A Japanese gym teacher is watching his class of 10 young women jump rope. He grins and takes out a colorful stopwatch. “Stop!” he yells, pressing the watch. Like magic, all the women freeze. They remain as still as statues as he pulls up each of their shirts and passionately attends to their breasts with his hands and tongue. Next, he lines them up on the floor and rolls himself over their bodies, before zipping them into individual duffle bags and using their mouths for blowjobs. The women unfreeze when he presses his watch once more; they’re confused, but unaware of what transpired.
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This is peak timestop porn, a genre where one person has the ability to completely freeze everyone else in the scene (usually via a large wrist watch or stopwatch that makes a cartoonish, twinkling sound effect, though it’s also been portrayed as an app or a large ray gun). After which, of course, a frozen person’s body is poked, prodded, stripped and touched in every way imaginable. Sex, though, isn’t always the end goal — in one video by Wicked Works Productions (which seems to also do simulated snuff), a broke guy freezes an IRS agent and poses her in a series of progressively-less-clothed tableaus for his own amusement. In other scenarios, the victim is unfrozen every few minutes, and reacts with alarm, confusion and occasional arousal.
While there aren’t many timestop scenes on the major tube sites — the search results on Pornhub number somewhere between 90 to 1,200 depending on the phrasing — the comment sections are usually fairly active, including many references to “za warudo,” a line a character in the anime JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure yells as he’s freezing time. Pop culture generally seems to be where most timestop enthusiasts develop their fondness for the fetish. (From the pioneering device in H.G. Wells’ 1895 book The Time Machine to the magic remote control wielded by Adam Sandler in the 2006 film Click, humans have always wanted to manipulate the forces of time.)
In fact, Pablo, a member of the timestop subreddit (which has nearly 60,000 subscribers), tells me he first realized his kink while watching Charmed as a child. “I always wanted to be able to freeze time like Piper did, to be able to enjoy men’s bodies,” he explains.
Meanwhile, redditor WriterJim, a contemporary Wells of sorts, has written a multi-chapter, two-book erotic timestop saga called Timebenders about a man who finds himself in posession of a remote that can control both televisions and time. He contemplates using his new powers to stop crimes, but instead sets his sights on freezing women (his wife, but pretty much anyone else, too) and doing what he wants with them. A sample passage:
“Jake sipped the last of his glass of orange juice, but something bothered him suddenly. Thinking back on the night before… Sarah really had been tired from work. She hadn’t wanted sex. And Jake had used his power to make her want it. Sure they were married, but it still felt like maybe he’d crossed a line. Was it really okay to use magic to make your wife want to fuck you?
“And was he really using the word ‘magic’ in his head in a serious sentence? He supposed it was the only real explanation, at least for now.
“Jake shook his head, banishing the dark thoughts. He’d had incredible sex last night, slept well, and he had incredible power over the world. There was no reason to be mopey. He got up, kissed Sarah goodbye and headed out to work.”
Back in the mainstream, The Fermata, a 1994 novel by Nicholson Baker, centers around a temp who discovers he can stop time. He uses this power to conduct various dirty deeds with the women around him — from writing explicit notes in their books to undressing and fondling them. Sean Ellis’ Oscar-nominated 2004 short Cashback, which was expanded into a feature in 2006, stars Sean Biggerstaff (known for playing Oliver Wood in Harry Potter, and yes, that’s his actual last name) as an art student working the night shift at a supermarket. The employees all have their own tactics to help time crawl by, but his is particularly unique. “I imagine that the remote control for life has been paused,” he says.
This gives way to a series of sequences where everyone in the store is frozen but him. Conveniently, the supermarket is filled with busty women. He removes their bras, pushes up their skirts and sketches them. He then re-dresses them, unfreezes time by cracking his knuckles and they go on with their shopping.
You may have noticed a theme here — it’s men freezing women, and almost never the other way around. Indeed, I found almost no examples of women-led timestop, save for a handful of amateur videos on Clips4Sale channels like Taboo Timestoppers, a few videos from Japan and a single Reddit thread. In it, a 21-year-old woman responds to a commenter who wonders about a scene where a man freezes a woman before she commandeers the timestop watch and freezes him. “Why not just have sex if both sides secretly want it?” the commenter asks. “Because roleplaying and thrill. We want our turn too,” the 21-year-old retorts.
Pablo, who is gay, says he’s managed to find some other videos of men freezing men and women freezing men, but agrees that it’s “rare.”
The genre itself seems to nod to this fact. In one video, two girls try to sleep with a pizza delivery guy by going to a scientist for a timestop watch they’ve heard about; one of them, however, nabs it before the scientist can explain that the watch only stops women. As such, they freeze themselves, and the confused pizza guy has his way with both of them. When they unfreeze, they’re confused, but interpret their nudity as a success.
Obviously, it’s impossible to ignore the real-world context in which timestop porn exists. A real world that includes incels, or “involuntarily celibates” who blame women for their dormant sex lives, and many more men who believe the #MeToo movement has made it impossible for them to ever touch a woman again. Timestop seems to cater directly to them by providing a proxy where the scales of power are tipped back in their favor.
Case in point: Many timespot scenes involve the man getting revenge on the woman, often for wrongdoing as vague as exasperation. Other times, freezing happens after explicit rejection, like a woman who doesn’t want her male masseuse touching a certain area, or a man creeping on a librarian who turns down a lunch date.
“I have to admit that I’ve long had a fascination with non-consent erotica and pornography. It comes partly from being taunted by girls during my pubescent years,” says WriterJim. More to the point, Timebenders was born out of a “revenge fantasy about a woman in [his] office who annoyed [him].”
Still, the tone of most timestop porn is usually playful rather than ominous. The woman isn’t fighting back or resisting; nor is she sleeping or drugged, she’s just frozen. “It was so much fun [to shoot],” says Shavelle Love, a porn performer who has appeared in numerous timestop scenes, likening it more to “a sub/dom situation” than a rape fantasy. In some videos, the word “STOP!” even flashes across the screen in neon colors when the freeze occurs. Not to mention, in order to enact a timestop scenario IRL, the frozen person has to be completely on board. After all, it takes commitment and concentration to stay robotically still in situations during which you’d normally squirm and moan.
“I’d say the hardest part was to not make any sounds while getting fucked,” Love explains. “Once I let out a moan, and they had to redo it. I couldn’t help it though!”
Cassidy Dawn Graves
Cassidy Dawn Graves is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer, comedic musician, and variety show producer, using all of the above to engage with unconventional sexuality, the internet, marginalized creators, and art of all types.
