Somnium Contractus

Disclaimer:

This article is provided purely for the pleasure of the reader. It does not in any way constitute a binding legal contract, nor is it intended to. It does utilize vaguely contractual language (faux legalese) to help establish an immersive fantasy, but this is not to be mistaken for a legally binding document of any kind. This article is not an attempt to create a framework for a legally binding document in any way, and the author does not recommend or condone attempting to create a similar document that would be legally binding in any jurisdiction where that might be possible. This is provided purely for purposes of the reader’s fantasy.

The Fantasy Contract

On this date, ____________________ , ____________________ (hereafter “the Master”) and ____________________ (hereafter “the slave”), contract themselves to the following agreement.

In exchange for the privilege of kissing each of the Master’s bare feet one time, which privilege will be rendered and accepted immediately after signing this contract, the slave shall provide as equal exchange in the eyes of both parties ongoing servitude and deference to the Master. This servitude and deference is to commence immediately upon the slave’s receipt of the privilege of kissing the Master’s feet and is to continue indefinitely until the contract is terminated (see “Termination”, below).

Care of the Slave

The slave will have no means of caring for themself upon the initiation of this contract (see “Attribution of Income and Property” below). The Master agrees that they shall provide for all of the slave’s needs to keep the slave in reasonable health. The Master may, if they chose, delegate management of those needs to the slave by permitting the slave access to the Master’s property (such as currency) to acquire and maintain such necessities.

These necessities include, but are not limited to: food, water, shelter, healthcare, and such attire as is required by law of humans in public places or which is needed to retain good health in adverse weather. The slave shall be provided with adequate opportunities to sleep or otherwise rest as their health requires.

The requirement to provide these necessities is such as is required to keep the slave in good health. The Master shall have the discretion to forego such necessities for brief times that do not endanger the slave’s welfare when the Master deems it appropriate, such as intentionally inducing sleep deprivation on a short term basis, as long as such deprivations do become neither so routine nor so extreme as would endanger the slave’s health.

Master’s initials: _________

Slave’s initials: _________

Attribution of Income and Property

Excepting those funds contributed to a “rainy day” fund to belong to the slave, the slave surrenders its current possessions and future income to the Master. The slave acknowledges that any labor they perform while this contract is in effect they do on behalf of the Master, and any compensation provided for said labor is due immediately upon receipt to the Master. The sole exception to this shall be a “rainy day” fund which belongs to the slave and is maintained under the slave’s name.

Contributions to the Rainy Day Fund

Any income provided for labor conducted by the slave, for goods sold that were created by the slave, or any income otherwise generated by activities directly attributed to the slave, will be apportioned to the Master and the slave’s Rainy Day Fund such that the greater of ten percent of said income or one months’ average rent in the location the slave is domiciled are contributed first to the Rainy Day Fund, and all remaining income is due to the Master for use as the Master sees fit.

Use of the Rainy Day Fund

The only property the slave is entitled to retain is that contained in the slave’s Rainy Day fund. The slave shall legally own the contents of the fund, but will have no access to those funds unless and until this contract is wholly terminated (see “Termination” below). Those funds are stored purely for the slave’s potential future use after this contract ends, in order to re-establish themself in society. When this contract is entered, all property formerly possessed by the slave is to be considered income for that month, and ten percent of that property or the equivalent amount to a months’ rent, whichever is greater, is to be stored in the fund immediately.

Financial Obligations of the Master

As the slave neither owns nor has any method by which to come into possession of any property, currency, and things of this nature, the Master agrees that they will furnish to the slave such items when the slave must make use of them. This includes any form of material possession the slave needs to complete their obligations under this contract to serve and defer to the Master. The Master may, at their discretion, provide regularly accessible items the slave may use to complete the slave’s duties, but all such items will at all times remain the Master’s property. This includes such things as keys, credit and debit cards or cash, clothing, vehicles, etc.

Master’s initials: _________

Slave’s initials: _________

Obligations of the Slave

Once the slave has received and utilized the privilege provided to the slave by this contract, the slave chooses to serve and defer to the Master until such time as this contract is terminated (see “Termination” below).

Consent of the Slave

The Master and the slave agree that the slave’s ongoing participation in this contract and decision not to terminate the contract constitutes the consent of the slave to all terms in this document. The slave may withdraw their consent at any time by terminating this agreement (see “Termination” below). Ongoing participation in this agreement is otherwise acknowledged by both parties as the slave’s consent to any of the Master’s actions and any actions the Master requires the slave to undertake excepting those provided below. In any situation in which the slave’s consent is relevant, the slave defers decisions about whether they consent to the Master and consent to abide by the Master’s choices by participating in this document, excepting those documented below. This deferral and ongoing consent shall cease immediately following the termination of this agreement.

Master’s initials: _________

Slave’s initials: _________

What the slave Does Not Consent To

The slave explicitly does not consent to any of the following; any attempt to subject the slave to the following shall result in immediate termination of the contract, and may be grounds for the slave to file criminal or civil suits against the Master:

Being made to participate in, be party to, or otherwise contribute to criminal activities. If the slave is directed to do so this contract is immediately terminated and it is to be assumed the slave’s participation is done under duress
Medically unnecessary amputations or other procedures with meaningful risk of life-altering consequences
Knowing and intentional exposure to disease, dangerous gasses, dangerous drugs, or any other dangerous circumstances which pose a risk of significant or permanent harm to the slave

In addition, the slave does not consent to: ______________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________________

Master’s initials: _________

Slave’s initials: _________

Obedience of the Slave

The slave shall obey the verbal and non-verbal commands, instructions, and standing rules of the Master to the best of their ability.

Rules

The Master may choose to implement a number of standing rules. If they do, the slave is to learn these rules as quickly as the slave is able, and follow the rules at all times.

Tasks

The Master may choose to set recurring tasks the slave is expected to complete, such as serving breakfast each day at a certain time. Regardless of whether the slave is assigned recurring tasks or not, the Master may at any time instruct the slave to perform additional tasks. The slave will do their best to complete all tasks promptly and successfully.

Uses

The Master may choose to use the slave and their body in any way they wish, excepting the non-consenting uses documented above. The Master may choose to do so at any time and in any circumstances. The slave is to make themself and their body available at all times for any use the Master wishes to make of them.

Deference of the Slave

The slave shall at all times behave respectfully toward the Master, and show the Master all courtesies the slave knows of. This includes any additional courtesies the Master describes or defines for the slave, regardless of whether they are traditional courtesies in normal society.

Modes of Address

The slave shall refer to the Master as “Sir/Ma’am,” “Master/Mistress,” “Owner,” or using whatever other honorific the Master instructs the slave to use.

Posture

The slave shall learn and adopt such poses and postures as their Master wishes. They should at all times be mindful of their posture, and endeavour to display their body using good form to display pride and gratitude to be their Master’s property.

Attire

The slave shall adopt such attire as is provided by the Master. The Master shall provide attire as is required for the slave in keeping with the law and preventing harm from adverse weather. Beyond this limitation, the slave shall expect and proudly wear as much or as little as the Master provides in all circumstances.

The Master may, if they wish, require attire for the slave that requires limited body modifications. This may include piercings or tattoos, as long as such piercings and tattoos are located in places where they may be reasonably concealed beneath normal streetwear if this agreement is terminated. Piercings or tattoos that would be situated on body parts of the slave that could have adverse social repercussions if the agreement is terminated may be made to the slave with the slave’s consent. However, if the Master attempts to coerce the slave to get such body modifications without the slave’s explicit consent this contract is terminated immediately, and this behavior may be grounds for the slave to file criminal or civil suits against the Master.

Correction of the Slave

The Master and the slave both acknowledge that it is the slave’s intention to obey and defer to the Master to the best of the slave’s ability. Both parties agree that the Master wishes to aid in and enable the slave’s success in this regard, and assist the slave in obeying and deferring to the Master.

In order to provide such assistance, the Master may deem it appropriate to furnish the slave with positive or negative conditioning. Both the Master and the slave acknowledge that the decision of whether and if so what type of conditioning the Master should provide the slave at any time is the Master’s sole discretion, and the slave welcomes whatever behavioral assistance the Master deigns to provide.

Because some forms of negative conditioning may by accompanied by risk of injury, the slave acknowledges the inherent danger in such negative conditioning treatments and agrees to hold harmless the Master and any agents he appoints for any injury done during best-effort attempts to provide appropriate negative conditioning.

While this waiver applies to all harms done during such best-faith efforts, the agreement acknowledges that certain forms of negative conditioning are either inherently harmful or will become harmful beyond some threshold of force or other forms of damage.

Best-faith efforts require that neither the Master nor any agent they authorize to condition the slave will apply any force or other form of conditioning that might reasonably be expected to leave the slave with significant or lasting injuries. This includes, but is not limited to, any injury or accumulated injuries lasting more than two weeks; any injury or accumulated injuries resulting in broken bones; any injury or accumulated injuries resulting in cessation of consciousness (blacking out); and ________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________.

Both the Master and the slave acknowledge and accept that some minor, short-term injuries are both acceptable and expected results of some forms of negative conditioning that the Master may deem necessary to the slave’s training.

Failure to limit damage to the slave to those of lesser severity than what is listed above shall terminate this contract immediately and may be grounds for the slave to file criminal or civil suits against the Master.

Termination

This contract may be terminated by either party at any time.

Verbal Termination

Either party may permanently terminate this contract at any time by speaking this phrase aloud in the presence of the other, including remote presence via telephone, video call, or equivalent technology: _______________________________________________________________________________________

Written Termination

Either party may permanently terminate this contract at any time by sending this phrase in writing to the other, whether the medium of that writing is paper, digital, or other reasonably legible form: _______________________________________________________________________________________

Non-verbal Termination

Either party may permanently terminate this contract at any time by making rhythmic noises that correspond to these three letters as indicated in Morse code: ______________. Both the Master and the slave agree to take appropriate steps to memorize this pattern.

The Master agrees to avoid putting the slave in circumstances whereby the slave can neither verbally, non-verbally, or by written means terminate the contract. Putting the slave in such circumstances will immediately terminate this contract and may be grounds for the slave to file criminal or civil suits against the Master.

Automatic Termination

Several clauses in this contract indicate actions, behaviors, or circumstances that immediately terminate this contract. Any time such an automatic termination would come into effect, it applies immediately. If both Master and slave are present and neither wishes the contract to end at that time, both may immediately affirm that the contract remains in force. Such an affirmation does not negate the clause that triggered it, and any future incidents of such clause will immediately bring the contract to a close without their own corresponding affirmation.

Upon Termination

Upon termination of this contract, the slave immediately retracts all consent provided herein.

The slave has no obligation to serve or defer to the Master subsequent to the termination of this contract.

The Master’s obligations to the slave shall end when the Master has enabled the slave to access all funds in the Rainy Day Fund, as the slave will have none of the possessions necessary to perform social functions such as accessing such accounts. The Master shall additionally furnish the slave one complete set of clothing (streetwear) appropriate to the season, and shall provide access to such electronics as are necessary to acquire adequate transportation. If the Master retains any personal identification cards of the slave, the Master must relinquish those to the slave immediately.

If the slave requires proof of residence or similar documentation in re-establishing their independent living conditions, the Master is to provide such documentation as soon as is reasonably possible upon receiving the request.

Terms

Both the Master and the slave agree that this is an equal and fair exchange, granting each party appropriate compensation for what the counterpart concedes in their respective estimations. Both the Master and the slave acknowledge that they enter into this agreement of their own free will, that they do so without duress or coercion, and that this agreement adequately represents their desired legal obligations to one another.

Notary Public Signature: _________________________________ Name:____________________________________ Date: _____________________________________	Master Signature: _________________________________ Name:____________________________________ Date: _____________________________________
	Slave Signature: _________________________________ Name:____________________________________ Date: _____________________________________

Ye Olde Guarde

I…am not old guard. I know very little about it. I find most of the practices common to Old Guard leathermen relatively disinteresting or unappealing.

None of that is novel or remarkable. That is basically the norm for my generation, a gay millennial who grew up in the nineties and early two thousands.

Kink has, as a community, largely moved on from the Old Guard. When it comes up at all it is often people expressing, essentially, historical curiousity. I do recall running into it a lot more when I was younger — when I was a teenager exploring kinky spaces online, there was more of an ongoing culture war between those who found value in Old Guard and those who found it fundamentally, irredeemably flawed. And so some peripheral degree of awareness of it seeped in.

My perception, in those circumstances, was that Old Guard was a very narrow, dogmatic way of practicing kink. It entailed a lot of specific fetishes practiced in specific ways. So many of those contradicted my notions of what was hot that it was a non-starter for me, basically off of the table from day one. Something to be avoided. Like leather — I had no interest in subs wearing clothing at all, yet in Old Guard subs and doms alike are dressed and dressed preferably in leather. Ew. What status differentiation is even happening, then? How would a dom get to enjoy visual access to a sub’s body? Just very meh all around, as far as I was concerned.

Lately, I’ve been going on bluesky, and to a lesser extent twitter, and…being disappointed. Probably because of how small bluesky is it is nearly impossible to curate a feed to be exclusively or almost exclusively kinks I’m interested in and want to see. There are too few people to choose from to follow to be able to narrow down what comes up on my feed – I’ll follow someone whose last ten posts are all things I like only for, a month later, my feed to be inundated with ten shared photos of fisting and gaping that make me nauseous and prompt me to unfollow that person.

This is a pretty regular occurrence on bluesky, but it has always happened regardless of platform. It happened on twitter, albeit less often. There were so many people on twitter it was easier to find ones with specific kinks to follow. And it happened on tumblr, which was as or more populated than kink twitter and also much better at enabling you to create curated feeds.

I’ve consumed other forms of social media for a while now too; primarily tiktok, but a few months back I became a reddit user. On both I’ve observed a lot of trends, shared frustrations, shared biases, etc. among lots of gay people. And, occasionally, I see discussion about “the community.”

Growing up, “the community” among gay people hadn’t yet migrated online. I started college in 2006. The world’s first iPhone came out in 2007, and didn’t allow third party apps for several years. Grindr was founded in 2009. I graduated in 2011. For me, “the community” wasn’t an online thing yet. Online the gay community didn’t exist; there were gay people, and gay kinky people, scattered in a diaspora among small, sometimes highly active, online forums and bulletin boards and things like that. Craigslist still had a personals section. But there was no singular online space that a large proportion, even a majority, of gay people participated in. There was no online gay shared experience.

But in Dallas, where I went to college, there was Oak Lawn. The Gayborhood. A street full of proudly queer shops, and surrounding townhomes full of gay people. There was S4, a stereotypical pop dance club, with black walls and flashing, multicolored lighting. There were…I don’t even remember the names of them, but there was a cowboy aesthetic club across the street. There was a lesbian club. There were restaurants in between them, including one Black Eyed Pea that always felt misplaced to me. And there was a never-ending flow of queer foot traffic. There were little gay clothing shops selling nothing but $100 underwear that the smallest twink could barely squeeze into (I was a twink at the time! I couldn’t fit into them! I tried!).

That was a kind of community – literally. It was a city within a city, an enclave. It wasn’t a ghetto – gay people weren’t confined there or forced to live there. But it was a community. It wasn’t a very tightly knit community; but it was a location where a lot of similar people got to together to celebrate being a type of person. To celebrate being gay.

Being gay is, in some ways, like being kinky. In other ways it is completely separate. Both are invisible minorities, rather than visible ones. Both are something that one has to recognize and acknowledge in themselves — coming out to yourself as having that identity. Both are something that you may or may not come out as to others, and are likely to experience fear and trepidation about coming out to others because it is culturally stigmatized. Kink is not, on its own, generally recognized as a form of queerness; a man and woman who practice a strictly female-led household behind closed doors are welcome as allies to the queer community, but not as members. But kink is, like queerness, a form of deviant sexual, social, and often gender identity. It (usually) involves subverting gender roles and expectations, practicing sex in atypical ways that are socially taboo.

So, so far, I’ve mostly rambled from topic to topic here. What does any of this have to do with the Old Guard of gay leathermen? Is it just because they were gay, and kinky, and a discrete community? No.

Online now, on tiktok, on reddit, I see gay people complaining about things about gay culture they hate. “It’s so hard to find a guy who’s serious” “all gay guys just want to hook up” “grindr is just a bunch of old men preying on twinks.” While I personally consider the first two complaints to be the whining of marginalized people who want to mimic the heteronormative values of their oppressors and romanticize the deeply toxic values underpinning a lot of the marital/romantic problems straight people have, the latter is a pretty valid complaint. But what none of these are are representative opinions of The Gay Community. They are opinions of the Gen Z gays. Millennial gays show up sometimes to protest or interject or sympathize — lots of millennial gays have related stories of attracting adult predators on Kik, that notorious staple for toxic messaging communities. But there is no gay community on Tiktok, and there is no gay community online. And with the erosion of and death of so many brick-and-mortar gay venues and locations there is decreasingly a gay community offline.

There is, to a larger degree, some amount of BDSM community online. Fetlife attempts to be such a place, although I’ve never managed to log back into it for more than three or four consecutive days before forgetting about it for months or years. Twitter, Bluesky, etc. have tried to be the BDSM community space Tumblr once was. But even Tumblr was imperfect, and Twitter/Bluesky don’t even come close.

I’ve watched Gen Z gays whine and moan about the normative experiences of gay men, dating, hooking up, etc. and see some of myself reflected in them. I resent the inability to bring any expectations to the table in the kink space. While we have a partially shared vocabulary, gay kinky men broadly lack any set of social, cultural norms.

I want to be very clear – it is a good thing that we embrace that, for example, a submissive can be a top and not bottom at all. It is a good thing that we embrace that a dominant with a foot fetish can want to lick a submissive’s feet. It is good that we have a lot of flexibility with our kinks, and don’t prescriptively judge people for engaging with kinks in anything but a rigid, inflexible way.

It does make me, specifically sad, though, that I can’t find any kind of space not just where my kinks have staying power – I can’t find any kind of space where any kinks have staying power. That’s the appeal of the Old Guard. Yes, it is toxic and harmful to say that submissives need to be the bottoms, or that submissives should not be allowed to put on a collar without the consent of a dominant top who grants it to them.

But it is also…a communicative shorthand. It is also a structure. It is also a way of satisfying a need to say “when I go into this space, if I see someone doing <X>, I can infer <Y>. In fact, I can infer <Y> about everyone doing <X> there.” It is, in short, meaning.

And…in watching The Youths™ whine about how toxic all gay people are and how they hate that they can’t find a boyfriend who values loyalty and Traditional Hetero Values expressed in every way but calling it what it is…I empathize. I kind of want Old Guard at this point. Do I like leather? Fuck no. Do I like the idea of a boy wearing a collar meaning a Top has collared him and other Tops won’t talk to him, but other bottoms can?

Honestly yeah. I do like that.

I don’t think we have a community, not in the kind of ways that can give us that. We don’t have thought leaders, at least not for the most part. You can’t rely on any given gay to have seen or agree with anything that Natalie Wynn, for example, has said. Most gay people have never even heard of her. But…I kind of wish we did.

Our enemies do. If you go look at evangelical Christians…my god, that is the definition of a community. A toxic, hateful, spiteful community, but a very organized community. Evangelical Christians get together en masse every week to listen to a dedicated thought leader help them codify, organize, and understand their shared values as a community. And calling them our enemies is not some demonizing hyperbole: evangelical Christians self-describe as our enemies. They call us their enemies. In saying that they’re our enemies all I’m doing is agreeing with their acknowledgement of our inter-communal animosity.

But there is no Big Gay Al’s Big BDSM Convention at which the Big Gay BDSM Community Leaders get up and do Big Kinky Gay Pontificating about how all bottoms need to obey their tops, or how junior tops still need to defer to senior bottoms, or whatever other set of silly rule we’d like to make up. And while I think it’s good that we aren’t so proscriptive about our interactions and behaviors, I do wish that we had contexts available that gave us the option to.

I feel like…I want something like a concept of High BDSM and Low BDSM. Our current BDSM community feels like anarchy; every does whatever feels good at the time. Great. Let’s keep that. That’s perfect Low (formality) BDSM. And let’s say we have something like Old Guard become the standard for High BDSM. Maybe there are some events that are strictly High BDSM, and everyone going to it goes because all or enough of their kinky desires conform to a communally-agreed-to definition of “standard” BDSM expectations. And no one is expected to conform to all of them all of the time. But it’d be nice if we at least had them.

The reason I think it’d be nice is because then we could have Medium BDSM. We could have a space where High BDSM standards aren’t required — but they are the norm, and deviating from them is welcomed but also comes with an expectation of clarification. Are you a dom who likes drinking subs’ piss? Great! In Medium BDSM, wear a flag or something showing that you like drinking piss even while everything else about your presentation conforms to the appearance of a dom. In Medium BDSM no one is welcome to criticize you for being a dom who enjoys drinking piss, because there is literally nothing wrong with that. Instead, though, people are just surprised by it and are welcome to be surprised by it.

I’m not as pessimistic as the people who think it is inimical to human nature to be incapable of being surprised by something without also regarding it as inferior. The human psyche does not have to be inherently xenophobic; nothing about our brains say that they must be. It is possible to have a norm, and see the norm be violated, without making any kind of judgement about it.

As someone who…yearns for norms, whose current media consumption is kind of hell because there is nowhere I can go and feel comfortable, happy, seen, safe, what have you…I wish we had community norms, and I wish we objected to, stopped, and educated anyone who judged people from deviating from those norms.

Because the truth is that we don’t. Foot worship was a symbol of submission in many human societies going back millenia. Does someone with a foot fetish have to be a sub? Fuck no. Nor should they have to. But is worshipping feet seen, by the vanilla community, as embarrassing/kinky/gross/weird? Yes. It is stigmatized by the normies. There is a norm that licking feet is gross, a humiliating thing to do…and then there is a community all about status and power and humiliation in which so many members find that the idea of licking feet isn’t humiliating at all. Great! What, uh, what in our community is humiliating? Diapers? Well, sometimes, but also we assure everyone that wearing a diaper doesn’t need to be unless you want it to be. Drinking piss? Well, sure, but we also assure everyone that drinking piss doesn’t need to be unless you want it to be.

In being as kink-positive as we are, and as we ought to be, we have created a status/power anarchy. We already have Low BDSM. And that’s great.

But I get on bluesky and scroll through our sexual anarchy for hours and just feel like it is…All. So. Meaningless.

I want Old Guard, or something like it. I want something with community norms. Do I want to go to a High BDSM event like I’ve described? Maybe occasionally. But what I really want is a Medium BDSM space, where I can go and bring a sub who isn’t in leather. But I lead him around on a leash and a collar, and that collar tells other doms that he is owned. And when a man there in a pup hood has his keys on his left side, I know he is one of those rare-ish dom pups. But all the pups there with keys on their right side I can safely call “Good boy!” without insulting them, implying they’re a sub when they aren’t.

Misgendering them, if we’re real, about their BDSM gender.

Do I think we can have this? Honestly, no. I don’t really have hope here. The gays and many of the kinksters are on the political left just as much as the evangelicals are on the political right. They are authoritarians prone to fascism; we are anarchists prone to syndicalism. We don’t have rallies where a demagogue can state some norms that we, as a community, will internalize and follow.

I don’t see us ever being that way.

And for all the good it brings, that does keep us from really achieving a defined consensus on norms. We have norms that prevail loosely in small clusters of our communities…but those small communities are widely varied, hard to access, and the norms are loose at best.

Why did I even think of any of this? Why bother whining about it?

Honestly, I think having written a book was part of a subconscious desire to try and reach a lot of kinky people in an organized way. I think my subconscious, having its usual delusions of grandeur, was like but what if we tried to build a community around a group of people who all want to have those norms. What if we built a fandom of people around a prescription of BDSM norms that *CAN* be High BDSM, what if we reached so many people that we could get at least 30 or 40% of them to buy into some form of BDSM norms that we can then build healthier, Medium BDSM spaces off of, and everyone at least has the same language and expectations that specific behaviors and roles mean, by default, specific things?

So…yeah. That’s, I guess, something that’s been rolling around in my mind lately. Every time I get on Bluesky and see someone who had been nothing but a naked, chaste sub boy wearing socks, sitting on a chair above the camera, shoving his feet at the camera and inviting subs to come sniff them, and I’m just like “Ugh, another one? Sigh. Unfollow.” Because it’s great that he’s doing that; I love that for him. I just don’t, personally, want to be a part of it. I want to be able to go somewhere were a dom is a dom, a sub is a sub, a switch is a switch, and transitioning between roles involves some degree of formal, clearly denoted, ritual transition. I want to be able to be somewhere where if you see someone licking, sniffing, or kissing someone else’s feet it unambiguously implies that the latter is in a position of dominance over the former.

I want a community that is a private club that has rules and for which admission requires agreeing to those rules, and breaking the rules implies consent to being ejected.

I think the absence of any such space that I know of – I know only of “generic” kinky spaces like Fetlife, not specific kink spaces with specific hard-and-fast protocols and expectations – I think that actually did a lot to prompt me to put as much effort into writing a book as I did. Like, this doesn’t exist, and thank god it’s not the norm or only option because that would be toxic as fuck, but for people who want it and wish to participate in it I’d love to see that space get built.

Why, for me, a good dom cannot be a perfect dom

For a service sub, the fetishized experience is that of being inferior, lesser, less important. Not mattering in relative comparison to the dom. Having a status such that your pain, pleasure, comfort, effort expended, etc. are all so unimportant compared to even small amounts of pleasure or convenience for your better that, on merit, any amount of effort expended by a sub that results of any amount of positive experience for a dom is a fair, worthwhile, even, equal, appropriate thing. Or, perhaps, even that that is too generous to the sub and places too much value on the sub’s time and pleasure; that, in fact, an infinite amount of pain/effort/investment by the sub still has less value than even the most minute improvement in life for the dom, and so even getting to provide the service is more of a treat for the sub than the dom in terms of who deserves what. It is, basically, idolization. Worship.

A good dom is one who takes good care of his sub. He listens to them, prioritizes their safety, takes good care of them. Being a good dom takes a lot of communication skill, wisdom, and empathy. A good dom is very responsible. Being a good dom means doing a lot of monitoring — for safety, for consent, for how things are going. Being a good dom means doing a lot of work as a caretaker. In a status/power exchange relationship this may not mean making sure a sub experiences much in the way of pleasure or fun, but it does mean making sure they are having a net positive experience. That may mean a presence of fulfilment, happiness, or joy from serving, even in the absence of actual fun or explicit pleasure, but it is something and it is necessary for a sub to be taken care of and have a good, meaningful, fulfilling life. The dom is responsible for ensuring that happens, because the dom decides what happens at all times. The relationship involves the sub deferring their agency to the dom, putting him in control.

The people who are good doms, in my experience, are those who are very empathetic. They are kind. They listen to their subs. They work hard to understand how their subs are feeling. They work hard to maintain a state in which their subs are, in general, well, emotionally balanced, fulfilled.

Doing all of that involves caring about their subs. They are good doms because they take good care of their subs, but they take good care of their subs because they are caring people, and they have developed an emotional desire to see their subs be fulfilled, to see their subs live their best lives. That desire, that attachment, that caring is generally a necessary part of a good dominant. Without that desire a dominant would generally just be an abuser.

That desire also fairly systematically undermines the fetish. The dom wants to make decisions about the sub for the sub’s sake and not just his own. A good dom is not purely selfish; he does not see his own value as genuinely and truly higher than that of his subs, and he does not treat any experience of his subs as genuinely less deserving than his own experience. There is a saying that a sub is the one who has the real power in a d/s relationship, and my own experience is that that is not true at all. But a sub is the one whose helplessness imposes a burden on the dominant to cater to the sub’s needs. The sub may not have the power, but precisely because of that a good dom makes far more decisions and invests far more effort on the sub’s behalf to ensure that their lack of agency does not undermine their emotional well-being.

Given that the fetish is all about the sub’s relative unimportance, all about the ways in which the Dominant deserves to be pampered hand and foot by the sub, who merits not even being ignored in the dom’s presence…an actually good dom can’t fulfill. The qualities making him a good dom are the very ones that subvert it.

I do not think I’d want to be with a perfect dom for service submissives. I think a perfect dom would be a lazy sociopath. He doesn’t have any emotional resonance with his submissives; he has no actual emotional investment in their experience. But he is too lazy to train submissives over and over again, and so despite his lack of empathy he invests the minimal amount of effort into keeping his submissives maintained. They aren’t miserable, at least not miserable enough that they are still functional. Their mental health is catered to precisely as much as is necessary to render them of continuing use to the dominant and no farther, and it is catered to not out of empathy or caring but out of an apathetic disinterest in the consequences of the sub being too broken to serve–that is, a purely self-interested desire not to have to train and retrain subs continually over the course of the sociopathic dominant’s life.

I think that kind of dominant, while perfect, would also be miserable to serve. The actual experience of serving and being owned by a good dominant would be far superior. But the good dominant would, by his very nature, also be constantly invoking a form of cognitive dissonance in a service sub. Or, at least, in me. It’s immersion breaking. The only real salve for that, at least the only kind I could see being even reasonably sustainable or debatably healthy, would be finding a dom who is both a sociopath and not susceptible to empathy but also both lazy and intelligent, and able to recognize that it is less work for him to do some modicum of emotional and physical maintenance on his property than to have to be continually replacing it.

I certainly see that paradigm in other subs online. In lots and lots of fantasies especially. The whole fetishization of the straight male community, the tendency for subs to refer to themselves as “fags” with a pretense of “oh we’re reclaiming it” whilst actually just using it as a pejorative in exactly the way straight men originally intended it…I think there are a lot of subs who crave the latter fantasy I’ve described so strongly that they discard the idea of serving genuinely good men in pursuit of the fantasy. In some cases I think that may come from fetishization; in others from low self-esteem and a genuine sensation of personal worthlessness. I think in the vast majority of cases it comes from varying combinations of both, along with a healthy dose of self-deception and ignorance about one’s true motives.

In my youth, I think, I would have said the only way I could be happy would be by finding such a sociopath. I wouldn’t have used that word; I don’t think I was even originally aware that a dom with a functional capacity for empathy necessarily undermined/subverted my fetishized ideal. I might have been. But even if so I would have felt the only manageable, sustainable path for me as a submissive was a world/life in which that paradigm was not subverted at all, that I had no capacity for bearing the cognitive dissonance of things which undermined it.

My semi-recent decisions to contemplate being submissive again in various ways and capacities comes, I think, with a recognition that that is not and can not be true. Partly because there is no way to serve such a dom within the construct of my existing life and relationships, but also because I think I’ve learned enough to know that being shown tenderness is more important to me than shying away from cognitive dissonance. And, to be clear, that is an intellectual conclusion. Emotionally, have I internalized that? No, I don’t think so, not yet.

But, perhaps, I’ll get there. Because I think serving a perfect dom actually sounds horrendous, and serving a good dom would be the far superior option.

Submission, Insecurity, & Me

There’s a dominant man I’ve known for a long time. Longer, to my surprise, than I’ve known even my boyfriend. We’ve chatted on and off over the last decade, predominately as two doms, but when I first started exploring submission with a status exchange dynamic to our conversation. When I started exploring submissiveness again we eventually resumed that kind of dynamic, albeit in a different way.

Recently, he asked me how I’m currently feeling about my exploration of submission, and I responded that I was uncertain. He told me to elaborate, and I did, and we had a conversation about that. One thing he concluded is that I need to separate what components of my thoughts/feelings/desires about submission are a manifestation of my insecurity and which are not. This, hopefully, is me doing — or at least attempting to do — that.

It’s not like I’m really new to talking about either of those things here. At least, not in isolation. But the two are I think pretty heavily intertwined; when he first suggested that they needed to be untangled he acknowledged that that would be challenging. It does feel like a rather Herculean task. Later in our conversation he asked what I wanted to get out of submission, saying he didn’t perceive that it was enjoyment. And I principally agree with him, although getting enjoyment out of it would be nice. What I hoped to get out of it was a sense of being valuable, I told him, and I still think that is true.

And that largely encapsulates how completely intertwined insecurity and submission are to me. What do I desire from submission? Being told and shown that I am valuable, that I provide value, that I am desirable, that what I say and do and how I look and act are all things someone wants. Wants to own, wants to employ. Is benefitted by owning, by using. A concrete, tangible, incontrovertible proof that something I did was good, was right, was useful.

My favorite youtuber made a video not too long ago about romance in which she posited various romantic roles, but focused at one point on the dichotomy of lover and beloved. A core part of what men are denied under patriarchy is the opportunity to be the beloved, even though we need that as much as anyone else does. I feel that need pretty acutely. I even joked about it on Bluesky apparently a month ago.

If that is the core value of submission to me, how do I untangle that from my insecurity? It seems patently obvious that my recent interest in submission is pretty thoroughly tied to having recently established new floors for my self-esteem. But, regardless of how much my self-esteem issues are the inciting incident, I still don’t think my submissive drives are just about a lack of self-worth, right?

There’s a part of me that wants to say that hey, I’ve had an interest in power exchange relationships since I was a kid. I felt guiltily interested in slavery, both as dom and as sub, for nearly as long as I can remember, certainly since before puberty. However, looking to have “well-established pre-existing interest in D/s” doesn’t work as well when I look back and say well, hey, I’ve also had self-esteem issues that long. In a session a couple weeks ago my therapist and I discussed a lot of the things going on in my childhood (which is rare for us actually) preventing healthy self-esteem development strategies.

So…is my interest in submission separable from low self-esteem and insecurity? I mean, I’m not psychologist, and we as a species have not yet accumulated the sum total of all psychological knowledge necessary to understand the human mind anyway. So like proceed with many grains of salt, I guess.

My first instinct is to say that my interest in submission is part of a duality, the yin of my dominance’s yang. Even without low self-esteem, I have still felt the pull of submission stronger than that of dominance over most of my life, and as a part of the general D/s fetishization I have, and since obviously my dominance isn’t tied to low self-esteem, this must come from a place not of purely or exclusively self-esteem/insecurity appeasement. The only problem is…my desires for dominance also aren’t necessarily separable from low self-esteem or insecurity. I may, how insecure is it to crave someone who literally chooses to place more value on you than on themself? That is…like, is that not peak ego appeasement? Wanting to be worshipped?

So, uhhh, how much is my whole kink drive just actually a small child crying out for compliments and approval in a sea of “Why isn’t this 93 a 100?”s? I feel like it’s probably a lot, right? “These are just careless mistakes” is a shockingly traumatic sentence to remember from, you know, right around the time I remember seeing Hosea’s wife Gomer depicted on her knees in chains as a slave in my children’s picture Bible in third grade and feeling guilty about liking it. And trying to be discrete about how often I re-read that picture Bible’s book of Hosea. Damn, they sure implied Gomer liked it.

Anyhow, maybe the whole core of my kink drive is actually how a D/s situation is just a sort of self-fulfilling cycle of affirmation of the other’s value. The dominant’s value is constantly affirmed by the sub’s desire to elevate and serve him. The sub’s value is constantly affirmed by the dominant’s approval of his work and pleasure at the sub’s presence and obedience.

You’d think I’d have way more of a praise kink than I do. Praise does tragically little for me. Maybe it was my most formative decade of praise rarely being unconditional, and more often being “You did a great job, you just need to work on…” Praise that concludes with a “but you could do better” is not praise at all, especially when it always ends that way. It’s just a fancy way of pointing out how you’re lacking, of how you’re not good enough. I think my brain internalized the idea that an absence of ensuing criticism is the only form of honest praise. How do I know if I’m a good boy? Well, not if my dom tells me I am, or says I did something well, but if he has no notes on what I need to change to do it better next time. When he is simply happy with what has been done. When I am enough.

So yeah, I don’t know. I’m not really that sure I can separate my desire to sub from my insecurity. Perhaps what I can do is call out the ways in which they interact, intermix, and are informed by each other. I might not be able to say “well, I just like <x> form of submission on its own, without any potential interaction it has with my sense of self-worth,” but I can at least say “well, I like <x> and also I think it is interconnected with my sense of self-worth; use that and do with that as you choose.”

That isn’t the same thing at all, of course, and I think is rather less valuable. But it can, at least, inform a dom that when he wants to give me a compliment, the most effective way to do it is to just say he was pleased with something I did, and to reserve statements about how I should do it better next time to instead be instructions on what he wants presented as clarifications immediately prior to the next time I do it. It can shape how I could be dommed, even if it can’t attribute my motives for submission to something purely or even primarily erotic.

Like, ultimately, what I want as a sub is to be an attractive, sexually enticing, desirable possession that a man wants because he wants unfettered access to do anything to me, or make me do anything that he wants. Do I want to do dishes? No, it’s not like, hot or anything. Do I want my knees to ache from a wooden floor? No, I don’t get off on pain. Do I actually like sucking cock? No, it makes me gag and snot run from my nose. But I want someone who enjoys looking down on me and making me do menial work so that he doesn’t have to. I want someone who wants me kneeling naked on his floor for his own aesthetic pleasure and his sexual arousal. I want someone to want me to suck his cock for his enjoyment.

I want the sensation of providing him those things, of looking at him and seeing pleasure I caused. That’s what I want out of submission.

Low Pain Tolerance

Content warning: BDSM, including welts.

On Saturday, I went a session as a sub to a switch who lives a few hours away. This was the third time we’d tried to schedule a session; the first we’d arranged a weekend, but both forgot to message the other prior and missed that date. The second we were more on top of coordinating, but I had a lot of symptoms of sickness a few days prior, and ended up postponing. This Saturday, I actually went.

I had not had a car for a few months. It was an extreme annoyance in many regards, but especially given that the only form of work I could actively elect to just go do, driving for Uber or Lyft, was not possible, and every other job I applied to turned me down. Since I don’t have a job, financing was out of the picture, which meant expending an uncomfortable amount of my savings getting a vehicle. The process of actually purchasing it took painfully long, nearly two weeks, and I was worried I wouldn’t even have one prior to this weekend. Mercifully, though, things worked out so that the Friday before I finally picked up a new (used) car, and in addition to unlocking the capacity to make money, I also could actually travel to (rather than cancel yet again) this session.

My Jeep made it, even if it wasn’t exactly happy

On the way there, I got a breakfast sandwich, croissant, and iced tea for breakfast. I investigated a low tire pressure warning at a gas station, and determined that the tire pressure sensors were faulty – the tire was flawless and well-filled. I had some congestion, and hoped it would clear up rather than persist through the day.

I got there shortly before noon and waited a while for him to reply to my text. Eventually he brought me inside, had me sit with him on the couch, and we chatted. All I remember of that conversation is him emphasizing the use of ‘green/yellow/red’ as a safeword system; explaining his situation with his several roommates; telling me he didn’t want to talk about politics; and then starting to talk about politics. He moved on after a few minutes, though, to take me on a tour of his home.

He started with his kitchen where he makes almost all of their food from scratch because of his aversion to processed food and unnatural ingredients. He then took me down to his dungeon, showed me his swing, a St. Andrew’s cross he had under construction, and generally explained about a lot more he wanted to get done. Last he lead me up to his bedroom and we chatted a bit more there. Eventually he had me kneel, then a bit later massage his feet, then undress. He continued talking while I gave him a foot massage about everything from relationships to work to politics and back. After asking me what I did and confirming I had a tech background, he focused largely on his work experiences.

Eventually he seemed ready to move on from the foot massage, and had me start giving him a blow job. I mentioned how out of practice I was, especially at deep-throating, and so he focused on that a bit. Eventually a combination of fatigue and mucus buildup rendered me mostly useless at it, and my failure to participate actively did little to keep him hard. He stopped, lay down, grabbed his laptop, and we chatted some more, with me laying at the foot of the bed across from him. I tried to suppress an occasional cough but mostly failed. I hoped I wasn’t sick, and wasn’t going to get him or any of his roommates sick. I had literally cancelled once in that exact hope, and dreaded the idea while commuting there of it occurring again with a dom for whom I had been nothing but a flake up to that point.

As he told me about his internship with one of the early tech companies, I crawled under one of his legs, intending to rest my head on one of his thighs and cuddle between his legs. He just lifted the leg entirely, though, rather than leaving it resting on me, and rotated his cock towards me. Imagining he wanted me to suck it, I began to slowly work his cock again while he talked. That eventually evolved into a more dedicated deep-throating training session; he moved me through a few positions, ending with me on my back and my head hanging off the end of the bed as he stood in front of me. I had my hands balled into fists, squeezing my thumbs, as he’d instructed, and had found throughout that it helped. By the time I was on my back at the end of the bed, though, the combination of renewed fatigue and rebuilt mucus barrier had once again rendered my ability to force my body into action nonexistent.

There’s just, it seems, a place where the brain’s conscious ability to command itself stops – or, at least there is for me. It’s rather disheartening. I have yet to be in a place where a dom tries to apply additional stressors, like adding strokes from a crop or the like, to see if that can snap my mind past its fugue haze and get me applying effort again. In any case, whether such a thing might have done so or not, the man using my throat did not try it. Instead, he just stopped, laid down, and started exploring my body. He commented on liking my nipples, then bit them.

The day before, a dom I’ve been speaking too online for a few weeks now had had me put nipple clamps on. I found the experience painful in general; when he instructed me to situate them to maximize the pain they caused, I found it rather debilitating. It was quite difficult to also kneel, and just generally be still, from the pain of the clamps on the very tips of my nipples, though at no point did it get so bad I was unable to be obedient and re-apply them as they slipped off. Still, it was an excruciating, crippling sort of pain.

This biting was worse. It was certainly one of the most intense forms of pain I could recall ever experiencing up to that point – very possibly the most intense pain I had ever experienced. I was wincing, gasping, clutching my teeth, and trying to hold my body still, as he moved from nipple to nipple, biting each a couple of times. Not knowing how many more times he would, how long this would continue absolutely did not ease my mental state, although I rarely had enough capacity for conscious thought to be consumed by that particular fear.

Luckily, or perhaps kindly, he did not continue biting beyond maybe two or three times per nipple. Instead he rolled over and wanted me to bite his nipples. I began doing so, nibbling and sucking and tonguing them. He repeatedly instructed me to bite harder until I began to do so to his satisfaction; I felt rather worried, myself, by how hard I was biting, but he certainly seemed to enjoy it. After doing so with each of his nipples a bit, he had me progress to licking his armpits. Once both had been sufficiently worshipped, he instructed me to shower. He had asked earlier if I had cleaned out, which I had responded to negatively, and mentioned in the shower he had a douching attachment I was welcome to use. He stressed that although he hoped I did, it was entirely up to me whether to use it, and I certainly appreciated such a consent-focused set of instructions.

In the shower I did use the douche attachment; I have used shower douches before, albeit over half a decade ago. This one seemed much stronger; I did not recall the others pushing so much water it continually spilled out down my leg. I was someone self-conscious about perhaps not having inserted it sufficiently, although it had felt like I had. After running the douche, I re-ran the shower to rinse off (I had cleaned with soap prior to douching), then dried off. As my bowels became increasingly distressed, I picked up my pace with the towel, then hurried to the toilet and confirmed the douche had certainly managed to get plenty of water into me. A minute or so passed of repeatedly letting that out; I flushed let some more out, and was somewhat disheartened (if not surprised) that it was still not clear.

This was another moment where my general mental reserve of discipline failed; although I felt like I ought to get the shower back on, douche again, and repeat the process until the water did run clear, that was more a result of urban legend. While I may not have bottomed in nearly a decade, I have topped quite a lot, and I rarely have the patience for a bottom to perform an extensive douching routine. I am familiar with the general range of mess colons are likely to have in them. Perfectly clear water might be a nice guarantee, but it was certainly far more than had been even remotely necessary 90% of the time in my experience.

And I was so tired. And cold, and wet. And the day was still very young, and I had no idea to what extent he would embrace/try to avoid making fucking painful.

If I had been instructed to douche until the water ran clear, I would have. Of that I have no doubt. But to make myself go an extra, probably unnecessary, degree of effort for a maybe-kind-of command was just more than I had in me at that point. I finished drying off and headed downstairs.

I had expected to proceed down to the dungeon, kneel, and wait to see what he wished to do. However, he had stopped in the kitchen, where he was making bread. I knelt there, and he resumed chatting while he worked. Partly about the virtues of a Kitchenaid, partly about the breadmaking process, partly about work. I found myself rapidly in need of adjusting my posture because of the pain; he had instructed that I not stand in rooms he was in, but not clarified what I do instead, so I adopted a sort of side-saddle seating position. It felt more submissive than just sitting cross-legged, but was still somewhat stressful – albeit dramatically less so than actively being on my knees on the hard vinyl floor. I sat in the doorway as he worked the dough and talked. Eventually, one of his roommates got home and came in through the back door; I shuffled to the side so he could more easily walk through the kitchen doorway. He and the dom chatted for a bit and then he went back out and left again.

The dom resumed our conversation, relaxing against the kitchen sink as the bread rose in the oven, the door cracked open with a towel. I learned of his regret voting blue in 2016 and 2020, and his dislike of the current president but approval of his actions against the deep state. He had been a nice, sane, and safe dom in every way so far, but I’d be lying if I claimed this didn’t make me uncomfortable, and didn’t prompt my anxiety to spike further. I certainly hadn’t noticed any handguns secreted about the house, which was mildly reassuring.

Talk turned back to work, and eventually the bread came out of the oven. It had been in a large bowl, which seemed odd to me, but also was pasty-white and clearly not done. He invited me to stand so I could watch as he separated the mass into two balls, which he worked and then dropped into tin trays. He spread them out and sprinkled some flour on top, then set them into the oven and wholly closed the door. He marveled that more people didn’t make their own bread at home, and I expressed my surprise at the seeming simplicity of the process, far less involved than I had assumed. He told me there were only four ingredients, which I found impressive. He seemed content to leave me standing, and as we talked offered me a clementine, which I gratefully accepted. I’d had nothing to eat or drink since breakfast, eight hours ago.

The timer set on the oven, he instructed me to wait while he went upstairs. I heard him showering, and debated what to do with myself. I ended up deciding that even though he wasn’t in the room, it was relatively appropriate for me to wait on the floor, so I first knelt and then sat back down (when kneeling grew unbearable again). I tried to not let me gaze wander too much; it was certainly not my business to scrutinize his house or affects or anything. The wait was a good opportunity to appreciate how intensely cold I was, how much the floor hurt, and to worry about when/if he intended to feed me or give me anything to drink.

Some time after the shower had ended I heard him chatting with others upstairs, and some general walking around as he got ready. Eventually, he re-emerged in a bath robe, and told me that he liked tiktok. As he worked in the kitchen he let a video play of a young twink complaining about a client not paying them; apparently this boy was also a web developer, and I commented to the dom that I definitely never deliver a website until payment is rendered, and generally won’t start work until a 50% deposit is placed. This prompted him to express some concerns about the vulnerability of youth, like the young man in the tiktok, then swipe to the next.

Because my feed doesn’t contain them, I’d forgotten tiktok updated their videos to allow for many-minute length entries. The next was some suited man going on about how the U.S. has been provoking Russia for years, always creeping NATO east, and how good it is that the current U.S. president is finally talking to Russia and assuring them that the U.S. does not want further hostilities and is not planning to move further. Apparently the speaker had had some form of ambassadorial position; I can’t recall whether it was the speaker, the dom, or a mixture of both who narrated about how the deep state was invented after 9/11 as a conspiracy to ensure American hegemony, how both parties were swept up in it, and new presidents inculcated in the plot’s existence and their part in it. The dom seemed pleased that the current president was, apparently, rebelling against this plot, and the speaker on the phone indicated that the U.S.’s invitations to Georgia and Ukraine to join N.A.T.O were the cause of the current conflict.

Just a fact check, for those who do not know: Georgia and Ukraine are considered NATO-aspirant countries, have cordial relations with NATO, and want to join; neither Georgia nor Ukraine have ever been formally invited to join NATO at time of writing, despite assurances they will be invited eventually.

Eventually, the bread was ready. It was taken out, and we went downstairs to the dungeon. I knew it was sometime after 7pm, and it was wholly dark outside, but not really what time it was. I definitely didn’t feel comfortable staying the night, at this point, and also did not feel very comfortable driving super-late at night. I did not want to deny the dom the opportunity to use me as he wished and fuck me, but the lateness of the hour and my certainty that I wanted to drive home that day escalated the level of background fear I was navigating.

In the dungeon, I knelt and tried to stay out of the way as the dom went about setting up a projector with a porn feed. I waited a few minutes on my knees (there were thick rubber mats atop the concrete floor which were quite comfy) as he went upstairs to ask his roommates where the speaker had gone. Once that was located, and his preferred porn file was playing he dug through cabinets and we chatted about Temu’s relative offerings in the online retail space. He had me put wrist and ankle collars on myself while he got out other things, then walked over and put a collar on me.

I was instructed to stand beneath one of the rafters, to which he had affixed various cords. Grabbing my left wrist, he connected it to one of the cords. It was definitely a strain to reach; I shuffled to the left to try and take some of the tension off of the cuff, but was simply not tall enough to remove all the tension. In attempting to shackle my right wrist he determined he needed to loosen the cord on that side some so it would reach, but eventually got it shackled up as well. I mulled whether or not I ought to say anything about the tingling in my hands as he bound my ankle cuffs to a spreader bar. He was a sensitive and experienced dom; I have very little experience as a sub, and as a dom I certainly don’t bind anyone’s arms above their heads. When I dom I have the relative luxury of being able to adjust if a boy’s limbs feel any tingling at all, but it seemed unlikely that having your arms suspended above your head could ever produce no circulation challenges, and so I trusted him to monitor it/act as needed.

He slipped a blindfold over my head next, and groped me briefly. He made some kind of comment about nipple clamps; he’d called out that they were misplaced when we first came down, taking them where they had been strewn before. They looked pretty heavy. When he put them on me, though, they felt less painful than even the fairly cheap pair I’d tried to balance on the tips of my nipples the day before, and certainly much less painful than his bites had been earlier.

Next, the clink of chain sparked my curiousity. Eventually I learned of his intention to use it as a harness, as he laid it over my neck and crossed it over my chest. As he wrapped the ends around the small of my back I winced and gasped; now, the nipple clamps caught in the chain pulled sharply, and hurt much more. After a few seconds of my audible pain he reached around and got the chain untangled from the nipple clamps, then pulled tightly to try and bind the two ends of the chain together in front of my stomach. After several tugs he got them. I heard him walk away; before he’d put the blindfold on I’d seen him get out a flogger.

“Do you remember what your safewords are, boy?”

“Yes sir.”

A pause, and then a tapping sensation on my balls. I wasn’t sure if it was intended to be painful, but I would guess it was; my ballsack has a hydrocele, and that seems to generally dull most sensations, so I didn’t experience pain from it. After some tapping, a swishing noise was followed by a prompt burst of pain coming from my thigh. The flogger, I assumed, gritting my teeth. Another burst of pain on my chest, and then a lighter sensation as he flicked my stomach, perhaps trying to avoid causing damage from the chain. A few more harsh flicks brought a sensation of a heavy, stinging blow to each of my upper arms, and finally to the front of my other thigh. I inferred he moved around me as I began to feel blows land on my back, shoulders, butt, and the backs of my thighs. By the end of the rapid, heavy-feeling stings I was breathing heavily through clenched teeth. It hurt quite a lot.

I’d never experienced any form of impact play beyond spanking, and that had been half a decade prior. This was definitely new, both the sensation of the flogger and the rapid succession of impacts all over my body.

More taps on my balls preceded a series of strikes to my stomach and chest with another toy. Based on the sensation of the impact I now assume it was likely a riding crop. Footsteps, then more of the sharper, smaller thwacks on my back, butt, and the backs of my thighs. I was no doubt wincing at this point. I think I might have started grunting, or perhaps mewling; I recall doing a combination of both as the session progressed.

Another brief pause, and then the flogger began striking me from the front again. It felt non-stop then; I wonder now whether I leave longer pauses in between blows when I give spankings, but at the time it felt like each blow sure came immediately after the one before. This time as my upper arms, chest, and thighs were flogged I know I grunted and moaned. I remembered the scene from Gundam Wing where Duo is told it “would hurt less if he yelled out loud” with disbelief. Grunting and moaning seemed to be as much as I could manage to even do through the pain.

He moved again to my back, and trembling, grunts and moans abounded. When he finished on my back, he asked again:

“Remember your safewords, boy?”

“Yes sir,” I said, although this time I am pretty sure it was much weaker. I think I managed to make it audible, even if my voice trembled. He did another 360 with what I assume was a riding crop; those of you more used to this can perhaps help identify the tool based on the only persistent marks it seems to have left. I winced, moaned, and shook; I had already been pulling heavily on my wrist cuffs as my muscles contorted, and that only further exacerbated the tingling sensation.

I slumped after the cropping stopped, as he switched implements again. Another round with the flogger began. At no point did any of the blows seem to grow any heavier than those before; they all felt significantly painful, but none unbearable on their own. By this point, though, my brain was on fire. I was overwhelmed with the pain. I think some sobs began to work their way into my responses to new blows alongside the familiar moans and grunts I was emitting.

He made his way to my back. How much more of this would he do? What would happen when my mind snapped? How could my mind even house a more intense, larger, greater sensation of pain that I was experiencing then? As he flogged my back again, the ongoing anxieties about the lateness of the hour, my unwillingness to stay the night, my awareness that anal sex was still coming all combined with the sheer, mind-blowing pain.

“Yellow.”

I attribute to kindness that the dom treated that as though I had said red, instead. He stopped. He unbuckled the chain from around my chest – he’d removed the nipple clamps after a couple of rotations, dissatisfied with how they interacted with the chain – and began to unshackle my wrists. Letting them drop to my sides was an enormous relief. The most intense tingling I could imagine, as blood rushed back into them, almost distracted me from the fading pain from the blows. My second wrist dropped, and he began undoing the spreader bars.

“You can just kneel there, boy.”

I dropped to my knees immediately. I didn’t have the strength to try and shake my hands, if that would even do any good. I just let the overwhelming tingling of them subsume me. It lacked the intensity and totality of the pain moments before, but it was an infinitely more welcome sensation.

“I…I definitely have a pretty low pain tolerance, sir. I’m sorry that was so short.”

“It’s alright, boy, everyone’s body reacts differently.”

I just knelt for a while, blindfolded and cuffed, while he busied himself. The collar had definitely felt tight, made it a bit harder to breathe, while I had been bound and suspended, but I could move a bit more freely now, and found it less troubling. After a few moments he grabbed my hair and pulled me forward to where he sat down.

“Worship my feet, boy.”

I worried slightly about my hands being able to support my weight as I leaned down, nosing around to find his feet past my blindfold. Finding his left foot first, I nuzzled, then kissed, then licked it. I hadn’t thought about it, but most of my weight was on my legs and forearms, not my hands, so it was fine. After covering one foot completely with kisses and licks, I felt around for the other and did the same. I began just repeating that pattern, until eventually he asked me if I would be alright if he invited one of his roommates down to join.

“Yes, sir, that would be fine, sir.”

“Just wait in an appropriately submissive posture.”

“Yes sir.”

I crawled back to make room for him, then sat up onto my haunches. At first I tried to sit with knees spread, butt on my feet, hands held behind my back. That position was a strain, though; other, appropriately submissive postures would be less so. Releasing my hands, I placed them on the floor between my legs, head bowed. Then I worked them around a bit to be more comfortable. I led my head sag fully, and made sure my back was arched. At this point, the tingling in my hands had subsided to a much lighter sensation, fortunately, and I was able to support myself with no issue.

Eventually he returned. Grabbing my hair, he pulled my face into his crotch, where I began to nuzzle, then lick, kiss, and suck his cock. Before long he was instructing me again on deepthroating. Despite the overwhelming sensation of exhaustion – or perhaps because of it – I was able to take him relatively deeply. My gag reflex was still there, but lessened. Even so, it prompted him to remark on how strong my gag reflex was. I continued doing my best to deepthroat him, and while I found I was, with concentration, able to take him deep, I was unable to obey his recurring commands to also suck him. I could not find the strength or concentration to do so. Once again, I wonder whether, if he had been taking a crop to my bottom, that would have improved my abilities or only degraded them further.

After working his cock for a while (and not registering any sounds of another person in the basement), I paused briefly, and asked “Sir?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I think I probably ought to start heading home soon, sir.” I had said it. I felt guilty about not doing everything he wanted; I felt guilty about having so little stamina for the things we did do. I felt guilty for not indulging his desire that I stayed over. But finally the fear, I suppose, had won out over the guilt and given me the ability to say something, to ask.

“Yes, it is pretty late.”

“I’m sorry about not being able to go longer, sir, or you not having the opportunity to fuck me.”

“It’s ok, boy. I enjoyed our time together.”

We chatted a bit at that point, me just kneeling between his legs. I think probably about peoples’ various pain tolerances. I brought up the biggest pain slut I know, a boy who also lived in Ohio, although closer to me than to this dom, and he wondered if it was someone he knew. From my description he was able to pull up Pup Leff’s recon profile; instructing me that I could remove the blindfold, I saw his profile and smiled. They had apparently talked on and off a bit, and I imagined their shared interest in pain play – and in switching – would likely enable them to get along well. I related a bit of my history with Leff, and mused on how it had been way too long since I’d gotten dinner or anything with him.

Eventually, he started cleaning up, had me take off the cuffs, and we proceeded upstairs. In his bedroom I got dressed. He’d said, after I’d called yellow, that my back wasn’t even red where he’d flogged it, and I don’t doubt that was true. I was surprised, though, when I got home that I had failed to notice the welts on my thighs from the flogger as I got dressed.

I went out to my car, stopped at the first mcdonalds I saw, and hoovered down a drink, then ate some cheeseburgers and fries. Hopefully I’d be able to re-hydrate enough for the three-hour nighttime drive home. I needed to stop for gas on the way back, and about an hour later pulled into a Meijer parking lot that had a gas station. I went in, got a big can of tea, and found out their gas pumps were all closed. Making my way down the street, I got gas and headed back. Sometime after one am I stumbled in, disrobed, and fell into bed. Surprisingly, it still took me a while to fall asleep.

I don’t know how I feel about it. Normally, I guess, I post these retrospectives months or years after a session, when my brain has finished processing them and knows what it wants to say. That isn’t the case now. I can mechanically recreate my memory of what happened; but I think my mind has yet to really form and feelings or make any judgements about the situation.

I have learned, though, that a relatively short flogging is enough to completely break down anything else that exists in my mind. I think it was probably less than thirty blows with the flogger, and fewer than fifteen with the crop. Perhaps being dehydrated, being afraid, being anxious about the time, being sick (it is two days later and I am, definitely, sick and hope I didn’t get anyone else there sick) – perhaps all those things lowered what otherwise might be a slightly higher capacity to manage pain. I don’t know. But I do think I have confirmed what I have always thought to be true:

I have a very low pain tolerance.

Atheism & The Soul

I have been pretty into Stellaris lately. It’s a nice escapist fantasy–some group of advanced aliens kidnaps you, genetically re-engineers you into some other alien of your own design, and then puts you in power over them to lead them to…whatever destiny you want. Great stuff.

Stellaris is a “neutral”-ish game with regard to world-building; in science fiction, you have to decide what the fictional rules of science are, and the genre has lots of popular tropes. Some games adhere more closely than others to particular sets of tropes; Star Trek Online, for example, is set loosely in the Star Trek canon and tries to adhere exactly to Star Trek’s fictional rules about science. Artemis Bridge Simulator clearly wants to be set in the Star Trek canon but isn’t licensed to use their IP, so they very mildly rename things but follow most of the fictional rules about reality that is encountered in Star Trek. StarCraft clearly takes inspiration and some cues about science fiction from various places–the Zerg are a very obviously Tyrannid analog from the Warhammer 40k universe–but overall just abstracts faster-than-light travel methodology and similar concepts into popular but non-specific sets of rules common across many science fiction franchises.

Stellaris seems to aim to be “neutral” to let everyone play out their own sci-fi fantasy, whatever it may be, regardless of which sci-fi canon (and tropes) a particular player wants to be into. There are rules in Stellaris that harken to Star Trek canon, to Star Wars canon, to Babylon V and Warhammer 40k and Stargate canon. Other than easter eggs like naming one solar system “Lando,” these mechanics take the form of mechanics in those universes without taking the names, to better avoid IP infringement as well–as to help them co-exist with wildly different concepts from canons that have conflicting takes on metaphysics.

I personally would like to live forever; immortality would be great. For the first few years, Stellaris put this out of a player’s role-playing grasp, but then lightly worked it in by adding the concept of hive minds, which were immortal. For a while that was the only way to roleplay immortality in Stellaris, until eventually they worked in a very RNG-based method that wasn’t really something you could do much to actively pursue, and had the issue of only allowing a single individual to become immortal, not everyone in your nation-state–and that isn’t just, I’d want to make immortality available universally.

That RNGeesus method was to pursue one of three “ascension” paths that allowed your civilization to empower themselves in fundamental ways. The three paths were: to unlock incredible gene therapies to re-design your species’ anatomy; to unlock the ability to record, digitize, and synthetically re-create your peoples’ minds in robot bodies; and the ability to unlock psychic and psionic powers for your people. The second sounds like it’d provide immortality–a digital conscious would just be a program, after all, and could run forever and be copied from computer to computer or robot body to robot body–but for some reason it did not. The immortality that was added was for a single member of a psionically ascended race to find a cache of psionic power on another plane of existence and ingest it, becoming more powerful and immortal.

At the time, that other plane of existence (which Stellaris refers to as the “Shroud”) was the only such thing in Stellaris lore, and spiritualist and psionic races seemed to assume it was not just the source of psionic power but also an afterlife, potentially. Stellaris’ lore itself never really confirmed or denied if their spiritualist civilizations were canonically correct, or whether entities in Stellaris get afterlives. Spiritualist civilizations, however, always derided anyone who uploaded their mind into a machine as having sacrificed their immortal soul.

I was not too interested in psionic immortality, because something that is not systematic or replicable didn’t really meet my roleplay needs. I was disappointed in digital ascension, as it seemed ridiculous that it did not offer a path to immortality for those so ascended–their bodies would eventually break down, which does make sense, but for whatever reason the game assumed a digital conscious must be irretrievably tied to a specific robot body, and be lost when that body degraded.

More recent patches have changed a number of things in a number of ways. Most significantly, robot populations can now gain a trait that makes them immortal. This did a lot to renew my interest in Stellaris, and for a while I played pretty exclusively in the goal of ascending my civilizations to digital immortality. One thing did bother me, though.

The game lore is silent on whether the spiritualist empires are right, and people in the game actually have immortal souls and an afterlife.

Digitally ascending your population seems to have no ill effect. If they do have a soul that is lost, they don’t notice its absence. Which I appreciate–as near as I can tell, that is the most realistic and pragmatic way to handle it. In life I have never experienced anything that seems tied to the presence of a soul–everything I have experienced is pretty adequately encapsulated by known science regarding how bodies and minds function, chemical reactions and electrical signals in the brain and between the brain and the rest of my body. I see, and light waves hitting the photoreceptors at the back of my eyeballs are electrochemically converted into signals my brain interprets to garner an image of my surroundings. I type, and my brain fires signals down nerves in my arms to tighten specific sets of muscles in my fingers so they contract and hit the keys I intend. I feel reflective, and sets of chemicals in my brain have been released and circulated to neurotransmitters I have learned to associate with a mood named reflectivity. There is no interaction with a soul in daily life I have ever run into. If one exists, and mine were to be severed from me, I can’t anticipate any difference in experience.

What would a soul be, if it were to exist? Most depictions of souls seem to say they are a person’s “essence,” and then go on to describe something that is anything but. Souls are usually represented as a person’s complete mental experience–their personality, their memories, their thought process. As near as I can tell, there is essentially no difference between the concept of a ghost of a person and the soul of a person in general public discourse, excepting that the latter exists in a person’s body during their life or separately in an afterlife, and the former exists in the real world for a person who has died. They’re just the same thing–the entire mental experience of a person, supported by metaphysical laws that provide some system of ethereal support that begets consciousness in the absence of the normal supporting biology. The popular conception of souls kind of implies that brains and everything attending them are fundamentally redundant appendages, an organ whose function could be entirely replaced by this unknowable and untouchable system of providing consciousness, if it could only connect to a physical body and move things around in the real world.

While that degree of wishful thinking exceeds my personal capacity for self-delusion (wouldn’t an afterlife be a pleasant luxury! at least one that is not a hell of unrelenting, eternal pain, anyhow), I don’t think that’s the only definition of soul people use, and certainly not the only one conceivable. I have a rather simple, atheistic definition of a soul:

A soul is all those parts of the conscious experience we lack the scientific knowledge to anticipate or describe.

We certainly can’t synthetically recreate people’s personality with our current technology. Our understanding of the brain is deeply limited. We do know that electrochemical signals correlate precisely with thoughts; we can literally record and see the patterns of images in peoples’ minds with equipment as they experience sight, watching the parts of the brain that are activated correlating to those images. So we know some things about how our brains function. I am not a biologist, neurochemist, etc. I don’t know what we do and don’t know. I believe I saw some research or speculation about the potential that parts of our brain or consciousness function using principles of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that we currently (again, as far as I am aware) lack a complete understanding of. And there are certainly other physical phenomena that we do not completely understanding–gravity exists, String Theory is a theory, etc. We don’t know what we don’t know about existence, and we don’t know what parts of physics are utilized by the brain for successful functioning that rely on unknown physical phenomena.

If we were able to wholly digitize a consciousness based on what we can observe and know now of mental functioning–replicate the chemical and electrical goings-on with code, map every nerve and synapse and connection and run them all on a machine–we would potentially be leaving out parts of the conscious experience that rely on those unknown physical phenomena. What if quantum entanglement actually plays a crucial role in the thought process that we have not yet observed? Would the digitally reconstructed mind know they were missing? Maybe. But maybe not–without their presence in the reconstruction, would the absence of such phenomena’s simulation in memories be noticeable?

To me, a soul is all those parts of the conscious experience we don’t yet know about. All those fundamental components that may or may not exist based on the physical laws of reality we lack an understanding of. That is a soul. Maybe there is something there; maybe there isn’t.

In Stellaris, when an empire ascends to digital immortality, are they forgetting something? Are they missing something? Is part of their experience being left behind? That, actually, Stellaris does take a stance on: emphatically, yes. Digital consciousnesses, and machine beings, are incapable of perceiving, interacting with, or in any way accessing the Shroud. In Stellaris, the Shroud is a canon thing that does exist and provides power to biological creatures that learn to utilize it.

Recent changes (within a few years) have expanded what the Shroud is defined to be, what it is like, and also added other planes or dimensions or alternate realities and universes. Stellaris has become canonically an experience of playing a civilization in one universe that exists alongside others in a multiverse. You can interact with species that are dead in the current universe by finding them in an alternate one in which they survive; you can find entities that exist in other spaces that grant them access to many universes. And the Shroud is posited to exist outside and above it all, encompassing, touching, accessing all the universes.

The Shroud also has become much more obviously modeled on the concept of the Warp, from Warhammer 40k. While not a one to one match, increasing bits of lore paint it as a similar kind of alternate reality, a subspace that is a primordial ooze begotten by living beings’ emotions. And like the Warp’s chaos gods, the Shroud has uber-powerful entities willing to contract with and bargain with mortals. The Shroud’s entities seem somewhat less unerringly malevolent that the Warp’s chaos gods (intentionally or not), but they fill the same narrative (and metaphysical) role.

Synthetic beings can’t access this form of subspace, or draw on it for telepathic and psionic abilities. Does that imply the existence of a soul in Stellaris canon, the way souls canonically exist in Warhammer?

Personally, I don’t think so. It canonizes the existence of a realm that biology is needed to access. A person with both arms amputized cannot pick up a fistful of sand and experience letting it sift through their fingers back to the ground, but that’s a function of what their body can do, not their fundamental mental makeup. In Stellaris, it seems to function similarly–digital minds lack biology, with the equivalent of a type of “limb” that gives access to, perception of, etc. the Shroud. (The less generous might characterize this as the absence of midi-chlorians, but let’s just stick with Shroud similarities to Warhammer for now without dragging Star Wars into it.) Someone born blind, with no sight whatsoever, never knows what the sunset looks like because they have no way of conceiving what purely visual phenomena are like. Digitized consciousnesses in Stellaris behave like someone congenitally blind in regard to the Shroud. They can still be affected by it–psionic weapons and entities still do damage to machine civilizations, certainly–but they can witness only the abilities that seep into the universe they entirely inhabit, Flatworld-style.

But it’s hard to say for sure that Stellaris canonically doesn’t also have souls. And I believe that is intentional, and I think it is a wise choice. Let players decide whether some kind of immortal soul exists to be lost when machines ascend. It opens up far more play possibilities.

But if you’re unsatisfied with becoming the potential (roleplay) equivalent of a congenitally-shroud-blind immortal, Stellaris seems to offer you relatively few choices. At least on a systematic scale.

There is one, though. Added I think also fairly recently, that race of beings you can encounter who inhabit a space between multiverses (alluded to earlier) posses a technological artifact that grants immortality to some nebulous group that come in some nebulous level of contact with it–essentially, it makes all characters that belong to your civilization immortal, while implying it doesn’t do that for your entire society. And you can steal this artifact from them (they themselves already being immortal, seemingly, and so apparently no longer needing it). And so if you ascend psionically and are able to acquire this macguffin, you are able to systematically offer immortality to those among your population who want it. Win-win. At least, if you can succeed at all the things necessary to make it happen.

I appreciate, though, that it is not just impossible, or some entirely RNGeesus based aspirational dream like it had been in the past. Truly, Paradox games are ones which only reach their potential after a couple of dozen DLCs.

Sapiophilia

It’s pretty ableist, isn’t it?

I mean, is it? It’s an attraction. We don’t really consider attraction to men to be misogynist or attraction to women to be misanthropic. We do, though, have a more complicated relationship with attraction to thin, athletic, and muscular bodies; mostly we conclude the attraction and aesthetic preference isn’t fatphobic, and choice of whom to pursue romantically and sexually isn’t, but any other form of discriminatory treatment towards people whose bodies don’t conform to our societal ideals would be.

So sapiophilia likewise wouldn’t be ableist.

It does seem to be trendy, though. I don’t recall even running into the word until a few months ago, and while I wouldn’t now say it’s commonplace, I have certainly seen it a few times since. Prior to that I would occasionally come across folks whose dating profiles indicated a preference for/attraction to intelligent people. And I think it was those experiences that led towards my anticipation that sapiophilia was ableist.

Sapiophilia, as a paraphilia, seems unremarkable. You swoon when someone makes some remarkable display of intellect; there’s power in that, and that power is seductive, and makes you feel tingly. It’s no different from swooning when a strong person lifts you (or just something heavy) off the ground, and the sensation of that remarkable strength makes you feel tingly. It’s just a reaction to a display of power, and that’s romantic and/or erotic for some, perhaps many, people.

What I seemed to most encounter, though, wasn’t that; in peoples’ profiles, what they described wasn’t really even a paraphilia. It was an intellectual preference for a partner they perceived to be smart. In many cases, those profiles implied that the author thought themselves smart, and expressed impatience or derision (with varying degrees of subtlety) with those they felt were not, and in essence they wanted to date “other smart people.” In other cases, the profiles didn’t necessarily hint that the author thought themself a great intellect, just that great intellect was a more important, worthy, or inherently valuable attribute than other traits, and thus very desirable in a partner. In some recent profiles I’ve seen, either of those might describe themselves as a sapiophile, but neither is an actual instance of sapiophilia. They are instances of wanting an intelligent partner for clout. Others are even more obvious; when their profiles pine for someone smart, it is clear that is because they actually pine for someone they admire, and we’ve been socially conditioned to admire intellect. But the social standing of a partner’s intelligence is what they seek, not the intelligence itself.

Whether a potential partner’s intellectually-derived clout is something they want to flaunt to their social group or simply use personally, internally, for validation, what they are describing is not someone whose day-to-day behaviors give them butterflies, it’s someone who has a socially desirable trait. A socially valuable ability. It’s…ableism.

Sapiophilia, on its own, isn’t ableism. But we’re imprecise with our language–language is meant to be imprecise to a certain degree, anyway–and so it is unfortunately common that (especially during this trend) sapiophilia would become conflated with wanting to date someone smart. And that’s a shame. It waters down the potentially communicative use of the word “sapiophile.” I have no interest in talking to people who have some elitist need to be with or around smart people to feel validated, but I would get a not-quite-sadistic type of entertainment from talking to someone who I could make swoon just by, well, talking.

friends with benefits

Relationships require work.

It’s worthwhile work. It’s good work. It’s taxing work. It’s compromise and self-sacrifice, collaboration against the minutiae of mundanity. It’s meeting each others’ needs, in the ways that you can, and that often involves doing or being things that take effort or strength.

It’s not bad work. It’s not even remotely too high a cost. But it is work. And it can be exhausting.

The illusion of a friend with benefits is that it is a more remote, distant, “lightweight” relationship. You agree to a much more limited set of circumstances and needs you fulfill for each other. Sex. Kink. Whatever it is, the idea of a friend with benefits is that unstated contract that the relationship has limited scope. It’s a lovely idea. We both want this…well, perhaps not the same thing, but two halves of a thing. You want to serve, I want to be served. You want to be fucked, I want to fuck. We don’t have the time or energy for it to be more than that. We both know that and we don’t want it to be otherwise. It’s quite a beautiful dream. I wish it was real.

It defies human nature.

Why does the friend with benefits always™ catch feelings? At least one of them? Well. Let’s talk science. Humans are big sacks of electrical and chemical reactions. And when two of them come together and do enjoyable things, they release a bunch of chemicals into their little brains. Some are the straightforward pleasure endorphins–the I-feel-happy-now juice. But others are far more sinister. You’ve heard of dopamine and serotonin–but have you heard of oxytocin and vasopressin? I am no biochemist, nor will I pretend to be one. I don’t know what any of those chemicals really do; I have a basic, surface-level understanding. But that surface-level understanding includes the knowledge that oxytocin/vasopressin do (among other things) encourage the development of emotional bonds between people. That they are released during sex and–whether those or others–chemically compel people to want stronger bonds with each other.

Getting benefits makes the brain want more, basically. And certainly some friendships with benefits work out well, and last indefinitely, overcoming the nefarious influence of these emotional-bonding drugs. But many do not, despite both participants entering with the most genuine of intentions. Our bodies don’t like it, no matter how convenient or beneficial it could or would be for us.

There’s also, of course, a lot more to it than just drugs our bodies produce to inflict us with. Often, friends with benefits start for at least one partner from a place of compromise to begin with–they actually are looking for more, but the other partner is only looking for FWB. Their other needs aren’t being fulfilled, and having a friend with benefits promises to fulfill at least some of those needs, so they compromise, because something is better than nothing. But something feeds their appetite for the other things they’re missing. Whether they develop the need to get it from their situationship or just to vigorously pursue a more complete relationship, once their appetite is whetted, the situationship is likely doomed.

And, sadly, I wouldn’t be a crazy antifa without pointing out the role that capitalism has in crippling our resources. Friendship with benefits is generally an attempt to conserve resources anyway, resources that full relationships consume greedily; but surviving in an increasingly extreme capitalism places an incredible number of demands of time and energy on a person, competing for the same resources that relationships do. Just finding times that work for both friends to get together for their benefits can limit or prohibit the establishment or survival of their situationship.

Friends with benefits are, obviously, possible–plenty of people succeed at having them. My own attempts to establish them are at best abortive, though. I’ve felt guilt the last couple of weeks about a sub I’ve offered to let come serve me; non-sexually, giving foot massages and doing chores. I’ve offered several times, all of which he’s been available for, and had to cancel each time. My circumstances don’t give me much flexibility for such things.

I wish they did. It’d be nice to have that sub over and to enjoy his service.

Vignette #11

Gender is a weird thing.

Petal sighed in annoyance as he tried to find some way of making the French maid dress fit decently. He wore nothing under it; both his pussy and his bussy were completely exposed for his husband to fondle or use as he wished. But the lack of undergarments was not the problem; the dress was somewhat busty. Petal (and his husband) both were very happy with the outcome of his top surgery; he had met his husband well after having it, and both liked his flat, smooth chest. He was the boy he wanted to be; but he was also the housewife he and his husband wanted him to be, and now part of his submission and process of being sexy for his more dominant and wonderfully controlling husband was dressing up coyly in this strapless French maid dress. But the breasts that were supposed to keep it up were long gone.

The dress did have tiny sleeves that went over the tops of Petal’s arms, and that did keep the dress from falling off entirely, but it kept annoyingly sliding down below where it was supposed to be, sitting awkwardly below his nipples. That also further lowered the hem, which was a mixed blessing; if it sat properly it might be short enough that Petal would need underwear beneath to be decent to go about the house.

That was another oddity of gender; Petal’s anatomy, though frustrating in some ways, had accommodated a weirdly specific fetish. He had, despite being a man himself, been able to carry his husband’s children, a rarity among the houseboy-fetishizing group of gay men who longed to be able to get pregnant when their husbands fucked them. And those children were finally old enough to be unable to see up the bottoms of outfits like a French maid dress from underneath, so he could discretely and inoffensively surprise his husband by wearing such things without underwear again.

The fit was frustrating, though. Petal decided he’d need to take in the sleeves at some point, so they would ride higher on his arms. It wouldn’t be quite as nice, but his shoulders would still be bare. As Petal heard shouting from the living room, and responded almost unconsciously with a yelled “Calm down,” he abandoned the dress and just grabbed a t-shirt so oversized it could function as a shift. Adequately dressed, he went out to see what commotion was being caused by the children his husband had given him.

the houseboy handbook

Daily Chores

“W” means every week of the month on that day. “1st” means first week of the month on that day of the week, and so on.

task name	M	Tu	W	Th	F	time expected for process, in hours	time boy spends working, in hours	specific instructions (see note on row)
daily expected labor quantity	7.25	6.95	10.5	8	6.45
laundries
launder shirts, pants, underwear, socks	W				W	8	1.5	combine with other laundry of the day
launder bedsheets		W				4	0.5	combine with other laundry of the day
launder hand towels	W				W	2	0.25	combine with other laundry of the day
launder bath towels and wash cloths		W				4	0.25	combine with other laundry of the day

housework
wipe down bathroom mirros, counters & sinks		W			W	0.25	0.25
wipe down bathroom toilets, clean bowls		W			W	0.5	0.2
vacuum, then mop bathroom floors		W			W	0.75	0.75
vacuum, mop & necessary other floors		W				1.5	1.5
wipe down kitchen surfaces			W			2	2
dust/wipe down remaining household surfaces			w			2	2
wipe down bathroom tubs/shower stalls			W			0.75	0.75
clean baseboards throughout home			1st			2	2

meal management
meal prep boy’s food for week	W					2	2
create grocery list for upcoming week’s meals			W			0.25	0.25
get groceries for upcoming week’s meals				W		2.5	2.5
cook day’s meal, package leftovers	W	W	W	W	W	2	1.5
prep breakfast, pack lunch	W	W	W	W	W	0.25	0.25
wash and clean dishes	w	w	w	w	w	1.5	0.25

misc
wash car				W		2	2
personal grooming & hygeine	W	W	W	W	W	1.5	1.5	showering, shaving body, lubing, plugging, etc.

Standing Rules

category	rule
attire	=============================
at home, in general	The boy is to remain dressed in his his collar, chastity cage, and nothing else when at home, unless directed to by his owner. If his owner orders him to wear something, he is to wear it until told to stop or until the end of the day. Unless instructed to wear it over night, he will remove it prior to going to sleep for the night. If wearing something that interferes with functions such as using the restroom, he may temporarily remove it while he does so and re-don the clothing as instructed when finished. If he experiences an unbearable level of discomfort due to cold, he is to inform his owner as soon as possible. During periods of prolonged cold, his owner may choose to create standing modifications to this protocal, such as allowing the continual use of a onesie. If such an exception is made, once the daily temperature has increased, the boy is to begin asking his owner once a week whether he still has permission to use whatever alteration was made.
at home, while cooking	If the boy is preparing meals with heated oil, water, or other components that could jump from the stove and burn him, he may don an apron to prepare the meal that his owner keeps in the kitchen for this purpose. He may not add any other clothing besides the apron, and his backside should remain fully exposed for his owner’s inspection and physical access. If his owner has them, he may make disoposable gloves available for handling raw meat. The boy is to wear these and take them off carefully to prevent cross-contaminating other foods or kitchen surfaces while cooking.
at home, while cleaning	The boy may wear any gloves his owner has while scrubbing surfaces. He may (and must, as instructed) wear any additional protection such as eyewear or a mask to protect from spashes from cleaning chemicals.
outside on owner’s property	When he would be visible to the public, the boy is to don a speedo as required by local nudity laws. If walking on areas of his owner’s property that could cause injury to bare feet, he is to put on sandals kept by the door for his use. If outside during cold weather, the boy is to wear appropriately heavy clothes to prevent frostbite or other damage.
at home, with guests	They boy’s owner will sometimes have guests over that are kinky and sometimes have guests over who are not. The boy’s owner will direct him to put on clothes when needed to accomodate guests. If the boy’s owner does not, the boy is to assume the guests are kinky or kink-friendly and do not need to seem him in an unnaturally overdressed state beyond his collar and chastity cage.
away from home	The boy is to wear anything his owner chooses for him when he is to leave the home. If his owner has not chosen for him in advance, the boy is to ask his owner to select clothes. If his owner is unavailable, the boy is to wear an outfit designated for him by his owner as his default outfit.
at nudity-friendly locations	Any time the boy is at a location that permits nudity, whether a nudist beach, park, club that allows nudity, etc., the boy is to strip to his cage and collar unless otherwise instructed by his owner.

posture	=============================
at home, resting	The boy is, when otherwise inactive at home, to sit in a short-sit, open-knee kneel sit, or w-sit position as much as possible. The boy may also sit side-saddle as needed, or lay down fully on the floor. In all positions the boy is allowed to put a small pillow or blanket beneath him to sit on, and pillows or blankets for this purpose should be kept near the boy’s master’s desk, spot at the table, preferred recliner/spot on the couch, and by his bedside, so the boy can be beneath him whenever he is free. These blankets are not to be wrapped around the boy or otherwise conceal him from his owner’s view.
at home, working	The boy is to prefer to work from a kneeling position when possible. Most of the boy’s tasks will require the ability to reach higher than the boy can while on his knees; for all such tasks, the boy may rise to stand as necessary. When waiting in between tasks, however, the boy should resume an appropriate sitting position on the floor–for example, while waiting for food to cook that does not need to be continually stirred.
at home, carrying things	The boy is to prioritize carrying items carefully and safely, and adopt any posture necessary to ensure doing so. The boy will endeavour to remain on his knees as much as possible. If he can carry the item safely/adequately in his mouth with his teeth, he will crawl on all fours. If he can safely balance the item on his back, he should do so in order to remain on all fours. If the boy can adequately carry the item in one hand, he should do so by crawling on one hand and his two legs if possible. If both hands are necessary to carry the item, the boy will hold the item carefully and shuffle forward on his knees. If the only safe way to carry the items he needs to carry is to walk, he may stand and walk. When traversing stairs, he may stand to go up or down the stairs, then resume the best posture he can as soon as possible after. If the boy has been ordered to hurry, he may instead stand to carry the items so he can move more quickly. For all normal tasks and the completion of daily chores he should instead endeavour to retain as much of the crawling posture as he safely can.
at home, moving around	The boy is to crawl on all fours whenever he simply needs to move between rooms in the house. If he experiences difficulty continuing to do so, he is to seek permission to wear kneepads if necessary, or to take rests, if doing either will enable him to retain an appropriate posture. If he is unable to proceed despite either of these solutions, he is to discuss the issue and expected duration he would need to be allowed to walk, or what other appropriate position he might use to traverse the home until he is able to crawl continually as expected.
outside the home	Outside the home, the boy is to walk and sit on furniture as expected of him, so as not to embarass or trouble his owner. When sitting on furniture outside the home, if it is practical to sit in a short-sit he should still remove his shoes and do so, and express it as a personal preference for comfort if asked by vanillas.

conduct	=============================
term of address	When speaking to his betters, the boy will address them as “Sir” in every sentance. When speaking to his owner, the boy will address him as either “Sir,” “Owner,” or “Master” in every sentance.
topics of conversation	The boy may bring up any non-redundant topic of conversation when alone with his owner. General whining is redundant, as are requests to waive any standing rule without good reason (i.e. asking for release from chastity because he is horny/pent-up, permission to sit cross-legged because he is uncomfortable). Any requests that are motivated by health concerns are never redundant and should always be brought up promptly (i.e. notifying his owner that his chastity cage is chafing and seems to have opened a cut/sore which may be an open wound). The boy should endeavour generally to speak when spoken to, and to be seen and not heard, whenever guests are present. Health concerns always override this preference, but otherwise any conversation he wishes to have with his owner should be deferred until the guests have left, and any conversation he wishes to have with the guests he should recall is beneath them. If they wish to speak to him they will address him, otherwise he is not to intrude into their notice.
sexual readiness	The boy is to keep himself cleaned and lubed. He should expect to be used without warning, when his owner or his owner’s guests feel like it, and should be ready accordingly. His owner will indicate when the boy is expected to keep a plug in, and may require the boy to keep a series of vibrating, remote-control plugs constantly charged so one is always ready for insertion at his owner’s direction. Unless instructed otherwise, the boy should assume his owner grants his guests standing permission to make the same sexual use of the boy his owner is himself entitled to, and should behave and submit accordingly to any groping, advances, or other sexual attention those guests engage him in.
chastity	The boy will be kept chaste except at such times as his owner wishes to unlock him for whatever purpose. The boy is responsible for learning to clean under his cage, to seek appropriate oils and other applications to minimize chafing, and generally to take all prudent actions towards accommodating being in his device as the default. The boy is not to bother his owner about unlocking or being unlocked. If he is horny, he should indicate this to his owner by expressing his interest in server his owner sexually; crawling so that his pussy is prominently visible to his owner, or kissing, licking and nuzzling his owner’s feet enthusiastically to show how needy he is to have his inferiority recognized and celebrated.
furniture	As implied by the requirements established regarding the boy’s posture, the boy is never to use furniture unless instructed. This includes beds, chairs, and tables; the boy is to sit on the floor on blankets or cushions, sleep on the floor on a dog bed, and eat from the floor in a dog bowl or, if his owner chooses, by having his gruel poured directly on the floor to lap from. While this may have the additional benefit of encouraging the boy’s diligence about keeping his owner’s floors clean, the boy should always remain aware that this is because he does not deserve to use the furniture, as his owner’s and owner’s guests’ inferior. The comforts and conveniences afforded to free humans are inappropriate for the boy, whose purpose is to be one of those conveniences, and whose own comfort and convenience is irrelevant. If the boy falls ill or has other limiting conditions, his owner may temporarily or permanently alter or revise this policy to enable the boy to continue to function productively. Any alteration his owner makes should be assumed to be unique; if he is allowed to use tables, rather than the floor, for writing notes, he is not to likewise assume he may sit in chairs at those tables or sit on or lay on the bed.
sleeping	The boy will be given a dog bed to sleep on adjacent to his owner’s bed. He may also be given pillows if his owner wishes. His owner may establish a standard bedtime from which he occasionally issues deviations, or he may not choose to and may instead instruct the boy daily on when he is to go to sleep. The boy is responsible for sleeping with earbuds in that can provide an alarm that will not disturb his owner, and is responsible for determining the time he needs to rise to have his owner’s morning meal prepared and waiting for him. His owner may or may not supply audio files, containing hypno tracks or otherwise, that the boy is to sleep to help condition his mind for use with his ear buds. When he goes to bed, the boy the must affix his collar to a leash affixed to the nearest bedpost, to help confine him to his place while he sleeps. At any time, the boy is to expect his owner may lay down with the boy to use him. Alternatively, from atop his bed, the boy’s owner may snap his fingers, pull on the boy’s leash, or, if he instructed the boy to sleep with a vibrating plug in, activate the vibrator as an indication the boy is to mount the bed for use. On some occasions, and only at the boy’s owner’s discretion, the boy may be allowed to sleep in the bed with his owner. This will primarily be from a desire to have convenient access to fuck or grope the boy during the night, and is purely for his owner’s benefit; the boy should not confuse this for a treat, or expect being allowed on furniture to be a type of reward granted for good behavior.