I have already sent off this week’s story, so normal service is definitely resuming, and rest assured I’ve still got a nice long backlog ahead of me! And in the next couple of weeks, when I publish my next anthology (hint, hint…) I will try not to skip another week.

And which classic stories make up “Classic Jukebox”? Read on!

Back In Black: Kitten is the most popular girl at Subduction Videos; she’s a natural hypnotic subject, a hot submissive, and she’s got tits to die for, too. But Kitten didn’t show up for work yesterday, and her bosses are worried. (MC FF MF MD FD.)

Dare to Be Stupid: Dorothy shares her stress reduction DVD with Sharon. (MC MD FF MF.)

Come As You Are: Lila receives a very strange phone call in the middle of the night, and has a little trouble getting back to sleep afterwards. (MC MF MD MA.)

Turning Japanese: Josie’s a great girl, and Paul loves her a lot, but there’s something he’d like to change about her. He’d like to get her a little more interested in some of the things that he’s excited about…what? Sex? No, no. He’s talking about anime. (MC MD MF MA.)

Life in the Fast Lane: Shanna’s never been afraid to try new things. So when Honey gives her a hit of the new drug on the block, “Yes”, she doesn’t even think about the side effects…but Honey does. (MC MF FF MD FD.)

She Drives Me Crazy: Fiona’s accidentally stumbled onto a sinister secret: Her boss is under the sway of an evil mind controller. (MC MF FF FD.)

You’re So Vain: Marcy has finally gotten sick of her study partner’s stuck-up, arrogant insistence that she can seduce anyone, and she’s finally said so to Violet’s face. (MC MF FF FD.)

Jukebox Hero: Kay tests her boss’s new arcade game. (MC MF MD MA.)

Killing Me Softly: Detective Patricia Mulholland meets a woman who claims her husband is trying to murder her by erasing her personality. (MC MD MF.)

Jessie’s Girl: Jessie’s got himself a girl, and Lars wants to make her his. (MC MF MD.)

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Peter purchases a new Girl™, who is programmed to do anything to give him pleasure. Anything at all. (MC MF FD RB.)

Hysteria: Alice visits Dr. Faschen to treat the imbalance of magnetic fluids in her womb. (MC MF MD.)

New Sensation: Verity’s the new girl at the Cinnamon Ranch, but all the guys seem to be lining up to spend time with her, and Tawana wants to know why. (MC FF.)

All She Wants To Do Is Dance: The diabolican Doctor Damian Darke has stolen the Pendant of Persephone from the Pyramid City Museum! Can Adventure Girl resist its thought-sapping charms long enough to defeat him, or will she be reduced to a bubble-headed nymphomaiac in his thrall? (MC MF MD CB.)

Always Something There To Remind Me: Jay’s just woken up in his apartment. He can’t remember anything that happened in the last year, not since the night he met the beautiful and hypnotic Matilda. (MC MF FD MA.)

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah: A man uses a hypnosis DVD to get the girl. Any girl. (MC MD MF.)

Love in an Elevator: Dan and Naomi get stuck in an elevator together, and Dan finds out something very interesting about Naomi. (MC MF.)

Never Surrender: A girl wakes up to find she’s been kidnapped into a mind controller’s harem. The girls have all been brainwashed to prevent their escape, but they’re determined to resist their evil captors as long as they possibly can. (MC MF FF MD.)

Video Killed the Radio Star: A reporter does a “Where Are They Now?” piece on a former radio star who didn’t make the jump to television; while she might not have the looks for TV, she’s got an amazing voice. Guess what her old show was about? (MC MF FD.)

Tempted: Professor Karyn Bell hasn’t made a deal with the devil; he gave her the power to control minds purely as a gift, with no strings attached. Karyn’s determined not to use the power, for fear it will corrupt her, but even she has to admit, she’s very… (MC MF FF FD.)

Love Bites: A woman dressed as a vampire at a convention has the tables turned on her. (MC FF.)

“Fangs of the Living Dead”, also known as “Malenka, the Vampire’s Niece” and “El Nipote del Vampiro” (in its original Italian) features Anita Ekberg as a naive young woman who inherits a castle in a tiny Eastern European country. Of course, it also turns out that there are legendary vampiric curses, secret treasures, madman’s schemes, and at least one twist within a twist that was added by the producers afterwards and renders the movie pretty much incoherent. But there is a very nice, albeit brief scene when Anita first arrives at the castle.

She’s left alone with a servant girl, who promptly menaces her with creepy talk about her uncle and her mother and the sinister secrets of the castle. Just when Anita is really starting to get irritated with the enigmatic hints, the servant girl leans in close (while wearing a low-cut dress that makes her astonishing cleavage impossible to ignore) and tells her, “We’ll talk of this later. For now, it is time to sleep.” And Anita practically sags onto the pillows, her face smoothing out into blank placidity as she says, “Yes…I am so sleepy…”

“Sleep,” the servant girl says. “Sleep, sleep…I will be here with you.” And as Anita flops out onto the pillows, the servant girl proceeds to kiss her shoulder. Anita stirs for a moment, but only for a moment…

And then the spoilsport uncle shows up. And of course, the servant girl was probably planning to bite her. (Except that as you find out later, she’s not a vampire. Okay, maybe this one isn’t so much “I wish someone kinkier was directing this” as “I wish this one was direct-to-video.”) Either way, it’s worth tracking down. And lucky you, it’s on YouTube!

Enjoy…

But it is present. The film starts with a group of people in a bar arguing about whether the government should have the right to commandeer civilian resources in peacetime, just in case we need to build up a huge army to keep the Commies good and intimidated. Only one person is in favor of it, and just as he’s being sort of vaguely mocked for his super-patriotism (which is odd, because he’s the only person in the movie with a foreign accent…it’s implied that he’s from the Eastern Bloc and escaped to the States…) The Commies attack!

The rest of the movie is a long, slow, joyless march to the death of all the main characters and the defeat of America, and all because we wouldn’t give up our freedoms to the United States Army! Don’t you see? If we don’t give up all our freedoms and turn America into a totalitarian state, the Russians will do it instead! Wouldn’t you much rather be oppressed by good old American men with guns instead of Russkies?

And in the end, of course, it turns out that Vaguely Foreign-Sounding Guy is a hypnotist, and the cast never actually left the bar. The whole thing was a hypnotically induced fantasy designed to shock them into understanding how serious the Communist threat could be, if they were imaginary hallucinations of a paranoid disordered mind and had no weaknesses. Therefore, um…profit?

It’s a lousy movie, but it’s well riffed and contains “A Date With Your Family”, one of the top three shorts MST3K ever produced. (“Father feigns eating, draws Junior out, then disowns him!”) Try some, won’t you?

(to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine”)

You are my Goddess
My only Goddess
My mind is empty
Thoughts fade away
I’ll never know how
Much you control me
Goddess speaks, and I must obey.

For those who don’t care about spoilers…actually, I’ll put in a break just in case.

OK. Better. For those who don’t care about spoilers, the episode takes place in a creepy, inescapable hotel where every room contains someone’s worst fear. The idea is that the creature living in the hotel feeds…not on fear, but on faith. It torments you with progressively escalating fear until you finally come face to face with the absolute worst thing you can imagine, the perfect fear, and then just as you’re clinging desperately to whatever it is you believe in, it sneaks into your mind and transforms that faith in “whatever” into faith in it. You come to believe in it, passionately and truly, in that instant, as your deliverer and savior from the nightmarish existence you are trapped in. You want nothing more than to serve it and praise it.

At which point it sucks that faith out of your brain, stopping your life in the process. Oh, and it’s a big ugly minotaur-looking thing, which is decidedly unsexy unless you’re into some very specific kinks. But apart from that, man…this thing is a rich vein of pure MC in a series that has been decidedly underweight on the brainwashing ever since the reboot. (Even the freaking Master didn’t hypnotize anyone!) There are some genuinely hot scenes of women becoming beatific in their sudden, helpless adoration of their new god, even though it’s kind of hard to disconnect that from said women subsequently dying.

And next week, we get Cybermen converting people into robots! Not exactly my personal kink, but someone’s going to be tremendously happy.

Back in the 80s, you see, there was a wonderful syndicated comic strip called “Bloom County”, a personal favorite of mine that also happened to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the Reagan era. And as you may or may not recall, depending on your age, one of the big elements of the 80s zeitgeist was MTV.

“Bloom County” had an excellent strip about MTV; in it, one of the characters talks about how he used to love the song “Yesterday”. ‘It made me think of porpoises frolicking under Antarctic rainbows,’ he says. ‘Then I saw the video on MTV. It was full of explosions and half-naked women slinking around. You know what I think of now when I hear that song?’

And anyone who read last week’s story knows the answer… ‘Half-naked exploding porpoises!’

See? I told you there was a reference.

But the point is, comics have lotsa mind control. I love mind control. I love comic books. And comic books contain some particularly fine examples of evil mind controllers who do sinister things and plot evil plans…in a way that always seems to imply sex without showing it. So who are the best? Read on!

5. The Mad Hatter. Obviously, he has to make the list. He’s one of the better-known mind controllers, being a solid B-list Batman villain, and there’s something twistedly beautiful about watching someone slip a seemingly innocent hat on their heads and seeing their eyes go into a blank, obedient stare…even though the Mad Hatter never did anything particularly decadent with his victims (which is why he’s only number five; he’s too much a proper Victorian gentleman to ever take advantage of his thralls) he still gets mad props for inspiring that delightful thought, “What could I do with one of those hats?”

4. The Purple Man. For a long time, he could have been much higher on the list. He had mind control powers left, right and center; he appeared in a lot of good stories where blank-eyed people did blank-eyed things at his command; and eventually, he fathered a daughter who became one of the few mind-controlling good guys (the Purple Girl, natch.) But the Brian Michael Bendis decided to write the character’s sexual subtext as actual text, and turned him into a sadistic mind-rapist who deliberately let his victims (such as young superheroine Jessica Jones) know they were being controlled just so that he could enjoy their fear and panic at being helpless. There is a certain strain of MC fetishist who enjoys a controller who’s that sociopathic, but it’s not me. So he’s only Number Four.

3. Poison Ivy. Sure, she’s sexy. Sure, she’s seductive. Sure, she has pheromones that make her irresistible to men (and how come we never see women falling victim to the seductive spell of other women? After all, Everything’s Better With Lesbians!) But there’s this little thing about how everyone she so much as kisses keels over dead. It’s hard to really work up a truly exciting sexual fantasy about a character when all your kinky dreams start with, “And just before I die…” A lot of the mind controllers who didn’t make the list have that same problem (and all the mind controlling vampires, too, although there’s a strong vampkink contingent out there who would no doubt disagree.)

2. Mandrill. On the one hand, he can’t place at the absolute top on this list because I’m a submissive and tend to put myself in the victim’s place in mind control scenarios, and it’s really hard to get interested in the thought of losing my will to a big hairy guy with a blue nose. On the other hand, he’s clearly one of the most overtly sexual mind controllers out there; he always has a harem of beautiful women hanging off his arm, they all talk about how much they love him and want to obey him and are utterly devoted to him, and in recent years it’s been made pretty obvious that his whole “multiple attempts to conquer the world” thing is what he does when he runs out of lube and condoms and needs to kill a little time until he can get to the Walgreen’s. For this alone, he ranks very high on the list, and if I was a hetero top instead of a hetero bottom, he’d rank #1.

1. Enchantress. But I’m a hetero bottom. And the Enchantress is unquestionably the best of the comic book mind controllers. She uses mind control almost exclusively. She enthralls men with her seductive powers and makes them her thralls. And her end goal? Pretty much just to fuck Thor. Sure, she wouldn’t mind unbelievable mystic power and wealth and control of all that which she sees, but that would all be kind of secondary to getting Thor under her power so that she can have as much kinky sex with him as she wants. (Really, when you put it that way, why exactly is Thor working so hard to fight her? These are the kinds of questions that led me to a lifetime of writing mind control fetish porn.)

In the end, I think it’s because I’m good at it. Not just writing smut in particular, but writing in general. I am, not to toot my own horn overmuch, a pretty talented author…and I have chosen to write smut because nobody does. Sex is a huge part of the human experience; it’s where we all start, it’s a major part of our adult experience, it’s a driver of politics and economics and relationships and the human condition. But somehow, when it comes time to actually talk about it, we have been trained to draw a genteel curtain over the event and say, “No, no. These things should not be spoken of. They are acts to be ashamed of.”

The same thing does not happen in war stories. We never have people detail the entire training process, explain how they get shipped out to the battlefield, and then have the soldier say, “And then, Gentle Reader, I must leave the rest to your imagination.” Horror movies don’t cut away from the gore; in fact, they’re frequently adored in direct relation to the amount of gore they have. But romances always skip the sex. Even the thought of showing the sex is anathema; “respectable” actresses don’t work in the nude. Violence is okay. Sex is not.

I don’t think about that very often when I’m writing these stories; any truly honest writer will admit that the process is a lot more mechanistic and less driven by the wellsprings of inspiration than we want to pretend. (“So and so has to do this at this time in order to make this moment later on seem plausible. And it’ll be a cool scene, too.”) But when I do think about it, I think that it’s important to redress that balance just a little. It’s important to have something that is well-written, says things about life and the people who live it…and is also full of hot sex. Because people have hot sex every day, and it’d be nice if they didn’t think they were the only ones.

***

Janna drew her dildo from its sheath and held it out in front of her. “You can never win, Marat. Evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction.”

Marat flicked a switch, and her own phallus begin to vibrate. “This is your final chance, Janna. Join the Lesbian Conspiracy, or perish in sapphic pleasure.”

“Never!” Janna shouted, turning her own vibrator on and bringing it down in an overhand strike at Marat’s pert breasts. Marat blocked the blow, and Janna felt tingling up her arms to the elbow as the twin sex toys clashed.

“You are a fool,” Marat snarled, pushing Janna’s own dildo back towards her breasts. “You could have been a ruler of this world, and instead, you will suffer the ultimate fate–death by orgasm.”

Janna tried with all her might to hold back the vibrating sex toy, but as it slowly pressed against her nipple, she feared that Marat might in fact be right…

***

Gina groaned, trying to keep her mind focused on baseball, on her job, on anything but the vibrating butt plug whirring away in her ass.

“You can’t fight it forever, you know,” Kara said. “Sooner or later, you’re going to orgasm, and when you do, the drug will anchor itself to your neural receptors. And when that happens, you’re going to be my slave. Forever.” She patted Gina’s pussy gently, sending all-too-pleasant shocks through her body.

“…i can fight this…” Gina gasped out, struggling against the ropes that held her. “I’m not…not gonna be your slave…”

“Guess it’s time to pull out the big guns,” Kara said. She reached under the bed, and pulled out something that looked like a cross between a sex toy and a power tool. Which was exactly what it was, Gina realized. A dildo, mounted on a massive pumping shaft. “Nobody’s ever lasted longer than five minutes with this baby shoved inside their cunt,” Kara said, revving it up. “No matter how hard they tried. I call it…my five-minute drill.”

***

(This third one was written under the explicit rules, “Write for 5 minutes from a perspective far removed from your own. That is, try writing as a different sex and/or sexual orientation and/or D/s perspective from what you are.”)

Bob sighed as he shot his load into Carol, purely for the purposes of procreation. “Ah,” he said. “It’s so wonderful to be having missionary-position sex with my wife, purely consensually and free of any sort of hypnotic coercion!”

Carol nodded in agreement. “But only because we’re married and under God’s covenant,” she reminded him. “If we weren’t, it’d be a sin in the eyes of the Lord.”

“Very true,” Bob said. “Just like that homosexuality I hear about. Good thing we don’t have anything like that here in the good old U S of A!”

“You said it, darling,” Carol responded. “Homosexuality and bisexuality is for those degenerate Europeans, not for true-blooded Americans like us! We don’t even use sex toys, let alone any sort of sinister ‘mind control’ to increase our arousal or the pleasure of our coupling! Vanilla sex is the best sex!”

Then a rampaging elephant trampled them both to death.