Armed with this knowledge, she happens upon a luscious, impressionable woman or man, looks deeply into their eyes and gradually gains control of her chosen one's mind through whatever means are at her disposal. After a long, delicious period of mental seduction (often called induction), she forces her victim to desire sex so much that he or she can think of nothing else. The victim often winds up a brainwashed slut who lives only for pleasure, submission or humiliation.

You've just read the standard plotline from a subgenre of erotica known as "erotic mind control." Typically found on the Internet in places like the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository or the Erotic Mind Control Stories Archive, mind-control erotica isn't exactly your ordinary smut. Often, it contains no sex at all, and instead is merely a long description of someone being hypnotized. More important, mind-control erotica is, well, in your mind. Most of these sexy stories -- whose popularity has grown enormously over the past several years online -- portray erotic situations that are physically or technologically impossible. You cannot control someone's every thought with a pill or a machine or even hypnosis.

Mind control may not be your standard sex-fantasy scenario, but elements of it are as old as Ovid: the idea of losing control, of being seduced against your better judgment. But for fans of erotic mind control -- most of whom share their passions and pornography on the Internet -- nothing could be more titillating than the idea that somebody might control their thoughts and even give them orgasms without ever touching anything but their (un)conscious minds.

While most fetishists focus on the body -- feet, lingerie, breasts -- mind-control fetishists are interested in what goes on inside people's heads. And, of course, they're turned on by controlling or being controlled mentally. Mind-control erotica therefore shares territory with B&D or S/M. But it's also connected to more obscure, mind-oriented fetishes, like hypno-fetishism and fetishes that revolve around subduing people with laughing gas, chloroform and other drugs. The idea is that taking over somebody's mind is hot, whether you do it with hypnosis, drugs or special machines that reprogram the cerebral cortex.

Simon bar Sinister, who has run the Erotic Mind Control Story Archive since 1996, says, "This is a fetish for an abstract idea, basically. A story that is just about being hypnotized is enough to get me aroused. It doesn't have to have any erotic content."

RC, one of the better-known writers in this genre of erotica, agrees. "Since I enjoy erotic hypnosis, my emphasis is on the hypnosis part, not whatever comes after it. I've been accused of ending my stories too early, before the sex happens."

A typical mind-control story is "Hypnotic Roommates," written by an anonymous contributor to Simon's archive. Andrea, a naughty psychology student, has decided to hypnotize and sexually dominate her nubile roommate Susan with a video of swirly, glowing rings of light. Yet most of the story focuses on Susan's mental state as she becomes more and more mentally open:

"Susan ... felt a strange sensation that she couldn't place as she stared at the screen ... She tried to look up at Andrea and found that her eyes wouldn't move ... A little voice in her head started to warn her, but the rings were glowing and moving so smoothly and prettily that she didn't pay it any attention."

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