Overly Broad "Mind Control" Tag Description

StashDB Ministry of Truth
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This proposal was inspired by the discussion on this edit.

The current description for the Mind Control tag is as follows:

Control of someone’s thoughts, actions, or personality by an outside force.

As it is worded (specifically the “Control of someone’s actions by an outside force” part) this could be used to describe many scenarios that do not involve mind control in a traditional sense. For example, bondage involves an outside force (restraints) controlling someone’s actions (restricting movement), but I think it would be a stretch to say that all bondage is mind control! Similarly, a Dom/sub relationship involves an outside force (the dominant’s commands) controlling someone’s (the sub’s) actions, and even in some cases their thoughts or personality! Does this mean that all D/s relationships are mind control as well?

The current description originates from this edit (one word has been replaced since then), which says that it was “stolen from a weeb site”, and provides no further information about the reasoning behind choosing this to be the description. This implies to me that not much thought was put into it initially, and that it may have been submitted by someone with little personal interest in mind control/hypno kink.

I propose that the description be altered to something like the following:

The use of magic, technology, or hypnosis to mentally influence a person’s thoughts and/or behavior.

I believe that this new description is broad enough to cover all typical mind control/hypnosis scenarios, while ensuring a clear degree of difference between mind control and other forms of control! It also maintains the minor wording change made in this edit! If you also use this tag (or even if you don’t), I would love to hear any thoughts/concerns you may have about this proposal! I think it should cover all/pretty much all of the current usage for the tag, but there’s far too many scenes for me to manually check myself!

PS. My dream for this tag is to separate fictional mind control from real hypnosis, but I am aware splitting tags isn’t easy, and I don’t expect people from outside of this niche to care about or even necessarily believe in the difference, so I’m not holding my breath on that one!

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I can confirm that the original description was made by someone with little personal interest. You put thought into a better one so I can just make the edit if you want.

here: StashDB

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Thank you so much! Life has been pretty busy so I kinda forgot to pursue this further :sweat_smile:

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Another person inside the niche here… :slight_smile: I have a different perspective.

IMO, the previous description was about the EFFECT, but the new description is about the CAUSE. However, no list of CAUSES can ever truly encompass this kink because for some people it’s the EFFECT that matters.

I think that the ‘magic, technology, or hypnosis’ specifiers are too specific and inherently exclude causes that others would want to include in this umbrella term.

For example

  1. drugs, chemicals, and/or plants
  2. conditioning
  3. spiritualism (which to some people is distinct from magic)
  4. unknown mechanisms (you can observe the effect, but have no idea of the cause, and that lack of knowing can be hot)

The cause and effect are two different things and should have two different tags, ideally. Then you can make more specific tags like ‘Mind Control - Woman’ for a woman under the influence of mind control and ‘Drugged by Man’ for a man being the person who drugs her.

I would prefer the previous definition, myself, for the description of Mind Control as an umbrella tag.

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My main goal with this was to eliminate the confusion that led to this discussion, and others like it! The argument that was made was that a video in which a performer is bound up by a magical living rope fits into the description of “control of someone’s… actions… by an outside force”, and following that line of reasoning, all bondage or D/s relationships could be considered mind control!

I agree that it would be better to have more tags to represent the different methods and subkinks (something that I’ve done with my own library). Ultimately our kink is a minority though, and I’m not convinced something like that would get enough traction to be successful.

My feeling was that if we can only have one tag to represent the breadth of this extremely varied kink, it should at least be defined in a way that effectively distinguishes it from other kinks! I agree that I went too far in the other direction though, and that was part of why I brought the matter here for discussion!

So I ask you this: if you had the chance write a new description of the MC/hypnosis kink according to your preferences, what might you write? I am very interested to hear your perspective!