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 a movement of people that largely came out of the incel movement that is Transitioning, not because they felt they had gender dysphoria, but because they felt that women had it easier in our society and that they were never going to win given the hand that they were dealt.

Simone: Right, it's gender euphoria, not gender dysphoria. It is, it is

Katherine Dee: gender transition for gays. My guess at that is like... There are probably people who sort of subconsciously believe that, right? And there's maybe like subconsciously influenced, but the actual movement that would identify with that label.

Katherine Dee: is probably pretty conf confined. And I think there's lots of lots of things like that, right? There's the there's tons of people who believe X, but the people who would, you know, use Y label are is probably much smaller and much much more eccentric.

Malcolm: Let's go into the origins, because I interrupted you when you were talking about [00:08:00] that.

Katherine Dee: Yeah so, like I said, I haven't done an exhaustive project on this. I I did an interview, and I I was sort of, Looking, you know, looking through it a few, few months ago but other, other projects caught my attention. Finding the origin was difficult because it's, it's like, what, you know, what the origin of what, like a sissification or like sissy, hypno you know, like a discreet, that discreet phenomenon.

Katherine Dee: And both were actually like pretty hard to pin down like a first instance of it. I, again, like I could only speculate, but like sissy, sissy, sissification and bimbification seem to go back. Pretty far back to the, you know, like 1790s far. Even specification. Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't look exactly the same way that it would look today, right?

Katherine Dee: But some version of feminizing a man as a, you know, a sexual expression, as a sexual tool. It seems to have always been... A piece of, of BDSM, not that that term has always been used, but just sort of [00:09:00] that type of sexual expression. But the Hypno videos, there's no one's written a history of it.

Katherine Dee: And it's, it's actually like pretty hard to find where it originated. And the closest thing is like this Andrea Long Chu essay about it. And it, Andrea Long Chu suggests that maybe it originates on Tumblr. I I don't really buy that. That feels That feels wrong, but I don't actually know where it comes from.

Katherine Dee: I did one interview with someone who first encountered it on 4chan. And I think, I think in 2008, if I'm remembering correctly. So it must've been like very, very early. So yeah, it's, I, I wish I, I wish I knew.

Malcolm: So I, I can, I can maybe give an answer to this. Because so Sisyphication has clearly been part of the.

Malcolm: The general sadism, masochism, and dominance and submission displace for a long time. Likely going back to the English vice, as you said, easily 1700s. Bimbofication, I would argue, or at least from what I've seen, because, you know, [00:10:00] we've done a lot of research. We've actually given speeches on the history of different types of pornography at one point.

Malcolm: That seems to have not arose until the women's liberation movement. And, and didn't really get big until the late nineties and you can correct me if I'm wrong about any of this, but I, I have not heard of any bimbofication porn historically. And I think the reason being is there was, it was not considered normal for women to not be hyper sexualized to the extent that they, you know, you needed to, to counter this, the, the specification hypno, I think came after.

Malcolm: Audio porn got popular, which didn't really happen until Argonne Wild Audio, which Simone has dug deep into because it somewhat requires that to have happened first. And so I would guess that it probably got started on the major hubs of audio only porn, which again, I didn't get big until the mid 2000s.

Malcolm: Hmm.

Simone: Yeah. I mean that

Katherine Dee: I'm not a, I'm not an expert on pornography by [00:11:00] any, by any stretch of the imagination. So, I mean, sure. I, I feel like I, I could imagine it starting at different points or like different expressions of it appearing at different points in time. But I mean, it sounds you know, much, much better than I do.

Katherine Dee: Well,

Malcolm: no, no, no. I thought maybe you, you did. So I'm, I'm wondering what you think it means for, and I'd love you to pontificate within the realm of pacification, hypno, and broader. How do you think the ways that the internet, because it, to some extent, de genders people. How, do you think it's like changing the way we relate to gender?

Malcolm: Yeah, as an internet person.

Katherine Dee: Yeah, I don't know if it de genders people as much as... The way gender expression you know, like our relationship to our gender expression changes, like one thing I think about a lot is like certain people in text appear more masculine or feminine, and people will get really into this with you, like if, if you sort of.

Katherine Dee: Say that it is like you are like doing some level like of interpretation. They're like, [00:12:00] no, there's you know, an essential way that men communicate and sort of an essential way that like women communicate and you know, you're, you're downplaying that, but I don't, I don't think so, right? There's ways to present femininely.

Katherine Dee: It through text and it is it is a like interpretive art like it's it's like when you the thing I compare it to a lot is like when you're reading something and there's a character and there's not a physical description of the character, but you start you start imagining based on other things in the text.

Katherine Dee: I think that happens through text based communication and that is that that is not just something that's being like read. by a third party, but that's part of our gender expression and we don't really think of it that way. And there's other components of that too, like the, you know, the colors we use or the type of art we might put on a profile what websites we use, what apps we use.

Katherine Dee: All of these are gendered in a way that we don't really, really think about. And I think that has actually impacted our Has [00:13:00] impacted our gender identity a lot because there's this new disembodied, very, very new way of expressing yourself that we really haven't named.

Simone: That makes a lot of sense.

Simone: I'm, I'm curious to know if you feel like, because obviously there's so much, gender is now playing such a key role in how people are freaking out culturally, or even like coalescing into different groups culturally. Do you feel like there is a significant change to the way that people. relate to gender or even like sexuality through gender?

Simone: I mean, we, we can see that rates of reported sex are plummeting. We can see that gender is getting weird and different. Do you feel like it's overhyped and like the average person is just the same as they always are? Or do you think we're coming to a new evolution in human culture, at least in developed nations or like super internet connected nations where gender means something fundamentally different than, than what it was before.

Katherine Dee: I think there's parts of it that are really underappreciated. I think, you know, that a [00:14:00] lot of our work is disembodied or mediated by a screen, I think, has a big part of it. There's, it, the, gender has always been so related to what we do. And a lot, and a lot of the places where that was like delineated have been like completely you know, abolished, right?

Katherine Dee: Work is, anyone can have any job. There's, there's all these, there's all these things that have changed in that way that I think are impacting the way people think of gender. I don't think it was, I, 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. Gender. I wonder would we, would we have the same sort of gender questions if people were, like, more connected in [00:15:00] their immediate environments?

Katherine Dee: Or if jobs were, you know, most people's work wasn't, not that most people's work, but if the, the most vocal sort of gender anarchists, so to speak, weren't probably using a laptop for their work, right? There's all these other little things but I think

Malcolm: that's a really fascinating point that...

Malcolm: Historically, gender expression wasn't so much a choice that people were actively making, because they were just so engaged with people in their daily lives. Whereas today, you get this level of choice, and one of the statistics that I always found really interesting in our book on sexuality was that about 20% of people, when they are given a choice with zero repercussions for making the choice of which gender to express as, will actually choose the opposite gender.

Malcolm: So by here, what I mean is, you see this when people are choosing furry costumes, but you also see it when people are choosing online character avatars.

Katherine Dee: I, I think part of, part of that with like furries [00:16:00] and, and avatars is it's a very easy way to experience novelty.

Simone: That's interesting. Well, I also feel like part of what you're saying though, is let's say you live in some.

Simone: village in rural France or something, and maybe given the circumstances of your life, you are born female, but you're doing more male style roles, kind of like both given your skill, but also, I don't know, like maybe you're married, but your husband went off to war. So now you're like doing all the man stuff and you're acting more manly, but it also doesn't care because you don't have an audience and there isn't like this online world.

Simone: Is that also what you're saying? Like in the past, gender would Also be fluid, but it didn't matter because there was no big online discussion.

Katherine Dee: That, I mean, that, that must be part of it. I also, I think it just had different it was just used in different ways. Right. And it had different, different utility at some, you know, a woman who's doing.

Katherine Dee: Manual labor might actually be like more feminine because she is doing manual labor and that's maybe [00:17:00] masculinely coded in her, her culture. So she might have to compensate in other ways in different contexts. And then, you know, why, why bother at all? Maybe it's how, you know, just so she could signal that she's interested in a mate or something.

Katherine Dee: I mean, there's there's all sorts of different, different reasons for it. I also think you know, part of gender is finding people with similar experiences and that is something that we, I mean, I think has been like completely sort of, like underrated or like even suppressed in especially like American culture.

Katherine Dee: One sort of drawback, I think of the, you know, the discussion around transition and, and. Transgender identity is that part, part of saying I'm a woman is a way of saying I have a certain set of experiences tied to my biology and that is something that's been very stigmatized. And I, you know, if.

Katherine Dee: Finding other, part of finding other women is like talking about things that I experience in my body, my health fertility thing, you know, that's something that someone who is male [00:18:00] bodied wouldn't have any insight or experience with.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah, that's

Malcolm: super underrated. I, I think what's really interesting, and this is something we often talk about within the progressive movement.

Malcolm: in the United States right now, is while they claim to value diversity, they mean it purely in an aesthetic sense. And there seems to be this resistance to admitting along any metric that humans are systemically different from other humans in any sort of an average context you know, whether it's men or women are systemically different or, or, or different cultural groups are systemically different.

Malcolm: Do you think that that's sort of always been the case or is this a new thing with the

Katherine Dee: internet? I don't know that the internet is necessarily the reason for that. I think that you're right that like in general, boundaries are very, I think there's like a real allergy to boundaries and that includes like boundaries between different groups.

Katherine Dee: Right. And that could be something like in the workplace, you see, like The idea of a boss or a manager [00:19:00] is maybe in certain especially in white collar roles, or certain types of white collar roles, that's less emphasized now, and it's not as hierarchical as it might have been even 10 years ago.

Katherine Dee: But then that also applies men and men and the boundary between men and women, or the boundary between individuals and relationships. That's another Big thing. And a lot of people speculate that the popularization of like polyamory is because is actually because we expect our partners to be everything to us.

Katherine Dee: So instead of you know, saying, okay, I'm putting too much stress on my romantic partner, you, you rationalize say, Oh, I should have multiple romantic is. Making our, our romantic partner like our whole community, the person we get advice from, the person we spend all our time with. And it puts too much pressure on the relationship.

Simone: I've never heard that take before and I love that.

Malcolm: I'd love you to pontificate more on this point. Why do you think polyamory has gotten big?

Katherine Dee: I think it's, I think it's a lot of reasons. Like [00:20:00] expectations. Also, I mean, I think it's, it's interesting to look where, where is it big, right? It's, it's, I think there are a lot of places in the United States and I can really only speak to the United States where maybe people are more isolated, but like generally like the, the way people socialize doesn't look that different from 10, 20 years ago where I would assume the biggest changes are like Very educated groups or, you know, up the upper class upper middle class people in in cities and probably the very poor, but I would guess the middle class is probably the, you know, the shrinking middle class is probably not so different than, you know, what people people miss, right?

Katherine Dee: What people are nostalgic for so that, so that being said, I think the lifestyles of these groups sort of lend themselves to To a polyamory. Part of that is people who are in, again, like creative or tech fields may not want to get [00:21:00] married at the same, at the same age so that that's destabilizing people move away from their families so they don't really have communities.

Katherine Dee: I know a lot of people who like move cities a lot or they live in cities that are not very community friendly and the way they make friends is through dating apps. Yeah, I,

Malcolm: yeah, Oh, no, I was just gonna say that was definitely a phenomenon that I experienced really heavily when I first really became, you know, sort of long term monogamous with Simone was not being on dating apps made it a lot harder to find

Simone: friends.

Simone: Yeah. But I've never heard that articulated before that maybe it's because of one way we argue because we're really big in education reform that a really big problem with traditional schooling is that it really only teaches you how to make friends with people you're literally like forced to be in a room or office with.

Simone: So if you don't make friends through university or school or through your business, you sort of never learn how to make friends. And then after you graduate from school, outside of people you inter interact with in your office, the only way that you're probably interacting with new. Strangers is you are dating [00:22:00] like that is the one time people bothered to learn how to meet new people or make friends and it just never really occurred to me that like People might be interested in polyamory because they they also just want more friends But they don't know how to make friends that they don't

Malcolm: Social institutions to make friends like they might not have a church

Simone: But that really resonated, like that makes so much sense.

Simone: Cause when we think about poly communities that we've gotten into touch with or been exposed to, or poly people that we've met, like a lot of them, it's, it seems like it's more of a friendship thing and a more like of a social thing that it necessarily, it's like, well, this is how I want to be romantically involved.

Simone: That's so astute.

Katherine Dee: It's weird. It's weird that it's very hard for people to conceptualize like intimacy without sex which is, which is funny because like sex without intimacy is obviously very common. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And I, I think, I mean, I think that's right to your, your point, Simone, like they, people just don't know what a friend is or like how deep and intimate a friendship could be without it crossing that sexual boundary.

Katherine Dee: And it, you know, it makes me wonder sometimes like the [00:23:00] nature of, of that sex It, I think there's been sort of like a hobbification of sex almost, or even less than that it's even a hobby is almost too generous because I think a lot of people do it to like, to pass the time, or as an experience they do it for a story, you know, and it's, it's, it's almost not about living in that moment, it's about it having, it's something that happened, and helped pass time, or, Well, I mean,

Malcolm: narrative, narrative reinforcement is something we talk about a lot on this podcast.

Malcolm: And that's what you're describing there is they are trying to tell a story about who they are to themselves and potentially to the world. But another thing you mentioned there that I found very interesting about the Poly community is just the amount of time it takes. You know, when I talk to these people who have eight partners or Oh, I'm at five partners right now.

Malcolm: It's So this is like your primary hobby. Because it would have to be, it would have, it would just be an enormous time sink.

Katherine Dee: It's your culture too. It's, it's probably a stand in for, for culture in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm: No, I think it is. And, and it [00:24:00] comes to, you know, once you have a lot of kids or something like that, you know, this is another thing I've seen is you just don't have as much time for

Katherine Dee: it.

Katherine Dee: Yeah, I, and something about wanting to bring children into that kind of arrangement is very it's very creepy to me. I try to be like, sort of as non judgmental as possible, but it just seems like it's opening up your children to so much danger.

Malcolm: So when I was in Silicon Valley you know, one of the things that always sort of weirded me on, and again, we try to be somewhat nonjudgmental on this channel, we're a little judgmental but there, there's

Malcolm: a lot of like they're, you know, sleeping together to some extent and you know, occasionally, you know, as I was getting older, there would be kids like crawling around these houses And I always, that did not, I don't know, I mean, it could be a stable way to host relationships, but, but polyamory, you know, in ALS studies show this really clearly, leads to really low fertility rates, so I don't think it's a, a long term cultural

Simone: solution.

Simone: Yeah, I mean, I would argue [00:25:00] growing up broadly in that culture, growing up in Silicon Valley I was surrounded by it, but also I think because I was surrounded by it, I was blind to it. Literally, I went to Burning Man at age 15 and I saw zero sex and zero drugs. And that's just because I

Malcolm: remember we went to a party and there was an orgy and I was like, Simone, there's there's an orgy at this party.

Malcolm: And you're like, no, there's not. And so I had to go. Walk you to a door, open it and be like, that's an or that, that room right

Simone: there is orgy room. I just, I don't know. So I, I think, I think it's probably less damaging to children than you would think, because I think kids, especially think about it. If kids are growing up surrounded by sex, by like very, like openness, nudity, like all that, they're just like Hmm.

Simone: So that's what old people do, you know, kind of like, you know, sitting on the toilet for a really long time, reading newspapers, paying bills. It's just one of those things. Oh, I guess it's an old person thing. And you say, you're just like, I don't, I don't do that. Whatever. You're just like, so bored to it.

Simone: Like you're [00:26:00] blind to it. So I worry less about it. We'll see

Malcolm: what ends up happening with these kids. I mean, you were one of them to some extent. Your parents were in a polyamorous relationship at one point. So. Maybe they don't all end up, I mean, I think they

Simone: probably end up a lot more conservative than anyone may think.

Simone: And I actually feel like to a certain extent, Gen Z is showing this through a lot of its conservative interests in that, you know, they were raised. In a very permissive time and their choice in perhaps rebellion or just in perhaps reasoned cultural choices after seeing how it's working for the adults is to go, in many cases, more conservative.

Simone: But this has been a really fun conversation. But thank you so much because you've So I've actively changed my view on a couple of subjects and this is the kind of, and this is why everyone, if you're watching this, you've got to check out her writings.

Simone: There is no they're all over the place. They're on different publications. She, she, she writes for, for a bunch of different outlets. So just search her name. Yeah.

Katherine Dee: Is there a particular website? Yeah. [00:27:00] Just default. blog. And I, you know, update people on where I'm writing and what I'm doing.

Simone: Perfect.

Simone: Definitely go there guys. All right. All right. We'll talk to you soon.

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