the worst kind), and write all about why you should do so too, under some pen name because they can’t bring themselves to own their all-consuming internalised homophobia and transphobia.
Still, it’s not as bad as children’s books that defend the concept of slavery.
