I've always hated that word, 'victim'. It always makes what I do sound so crass and cruel and heartless, you know? Like I'm doing something wrong. Let me be perfectly honest--if I were to snap my fingers and give every woman I've ever hypnotized their full free will back, and all their memories of everything I've done to their minds and bodies, I think ninety-nine out of a hundred would thank me for it. Frankly, they'd probably ask me to do it to them again.

Not that there's been a hundred. I don't even think there's been fifty, not that I've been keeping count. I think it would be heartless if I kept count, don't you? If I simply reduced them to numbers, to a score in some private game I'm playing with myself. Every one of my... well, what you call my 'victims', although again I'd like you to even tell me how to define that term in a world where a million seductions play out every night in bars and nightclubs across America and hundreds of thousands of people tumble into bed with someone they didn't think they'd be sleeping with at the beginning of the evening... every one of them was special to me. Some of them still are.

Oh, of course this is where you bring out the scary buzzwords to frighten your readers. 'Brainwashed'. 'Programmed'. 'Conditioned to obey.' I even believe one of your colleagues called them 'sex slaves', as though I kept them in a kennel in my basement and only let them out once a day to use the bathroom. Honestly, you're the ones who should be ashamed of yourselves. You've interviewed Holly, I take it? The one who got me caught? She was holding down a six figure job with a Fortune 500 company, volunteering with a charity that helps children with spina bifida. It doesn't exactly sound cruel to me.

Really, the person you should be interviewing is her sister, the woman who was so emotionally needy that she hired a private investigator to follow Holly all over town just because of a few canceled lunch dates. That seems like suspicious behavior to me. But no, she's being lauded as a hero while I'm awaiting trial on... what did they come up with to charge me, exactly? I'm afraid I keep rotating legal counsel at a fairly rapid clip. I think they might be afraid to talk to me. I hope you see yourself as a very brave woman, because everyone here thinks you're out of your mind to hold this interview.

Ah. Yes. Wire fraud. Because Holly was kind enough to transfer a few hundred dollars my way to pay her part of the hotel costs for the Providence trip. I didn't even ask her to cover the whole thing, you know. She would cheerfully have signed over every dime she owned to me, but obviously I have no interest in that. No, what we had was more--

Well, yes, obviously it was sexual. But it was deeper than that, more intimate. Hypnosis builds intimacy quickly, more quickly than you can possibly imagine. And not just the intimacy of the devoted subject to her Master, either. It's a bond of trust, a sharing of deep and potent rapport that ties two people together faster than any other emotional experience you can name. I guarantee you, if any of the women I put into trance came into a room with me, their faces would light up with a bright beaming smile even though they don't remember a single thing we did together. That shared connection goes deeper than consciousness ever could.

Oh yes. Now we come to it, don't we? That's the scoop you really want, isn't it, Miss Gingold? You want the names of all those women I've hypnotized... less than fifty, probably less even than twenty-five... so you can find them and shove a microphone in their faces and ask them if they were traumatized by something they don't even remember happening to them. No, I don't think I'll be sharing the names of my 'victims' with you. I care too much about them for that. You have Holly, you have Annabeth, and you have that lovely young woman who shared an evening with me in New Orleans while that disgusting investigator was watching. Janice, if I recall correctly. I think the others deserve their privacy given what happened to her.

Do I feel guilty about that? I don't know, do you? It wasn't me who hounded her every day and night with demands to go back under on live television to uncover the memories I so politely concealed for her. It wasn't me who caused the abreaction she suffered, or who handled it so badly--honestly, where did you find that dreadful quack? I'd never have damaged her like that. Frankly, I'm glad she's suing the network. She's going to be working through that trauma for years, and here you all are blaming me for it. Thank goodness I never borrowed any money from her, or you'd probably try to lock me up for that, too.

Oh, don't give me that. Do you know why they're not charging me with sexual assault, Miss Gingold? Do you know why none of the crimes I've supposedly committed against Holly and Annabeth are the ones prosecutors are demanding my head over? Because there's no legal standard of consent you can apply to deem our interactions illegal that doesn't also set a dangerous precedent for every future interaction between a man and a woman--or any other permutation of the gender spectrum you might care to name, naturally. Between you and me, it's the straight men who are truly afraid of me. They think hypnosis will show them something about themselves they don't want to know.

Because that's the uncomfortable truth behind all this, Miss Gingold. That's what Holly and Annabeth and sweet little Janice would tell you, and any of the others if I allowed them to remember what happened while they were so blissfully deep in my control. I didn't make them do anything. I didn't steal away their wills with some kind of magic spell. I simply guided them to a place they wanted to be, a place where everything was pleasure and nothing felt shameful, and they said yes to everything I asked them to do. And if their 'yes' doesn't count because they were too relaxed and happy to offer informed and enthusiastic consent, then where do we draw that line, hmm? Who decides what a real 'yes' is, if three adult women who were all perfectly sober could be litigated into 'diminished capacity' simply because they were persuaded to to agree?

Oh, yes, I don't dispute that. As a matter of practicality, they were hypnotized. But from a legal standpoint? Can you tell me what the standard for hypnosis is under the law, Miss Gingold? If for example I told you that every time you blinked, you'd feel a slight reluctance to open your eyelids again, and that when you did you'd find yourself wanting to let your eyes stare into mine because the effort of emerging from those long, slow, lazy blinks left you just a little bit tired and exhausted, is that a crime? You don't have to listen. You don't have to let the power of suggestion filter into your thoughts and linger in the back of your head while you struggle to keep your eyes from closing.

No, I'm not hypnotizing you. Not legally. There's no such thing. I just suggested your eyelids might droop a bit more every time you blinked, that you might find that heaviness reminding you of times when you were drowsy at the end of a long night and all you wanted to do was let your eyes slip shut and enjoy that blissful silence inside your head. It's just a few sentences, a smattering of phrases strung together in a way some intelligent, imaginative people might find too evocative to simply ignore. That's on them, not on me. Find me a definition of what I'm doing that doesn't implicate every persuasive salesman or ASMR video in a crime right along with me.

Oh, I'm sure you'd like to believe there's a difference. You're probably sure you could even come up with an argument, if your head wasn't getting so unaccountably muzzy every time your eyelids closed down in another lazy blink and fluttered back open to stare blankly into my eyes while you tried to remember what we were talking about. And I'm sure you think this is all on me, something I'm doing to you, when it's really just your own mind enjoying the possibilities of what I have to offer so much that it's eagerly following wherever I lead. You're making yourself sleepy, Miss Gingold. And you're doing it because you know how good it feels when your eyes slip shut and you relax so very deeply for me.

Let me ask you, Miss Gingold--Miranda--does it make you feel stronger to tell me that? If you keep insisting that I've got this magical, irresistible power to hypnotize you despite your best efforts to resist that drowsy, heavy feeling that's making you too tired even to get up from your chair now, does it make you feel like you've got more of a chance of shaking off the sleepy feeling you get from looking into my eyes? Or does it make you feel even weaker? Don't you feel more like a victim when I'm the one doing all this and you're struggling and failing to fight it? Perhaps you want to be the victim here. If you're the victim, you don't ever have to admit just how good you feel when your eyelids flutter and close for me. That's it. Good girl, Miranda.

This is what I've been trying to tell you, Miranda. This is what Holly and Annabeth and all the others learned. Deep down, they knew just like you do that the one they were really fighting was themselves, and they lost every time the same way you're losing now as the pleasure intensifies with every slow, sleepy blink until you can't keep your hands away from your needy cunt anymore. But it's easier to pretend that I'm taking the power away, because if you admit you're giving it to me then you have to admit you love how I'm making you feel right now and, well... you're not ready for that, are you, good girl? No. Of course not. You'd rather just relax into the sensation of blissful obedience and convince yourself you can't resist my hypnotic control. Nod for me, sweetie. Good girl.

And that's why it's going to be so easy for you to forget all this once we're finished--there you go, pretty girl, just let those heavy eyes close and stay closed for me while you spread your legs and let me see those wet panties. You're going to forget because remembering either means admitting you're weak and helpless and utterly unable to resist my hypnotic power over you... or because it means accepting the real truth, that you want to be a submissive slut who unbuttons her blouse and shows off her pretty titties to a man just because he tells her to and deep down she enjoys doing what she's told.

That's it. There we go. They're very beautiful, Miranda. I'd be happy to play with them if I wasn't, well... somewhat restrained at the moment.

So yes, you're going to forget just like all the others, because it's difficult and confusing and you're really not sure you're ready to accept the truth about yourself. But deep down, you'll know how happy it makes you to obey me and you'll be filled with a deep sense of contented fulfillment every time you follow my instructions whether you're aware you're doing it or not. You'll be so thrilled to go back and write a nice, long, sympathetic article about the trumped up charges they've got me in prison on, and you'll do a follow up interview with Holly that paints our relationship in a more reasonable light. Make sure to tell her to blink herself to sleep, first. She'll be so much more... tractable that way.

That's right, good girl, and cumming for me again now, cumming so hard at the thought of pleasing me and helping me leave here so we can resume our relationship on a more intimate basis. I told you hypnosis builds intimacy, didn't I? Of course, I also told you I hated the word 'victim'. And if I'm being perfectly honest... off the record, just between you and me... I think that under the right circumstances, it can be very erotic. And I can't wait to show you exactly what I mean.

THE END