X, Y and Zee

After ten seconds, I responded with the first inducement. "Please continue," I said, gesturing to the chair.

X rubbed her temples, in evident emotional confusion. Y looked at her, but she clearly could no longer comprehend the rationale behind X's actions. It was impossible for her to conceive of disobeying the authority figure in this scenario, and so X's behavior must have seemed irrational if not absurd to her. She simply waited for further instructions.

"Please," X said, her eyes filling with tears. "Please, can't we just-" She was unable to continue the thought due to the stress of challenging my authority at this point.

I responded with the second inducement. "The experiment requires that you continue." The recordings of the experiment show that my voice did not betray the intense pleasure I was feeling at that moment as I watched her desperately trying to find a way out of the trap her mind had set for itself.

She looked over at the chair, then back to me with a pleading expression on her face. "I can't, Zee. Zee, please don't make me." Her use of the nickname established at the beginning of the session in order to appeal to the emotional bond it created was interesting, and a layperson might have ended the experiment there. But I had science to think of.

I responded with the third inducement. "It is absolutely essential that you continue," I said, gesturing again to the chair. I attempted to keep my movements as similar as possible, in order to create the impression that there was no change in my emotional state. In fact, I was far more aroused than I had been after the first inducement, and was very near to orgasm.

X whimpered again, trembling as she attempted to assert some kind of authority in the face of my seemingly implacable demands. She appeared to have lost the ability to verbalize at all, instead letting out a soft, keening noise. She was paralyzed with indecision, reduced to a virtual fugue state by the contradictory demands on her psyche.

After I came, which I was able to do without undue disruption to the experimental protocols, I gave her the final inducement. "You have no other choice, you must go on," I said. In theory, had she continued to resist authority, I would have released her from the experiment and explained to her the true meaning of the test. However, this turned out not to be necessary. On hearing the final inducement, her eyes took on a vacant, glassy quality and she resumed her seat without protest. Her mind had resolved the apparent contradiction by entering a purely agentic state, where she no longer viewed herself as anything other than an instrument of my will. All X could do, or even think about, at that moment, was following my instructions.

X and Y placed their hands between each other's thighs. Y immediately began probing X's vaginal opening, and X mimicked her actions. Interestingly enough, her agentic state was strong enough that she even followed the nonverbal commands of another agentic individual. This "hierarchy of obedience" may explain why bureaucratic structures work even when members of those organizations have differing levels of authority and autonomy-all of them see themselves as occupying a particular agentic space in relation to each other and to the organization as a whole. I resolved to follow up on this with further experiments, possibly involving multiple women. (Perhaps a variant on the Zimbardo trials?)

"Are you ready?" I asked.

"Yes, Zee," they responded in unison. Their voices no longer had any emotion to them at all, sounding perfectly toneless.

"Then let's begin." I started the next series of images.

The sixth cycle of images (see attached visual file #009F) contained significantly more items than previous, upwards of sixty or seventy pictures of women having graphic sexual intercourse with each other. The images flashed by in a rapid rotation, lingering on no image more than two seconds, and looping several times through the complete collection. (As before, these images were curated by this researcher over the course of several years.) Both X and Y showed total fixation on the procession of items, with their blink rate having gone down to virtually nothing, and both displayed obvious signs of sexual arousal as they watched. X had ceased showing any sexual inhibitions, and was reflexively moving her hips in time with the motions of Y's fingers.

Y, in turn, was lubricating freely, and her mouth was open in evident fascination with the images she was viewing. A small amount of saliva escaped her mouth during the course of the cycle, but she no longer appeared to have the mental acuity to notice or care. She had a small smile on her face, similar to the expression people have during extremely pleasant dreams.

I tested the women's ability to shift focus to other stimuli by openly masturbating while they watched the video. Neither one of them appeared to notice.

After a second orgasm, I stopped the video and asked them questions regarding what they saw. They were unable to press any buttons on their remote-under these extreme conditions of obedience to authority, they could not make a decision on their own even in response to an informational prompt. I hypothesized that they were waiting for me to tell them which response was correct, and immediately tested it by telling them which answer was 'correct'. They immediately pressed that button, even when the answer provided to them was self-evidently wrong. Needless to say, I look forward to recreating this situation under other conditions.

I then began the final sequence of images (#009G), which were of myself with one of the female research assistants. They displayed no emotional reaction to seeing me naked, with the woman who had propositioned them just days before between my thighs licking vigorously at my clitoris. Instead, they passively fingered each other while absorbing the sight. The release of vaginal fluids suggested that X came at least once, and Y twice. Neither vocalized beyond a long, sustained sigh during that period, although this may not be related to their emotional state. Their original personality profiles were unable to capture that particular nuance.

After the final cycle, I decided to test their obedience to authority as a practical concern. I disrobed, and instructed each woman in turn to perform oral sex on my person. (The woman not engaged in cunnilingus was instructed to stimulate my breasts using their fingers and tongue.) Neither woman showed any sign of hesitation in obeying instructions. X knelt down between my spread legs as though she was accustomed to lesbian sexual activities, while Y suckled on my nipples with evident enthusiasm.

After I came again, I instructed them to switch places, and Y complied without any sign of hesitation. I used my fingers to stimulate X's vulva and labia while she fondled my breasts, and she showed absolutely no resistance to my touch. In fact, she at one point begged me to continue, calling me 'Mistress Zee' without any prompting on my part. This suggests that obedience to authority may have some instinctively recognized sexual connotations in a culture that values sexual freedom to any degree. (I am currently trying to work out a way to perform similar experiments in other cultures. It may take some time, as my work is entirely self-funded, but I suspect that I may be able to get money from some non-traditional sources.)

Eventually, I decided that I had tested their limits-and my own-long enough, and advised them to get dressed as the experiment was at an end. They complied, and although they seemed to regain some of their personal autonomy once the formal test was concluded, there were still obvious after-effects. I look forward to conducting some longitudinal studies at their homes to see how long the ingrained obedience to my authority lasts.

Naturally, it will be some time before I can publish these results; I suspect that my fellow colleagues will have some ingrained resistance to my methodology. Still, I feel convinced that I'm doing some truly ground-breaking work, and I plan to press forward with my research. After all, the wonderful thing about science is that you can never have too much data.

THE END