Sissy-Hypno: A Post-Mortem
On all those asses all over your FYP
"You were talking in detail about things you wanted to do to the waiter, and when I said, 'James, he's straight.' Your response was, 'Doesn't matter, I’m a celebrity.'"
- Tati Westbrook, 2019
The fallout of ‘Dramagedon’, a convoluted cultural episode taking place across various YouTube ‘Drama’ channels in 2019, resulted in reputation damage for a cast of influencers and, in a monetised internet ecosystem, surely also resulted in financial impact for them too. Two friends, James Charles and Tati Westbrook, both high-profile YouTube MUAs (Make-up Artists) fell out over some kind of soured business relationship. Those details aren’t what’s important, what was important was the online discourse that followed: the arguments across platforms by thousands of users around fame, sexuality, consent and sissiness.
James Charles revolted his friend by the power of his sissiness. His highlighted cheeks, cartoonish flamboyance, his ass-less chaps showcasing his BBL attached to the body of a young man. See, like other young queer men throughout history, James Charles was acutely aware of his power over heterosexual-presenting men. When, in Westbrook’s words, Charles states it “doesn’t matter” that the men he flirts with are to be considered straight and therefore off-limits, he is speaking a truth of some kind. Not because he’s a celebrity and discredits issues of consent or power dynamics but because he has discovered an unspoken sexual authority. Charles can confuse cis-het men; playing with their unexpected reaction to his body, his energy. His sissiness is hypnotising. It truly doesn’t matter.
‘Sissy-hypno’ is defined by Urban Dictionary as “a type of short video or webm file type who's (sic) target demographic are sexually suppressed heterosexual males who wish to become gay or become a ‘sissy’”. Its authenticity as a product is debatable but its memetic currency is palpable. When considering this term, we may expand the framework of sissy-hypno to include the type of hypnosis James Charles and other young men have employed to attract admiration. Instagram is full of algorithmically produced imagery of smooth young men filtering themselves through a queered-gaze; with swollen lips and bulbous asses in lycra base layers, squatting and stunting for the camera for an audience frequently made up of other men. In the age of ‘content’, new male beauty standards and the focus on the aforementioned ass as almost totemic mean that the bodies of sissies are something to be considered by men of all sexualities. We’ve all lost time in a TikTok wormhole or a never-ending loop of Instagram reels. But if the algorithm is presenting us with endless content examining the bodies of sissies, perhaps the phenomenon of sissy-hypno has been actualised.