Earbuds wake the boy–a mild but constant alarm. He’s quite cold, now; he struggles to unwrap himself from his blanket. As his alarm transitions from waking bells to his Master’s voice, at first his sleep-addled brain fails to parse the words. Eventually, his mind is awake enough to parse them:

“Hurry. You’re not to be late preparing my breakfast, nor in being my alarm clock. You’re just a slave; your discomfort doesn’t matter. Stop hiding under blankets. You have work to do, work I, your owner, deserve from you. You’re my property. There’s no defensible reason for you to dawdle in bed. You have a schedule to keep, to serve me…”

By this point, the slaveboy has already thrown back his blanket and is pulling the earbuds out. He silences his alarm, and looks up from his place on the floor at his Master, still asleep in His bed. After gazing at his Owner for a moment, he crawls out of the room to the bathroom. There, he quietly brushes his teeth and checks his pussy for cleanliness–shaving is to be done later–and re-lubes himself.

Finished prepping his body, the slaveboy next crawls to the kitchen. There are plenty of leftovers this morning which his Master instructed him to prepare as today’s breakfast. The slaveboy hasn’t even begun to hunger yet; his body is used to eating later, after his Owner has been fed, as it always should be. He sets out the breakfast tray, a plate, and silverware, occasionally rising to his feet but always falling back to his knees after. Finally, he microwaves the food and sets it out to present nicely.

His Master’s breakfast made, the boy walks on his knees, tray in hand, back to his Owner’s room and quietly slips in. He’s pleased to hear his Master still snoring; it has taken quite a while for Him to adjust to the slave’s presence and activity in the morning. It used to always wake Him, which his Master found off-putting. Setting the breakfast to the side, the slave crawls down to the foot of the bed and gently lifts the bedsheets just enough to slip his head and shoulders in.

The boy quickly begins to nuzzle his Master’s feet; as he runs his cheek up and down his betters’ sole, he breathes in his owners smell and feels his nub start to expand in his chastity cage. He gently, dryly kisses his Owner’s feet absentmindedly, mentally revelling in the thought that this man, his Owner, is so much his better that it is right for the boy to know the smells and body odor of His feet and be able to recognize Him through such a humiliating device. The slave’s kisses become more passionate, though he is still careful to keep from wetting his superior’s feet with saliva, as his cage throbs. The slaveboy’s naked body finally stops shivering in the cold air of a house in the early morning, but he no longer notices–the boy is fully absorbed now with the rightness of revering his Owner and being in his place beneath Him. The unpleasantness of the smell of his Master’s feet has by now passed; this is his place, it is what he deserves to smell, it is a privilege to be able to humiliate himself beneath so superior a man.

Many other slaveboys are certainly not so lucky. To know that, as his Owner wakes, he will serve Him breakfast, prepare His shower, if lucky suck His cock or feel Him in his pussy–the boy knows well that many other boys, inferior, as he is, to such men, do not have the privilege of an owner.

Yesterday morning I drove to east Texas. It was a timely reminder that Hell is a place on Earth; I’ve been visiting family in Houston for the holidays, and it helped frame what’s been on my mind in that interval as a sort of temporary exile. I’ve been considering lately whether I’m a bad dominant. I think I might be; but I’m not completely sure that I’m a bad dominant rather than simply being bad at being the type of dominant I intend to be. I’m pathetically ineffectual at providing discipline; I suspect that stems from a lack of self-discipline on my part. But boys – at least the boys I’m in relationships with, and those that I have been in relationships with over the last few years – need discipline, and need their dom(s) to provide it.

I discovered – or perhaps decided – a month or two ago, while discussing my own needs and desires as a submissive with my boyfriend and former master, Faberi, that as a submissive I need to be broken. That is not his style of dominance; it may even the primary void I felt as a submissive serving him and why that submission broke down.

Earlier this year, in perhaps February or March, I did a session with a local dom, in which he repeatedly smacked my bottom around the house, expecting a “thank you, Sir” each time. During that session I found it discordant, unpleasant; even irritating. It was certainly stressful. I had been and always expected to be obedient, demure, submissive as a sub; and I believe I consistently have been. I never expected, desired, or valued corporal punishment in the absence of bad behavior. And yet, there it was, and not even as punishment. Simply as an assertion of dominance, of the differential of status between us in that session. Later, and for the first time in my life, I was given a spanking. I had forgotten to bring an item he’d ordered me to bring; after spending some time tidying up his apartment, I had crawled to a place below him near where he sat on the couch, he asked me whether I thought I deserved punishment for forgetting. Obviously, in such a case, there is only one thing to say – and I said “yes, Sir,” with dread and apprehension, knowing that even his casual smacks throughout the evening had stung painfully. By that point I was exhausted; my wrists and knees hurt, sore from constant crawling; my neck was cramped from craning up to see things on all fours, hindered by a thick collar. Obediently I counted the blows; mercifully, for whatever reason, he only went to ten. He then alluded to getting a paddle to continue; nearly in tears (or in tears?), I think I mumbled something like “yes, Sir;” I don’t quite recall. He chose not to, though. Instead he then had me begin sucking his cock, a task I worked on quite inelegantly after many months’ respite from practice. This clumsiness bore a toll not in his express displeasure, nor in any further corporal punishment, but simply through extended duration. I sucked and sucked and sucked some more, neck cramping from the angle, from the collar; snot streaming out my nose, I’m embarrassed that I several times needed to slip off of him and ask to blow my nose (which he always allowed). He occasionally, briefly, throat-fucked me; each time I began gagging, and when vomit started to rise I pushed back, which he tolerated. Eventually I suppose he lost patience as my pace slowed over time: nose more congested, breath heavier, and endurance sapped. He jacked off to orgasm and pulled me over to feed me his cum.

After that point, he relaxed back on to his couch; some words were exchanged, and I think he offered me the opportunity to express what I’d like to do at that point. Sincerely I asked to rest, which he allowed; I laid in a fetal position beneath him, my nose resting atop one of his bare feet. Finally idle, the pressure on my knees and wrists relieved, the anxiety of what came next mollified (for, with each task I’d performed, I’d felt exhausted, and up to that point each had simply been followed by a new command), I actually relaxed. And, weirdly, it was everything I’d hoped for. For the first time I was aware of that evening my cock began to expand in my chastity cage. I was still tired, my limbs sore, my neck cramped; but the pressure was off and I could feel them relaxing. Gently, I began to nuzzle and kiss his feet–a task that earlier he’d ordered me to do, whether out of his own interest or from a desire to arouse me, given how fervently I’d expressed interest in foot worship prior to the session. Earlier, it had simply been yet another stressor; I’d not grown hard, nor enjoyed my forced prostrations and affections to his feet. But at that later point, being allowed simply to lay there and relax, I wanted to. Gratefully, humbly, and with slowly increasing passion, I explored first the foot I had rested my cheek against, and then then other. Mercifully, though he clearly noticed the renewed attention, he did not take my activity as a cue to put me back to work in some form, as I feared he might. Instead, shortly after, we wrapped up the night; I dressed and took his trash out on the way to my car.

I went home exhausted; I don’t recall whether I jacked off that night or the next day, but having no prohibitions against it I soon did so. And then, quite strongly, I felt an aversion to him and to the scene; that wasn’t what I wanted, what I enjoyed, how I imagined slavery should be. Why should there be pain in the absence of disobedience? Invited back, I demurred; I was sincerely uninterested and quite turned off for some time. I realized then that it was immensely stressful; I was drained. I couldn’t imagine doing that again. I think I mentioned to Faberi that it was hot but I didn’t think it was a good experience overall. Over the next month I found the dom’s communications honestly bothersome and annoying, and I concluded I had likely more than satisfied my need to be submissive for quite some time.

Over the last few days, I’ve stayed at my parents’ house: half a continent away from my own home, the boy who lives there with me, three other partners about an hour’s drive away, and Faberi four hours away by car but frequently available online, on Discord, to game with. At my parents’ house there is no opportunity for discord, or private socialization; I’ve been limited to relatively infrequent texting with my partners, and none of the other interactions I am so accustomed to. My parents tend to bore me, to be honest. We chat, and as they watch game shows I game on my laptop or browse the internet on my phone. Semi-frequently we play a simple card or tabletop game; often they bring me to this or that social function. We watched the quite enjoyable Ford vs Ferrari in theaters. But I spent vast swathes of time with little mental or social stimulation. Nature abhors a vacuum and, like any other animal, free time naturally engages drives to procreate in humans. Not being heterosexual, this mostly entailed browsing Recon, Collarspace, and Twitter; and, with a foray from a Recon profile, I remembered I had a Fetlife account as well. Absurdly, I reached out to new people; my life is far too full for new relationships, yet here I was messaging people who intrigued me as my phone screen dodged my parents’ inattentive gazes.

My exile to the god-forsaken South also provided not a deficit but a glut of something else: food. It was Thanksgiving, and like any family of proud imperialistic occupants of native soil we had appetizers and desserts and snacks to sate even the most American-sized appetite. My parents, having cooked and prepared the vast majority of an impressive surplus, constantly plied me with requests to have some of this or that. To my own surprise I deflected what felt like a majority of the offers, but those few that I succumbed to kept my appetite continually sated. Within two days of my arrival, I had no interest in any meal save breakfast – by the time lunch or dinner ought to be eaten, I had snacked my way to apathy, and I actually found it difficult to participate in what is a frankly important social ritual.

And so I came to that place at which we began: Sunday, the day of my return home, I went to visit a close friend some two hours’ drive northeast of my parents’ home. That morning we rose early to attend church; prior to the service I caught up on Recon messages with a new kinkster and re-initiated a conversation with one I’d met some time before, ruefully considering that I much more often used Recon while visiting my parents and yet never bothered to check it at home. After the service I slipped in a few more words with those two who had intrigued me, both subs who are to my eye rather beautiful, before borrowing the car keys and beginning my drive. Two hours through the middle of nowhere does wonders for the engine of my mind’s introspection. A short lunch later and I got yet another two hours – albeit punctuated with occasional stops in gas station parking lots to continue my Recon intrigues.

By this point it is not news to me that the session I recounted above was as enlightening as it was positive (which, in retrospect, it absolutely was); I had, as mentioned, already had that discussion with my boyfriend. Being broken, being torn down by work, stress, physical discipline; genuinely not having a good time and allowing myself not to have a good time, but being obedient throughout; and that sweet, sweet reward afterwards of rest, exposed, broken, humble capitulation and gratitude to the man using you finally eroticizes and provides context to the idea of training. And, far more than that, of submission, of being owned, of being changed, of being controlled. It allowed me, over the last however many months, to wonder if that wasn’t really the core of what was missing from my submissive experience. I deeply love and am extremely compatible as a person with Faberi; but being submissive in all the ways I fantasize about, bringing my own expectations and enacting them ultimately provided no staying power. I did all of it electively; the edge of anxiety, of fear, of fatigue, of being driven was something implicitly present in my fantasies but never consciously acknowledged. That has not been my his style, or at least not with me.

Would I, in fact, be happy as an owned lifestyle submissive in a 24/7 TPE situation, as is so frequently my daydream, if it were provided to me with the edge of enforcement, of being made genuinely to wait on, submit to, serve, and acknowledge as my superior a man who owned me? I don’t know, and I never will. I deeply love my partners. I have so much invested in my life. I have ties to what is, and what I will build with those I love. But I understand more now than I did before. I know what it means for a boy to be bratty; I know what it means for a boy to say he needs to be broken, when before I never understood why someone who wanted to be submissive wouldn’t do as I did and do as he was told, whether he wanted to or not. I’ve finally understood.

I realize too that my kink life is stymied by a glut of socialization. As my parents metaphorically poured food upon my head when I was at their home, my partners and household luxuries sate any tiny appetite for stimulation as soon as it starts to take form. These last few months I have been nigh-asexual most of the time. I’ve gone through periods of interest in being submissive again, and periods of interest in being dominant; but most often, unless aroused by direct action of a boy lapping at my feet, or asking me to bind or discipline him and enjoying his helplessness at my hand, my sex drive has been dormant. I don’t want to initiate things – why would I want to get up from my immense comfort? Why leave the incredible edification of my video games and my pleasant dinners out to reserve time in an evening for a ramp-up of kink I’m not in the mood for, knowing full well I may end up turned on by it anyway? The enemy, I think, of my boys’ sexual fulfillment at my hand is not fleeting submissive desires of my own. It’s a superbly comfortable couch.

And that on its own might be merit enough to condemn me, at least by my standards, as deficient in dominance. However, that is a weak indictment I think; and, having had many hours of open road and damnably brownish-green countryside, I’m prepared to do better.

The dominant I want to be and the life I want to have is, and always has been, the precise reciprocal of the life I want to have as a submissive. One or more slaves, their ownership fully realized as live-in 24/7 TPE possessions, whether they left the home for eight hours a day for work or not. Boys who conformed to my will, have the initiative to do as a desire, the discipline to attend promptly and carefully to their chores, and the genuine desire to spend their idle time in grateful contemplation of my superiority to them, naked, exposed, vulnerable, but most of all reverent and grateful, simply resting at my feet; that is, in truth, the culmination of my desires. And, having tasted that somewhat, and seen who I am and how I do spend my time, I know far more about why I do not have it – and will not without dramatic self-improvement and personal growth.

The man I served early this year, while never incompassionate, was consistently demeaning, disciplinary, and motivating; to some extent this may have been aided by leading questions on my part, asking how he wished me to serve, but his physical attentions throughout and the unrelenting pace with which he made me work were indispensible to the experience. At no point that night did I start slacking to my knowledge, or express boredom, and that may be a trait of mine – but at no point did he invite either. The scenes in which I interact with boys I frequently check in on their morale, ask them about rest, and – at least from the perspective of my own submissive side – allow my compassion to overflow in to leniency and accommodation. My own scenes have historically erred on the side of caution and gentleness; and while those traits have their place in BDSM, and I don’t think it’d ever be reasonable or healthy for a dominant to go without them, I have historically overdone them to an absurd degree. To a degree that the man I served never even vaguely approached, and happily so, while I served him. It may not have been an enjoyable night in the moment; and nor would lifestyle enslavement necessarily be. Even the majority of nights would likely be as or like that one was. Yet it was fulfilling and erotic and exciting in ways almost no other experience has been. Yet, to submissives who come to me, I never offer that edge, that thrill, that anxiety – and so I fail to provide that much deeper and more abiding reward. And providing those things would be work for me, considerable work. Both that of leaving my comfortable nest to provide hands-on reminders and motivation, not necessarily pleasant, of a sub’s place and the discipline to obey, and also work of curbing my over-indulgent nature. That latter might have earned me the gratitude of colleagues at work, but a boy coming over to be a slave in my own is NOT a colleague, and my home, once entered, should not be an elective workplace.

Of course, this has quite a few implications; as I have grown to love my partners deeper over the years we have each grown and changed as individuals. While I don’t know that my actual desires have changed any (instead, it seems, I have simply come to know them more clearly), it has seemed that some of my younger partners’ desires have; and Faberi’s desires, while not seeming to change, are more clearly distinct to me now. This understanding I have, now, of what I want from submissives, may or may not be alignable with their desires either for themselves or for any other partners we were to attract. What I want to find in a slave is not mutability but instead a deep-felt need of the kind I know myself – to be broken, owned, disciplined, used, and made to serve. To own slaves who have, through their own experiences and journeys, learned that do genuinely need to be kept as the lesser of a man, and can enter in to such an arrangement with a clear mind and without doubts about who and what they are.

But the day to seek such a servant, if such a day comes, is not now; I love my partners, and I love how full they keep my life. I live on a glut of what I value most – the love, time, and interactions of kind, intelligent, talented people. And while the occasional impoverishment of that good company may prove beneficial or even necessary to my own enlightment and understanding, I’m happy to reject Stoicism for Epicureanism in my life.

My partners just may suffer somewhat from my resulting inadequacies as a kinkster.

As I’m slowly reintroducing myself to kink society I’m finding I sometimes have an odd desire: to actually switch. And, just as oddly, to try puppy play as a puppy.

I recognize that on the face of it what I just said makes no sense. Literally millions of people want those things; there’s nothing odd about them. The oddness is that I want them. I, whose entire sexual fantasy life is predicated on 24/7 TPE.

I don’t enjoy imagination and games in my relationships; I want things to be real. Slavery, servitude, status inequality; it’s always been a turn-off to me to have to suspend disbelief for a scene, whether that means equality outside the bedroom or pretending my partner is a puppy. The very fact that whatever I do, I do sincerely, has always given it meaning; it makes it true. A boy in a pup hood, mitted on the floor, wagging has always seemed a bit like I’m indulging him, but take the hood and mitts off and call him a slave and now he is just in his place: he’s where he belongs if he’s honest about who he is and what he needs–and about where he needs to belong.

I’ve always considered it to be because of my need for definition, understanding, honesty, and reality about who and what I am that switching is anathema to me. Sure, I’ve been flexible enough to say I feel a need to be submissive and a need to be dominant; so my place is above other submissives and below other doms. But those are always fuzzy categories: which submissives am I above? Which doms am I below? I never really answered those questions, just assumed my place was above total subs, below total doms, and peer to people who wanted both. That’s not very precise or well-justified, but it was close enough that I only occasionally ran in to issues with it. In any case, it’s certainly always precluded what I consider the idea of switching: actually changing roles, whether in the same or different context. I wasn’t not a dom when being submissive to other doms; I was still above the subs I played with. I wasn’t not a sub when domming other submissives; I just did so out of an agreed-upon definition of my superiority to other subs. There was no scene, no roleplay; my role in life and with my partners didn’t change with contexts. Certainly, the idea of one day domming a boy, telling him he’s inferior to me while making him lick my feet, and the next day being caged by him, waiting on him and doing his laundry has always been completely alien to me. Or even doing that with two different boys, one a sub and one a dom, but doing each just for fun, because both turn us both on, with no additional meaning about who we are; that, too, had no place in my life. In the past, if I’ve needed to address someone as Sir, it’s been because we agreed his relative status was higher than mine and he deserved it, as people; there’s never been a component of when or if, or that things were limited to certain contexts. I guess to me that’s what switching represents–regardless of whether roles reverse or simply become equal.

Perhaps because of seeing different content creators with different content, perhaps because of my hiatus, perhaps because of my changing relationships with my partners, perhaps because of my growing awareness of my own needs–or, perhaps, just experience and the passage of time–I’m wondering about that. Some of the switches I’m following on twitter have intrigued me; it’s odd. And at the same time, and in a related way, scenes of pup play have also started to appeal to me in certain ways.

There’s nothing inherently humiliating about being a puppy or adopting the mindset of a dog; and yet everything I’m now finding attractive about pup play is predicated on the exposure and helplessness aspects, on begging, being displayed, being inferior. Of being mitted, not allowed to speak, helpless. Of being expected to whine and beg and shake with horniness. Of being allowed to beg for anything I want (albeit nonverbally) because there’s no expectation I should know better, as a boy or slave should. Of being allowed to pull away from and try to get out of things I don’t want–again, of not needing to behave with the self-discipline and control of a slave, fully knowledgeable that he has to obey, and instead to be able to be willful and try to get out of things–and, unless the dom is willing, to instead be made to do the thing or be disciplined for it. To let the dom re-train my brain to with the discipline to obey commands I dislike rather than just doing so out of my own discipline and belief in my place as his inferior.

I’ve already veered back in to slavery, here, though; the appeal of pup play as I’m beginning to see it isn’t so much about servitude as it is about exposure, humiliation and control. It’s about being naked, on all fours, caged, straining, and unable to do anything about it beneath a man or men–and perhaps alongside other pups similarly limited. It’s about being helpless and allowed to beg. Or at least I think it is; it’s such a new curiousity it’s hard to say. But something about that kind of abject exposure, usage, and being enjoyed despite–or even for–begging for things a dom doesn’t want–and providing him pleasure in getting to decide, genuinely without fear of my desires not being met, whether to give it–something about that seems to correlate with pup play better than just enslavement. I’m not sure how; I can’t quite articulate it.

And that, I think, is the weirdest thing of all. I don’t know what I want, or even how to articulate what I might want. And I don’t think that’s ever–in the twenty-plus-years I can remember out of my thirty-year life–happened to me before, not in a way meaningful enough for me to remember.

The boy thinks he is done. His owner’s car makes a soft ticking sound as the engine cools. The boy rests momentarily, gazing blankly through the window at his master’s condo: he’s not lost in thought, just blanking out as his subconscious finishes computing.

Eventually he realizes he’s doing nothing and, with a start, opens the door and steps out to a musty, overly bright afternoon. It isn’t hot outside, but there is no wind, and the slave’s sun-dazzled eyes conspire with his mental state to make the building and lawn out of focus, their colors muted and washed out.

The clunk of the front door closing behind him is the next thing his conscious mind is aware of. He begins to correct his state of dress even before the gentle dimness of his master’s home, lit only by the daylight that escapes the windows’ shades, can salve his addled mind. Shoes, socks, shirt, pants, undergarments all fold neatly in to a stack, as cuffs and tail plug are retreived from their own neat home in the entryway and make their way on to the boy’s body; together with the collar and chastity cage the boy had already been wearing they completed the only wardrobe he was truly meant to wear.

By the time he kneels and grips the stack of worn clothes with his teeth his mind is back up and running. The boy hopes his arrival home, thirteen minutes before scheduled, is ok; he wasn’t sure if he should have taken another passenger, but doubted he had time to do a full ride before he needed to be back home to await his master’s return.

The slave crawls to the stairs and up them slowly, still uncertain, and accidentally drops the underwear originally pressed down on to his shirt by his teeth. He has to stop and re-arrange his clothes in to a slightly less tidy bundle to be able to get a secure grip on them with his mouth before he finishes his crawl up the stairs and to the laundry hamper. The return trip is less dignified, backing his way on all fours down the stairs as his master demands. The slave can feel his tail plug sway haphazardly with the awkward motion, and with a twinge of desire wishes his owner were there, hopefully to enjoy the spectacle he knows he is presenting.

Downstairs, he crawls to his spot on the floor next to where his owner sits on the couch and rests on his knees a moment as he tries to recall his first chore for the afternoon. He believes it to be to clean the bath; he crawls to the kitchen sink to retreive the cleaning supplies and stacks them in his drawstring carry bag. Slipping the bag onto his back, he again climbs the stairs.

At the top he opens the bag and, as he has been told to do, stands on his feet to begin cleaning the room from the top down. He has just begun cleaning the toilet when he hears the door open and close downstairs; his master does not summon him, so he continues his chores.

Later, when he has finished, he is allowed to kneel, leaning against the couch, and rest his head against his master’s feet. The boy is asked how his first day of work away from home went. He isn’t sure, though; and tries to say as much. Eventually his owner gets him to realize that he didn’t really care for it; it was an interruption, but at least it wasn’t an unpleasant one. No one even commented on his collar, though his master expects that will change after giving more people rides.

His master says he did the right thing by returning early, and the slave nuzzles the bottoms of his owner’s feet, enjoying his place there; his own small celebration of his owner’s approval.

Slave must be willing to relocate.

Twinks preferred, muscle subs also enjoyed. Slaves of other body types must expect to be fed and exercised until they to conform to one of these two body types.

Slave’s life will be about his owner. When he is first relocated he will not have a job for several months as he learns to perform all of his master’s domestic tasks to his master’s satisfaction. After that point his master may or may not choose to have him employed part-time while the master is himself away at work. His employment will always be based on his owner’s decision about how to use his slave. The slave’s master is conscientious about healthcare and will ensure the slave has insurance and adequate access, as well as a plan for the slave to re-enter society or find another master in case of the master’s death.

In the privacy of kink-friendly spaces, including his owner’s home, the slave will be kept constantly naked excepting:

• collar (always)
• chastity cage (always)
• cuffs
• butt plug
• jewelry (for any piercings, as well as other decorations as desired, including items such as clip-in cat ears)
• hoods (rarely; both isolation and/or pup hoods depending on master’s desire and assessment of slave’s inclinations)

Strict protocols will be expected of the slave, and he will be trained to follow them at any time he is not ordered to do otherwise. Protocols will include, but not be limited to:

• obeying any order given to him by one of his betters, immediately (if such an order would interfere with another order or rule of his master’s, any order given by his master takes precedence; otherwise he must ask for clarification and explain the conflict)
• remaining on all fours in kink-friendly spaces, excepting cases where it would be dangerous to do so (such as traversing stairs) or impossible to accomplish a task well (cooking his betters’ meals)
• eating from bowls or plates on the floor, or from the bare floor itself, when in kink-friendly spaces
• being disallowed on furniture excepted when invited, and then only for as long as the superior who invited him indicates he may remain there
• his sitting posture is to always have his legs beneath him (seiza posture, side-saddle posture, or similar); he is not allowed to touch his anus to the floor
• keeping himself lubed and clean for his owner’s sexual use, whenever his master may desire

In order to assure his adherence to the rules and protocols he must live by, especially his complete submission and obedience to his master and his other superiors, the slave can expect positive and negative reinforcement as well as mental conditioning.

Negative reinforcement is simplest, and will vary according to the slave’s temperament. Those which do not enjoy physical pain will be punished with bare-handed spankings, paddlings, canings, or similar. Those that instead find such activities to be rewarding may be punished with corner time, applications of icy hot or itching powder, and similar less-conventional aversions.

Mental conditioning may be combined with negative reinforcement in the form of writing lines, but more often will not be affiliated with positive nor negative reinforcement. Such conditioning will usually take the form of affirmations of his inferiority, submission and service the slave must memorize and recite. His morning affirmation might involve reciting his love, admiration, respect, and adoration of his owner, reminding himself of his feelings towards the man whose service is the slave’s life purpose. His evening affirmation might involve reciting the chores, tasks, and services he performed for his master that day, expressing his enjoyment of getting to do such work for his owner, and thanking his owner for the opportunity and privilege. Before eating, his affirmation may be to prostrate himself with his nose to the floor, lick the floor, and thanking his owner for providing the slave with all of his food and making all decisions about what he gets to eat so that he can be the best-looking slave he can be for his owner.

Positive reinforcement will typically take the form of being allowed to lay his head in his master’s lap; receiving pets or verbal assurances that he is a good boy; being given tasty treats appropriate to his diet, such as fresh fruit; and similar rewards that focus on his inferiority to his owner even as they praise the slave’s performance and mindset.

Master’s bio: the man seeking this slave is a white-collar professional in his thirties. His own body type has varied from athletic to chubby over the last three years, and is currently chubby, but will transition back to athletic over the next year. He works in the tech industry and has interests in science-fiction and fantasy settings. He spends his free time working with boys, visiting friends, working out and gaming. He predominately plays board and virtual strategy games. He is polyamorous, and his partners range from dominant to switch to submissive.

Inquire with any additional queries or clarifications.

Faberi, my boyfriend and former master, diagnosed me the other day with contentedness. I badly wanted to argue, but his evidence was compelling and thorough and I simply couldn’t find any reasonable refutations. I fear he is right–I think I might be content.

Our culture extolls the virtues of contentedness; we look self-deprecatingly on our consumerism and read the words of sages: claims that happiness comes from learning to be content with what we have, to appreciate and be thankful for our blessings. That pursuit of fame and prestige and wealth is hollow and empty. Contentedness, though, is a promised elixir of happiness.

Learning coping strategies for not getting what you want and expecting not to get what you want in most cases and for the rest of your life can be very useful. I grew up gay in the south in the nineties; I was in to the ideas of a man owning and using multiple other men as slaves by the time I came out to my best friend in middle school and tried to convince him to enslave me (which didn’t work, but we stayed best friends and just didn’t talk about it and he never outed me). So by that point I was already looking at any relationship I wanted being hated by all of the society I lived in. It would be a felony offense for me to have sex with any man I met or interacted with sexually for the next five or six years, despite yearning desperately to do so. I feel like my childhood was my opportunity to hone not getting what I want in to an art form.

I have always had borderline contentedness. I blame my childhood, as I do for so many of my traits: I never really learned how to compromise. I have no idea how to ‘let go;’ when you give up part of what you want to get some of what you want I never learned how to stop wanting the part I’m not getting. Instead whenever the compromise came up I simply remember what I’m not getting, get frustrated, and lose interest in what I do get. This ranges from the logical–such as compromising on climate control at a midway point, so that rather than getting a comfortable temperature you just get a different uncomfortable temperature–to the irrational, such as going to a restaurant with food I’m ok with rather than what I’m in the mood for. I just never learned how to get over it. Instead, I got very, very used to not getting what I want, and learned how to suppress my objections and hide my unhappiness.

I never wanted a nine-to-five job; I always hated working and loved playing video games and daydreaming. But I had learned that the world was against me and so get-rich-quick schemes would certainly never work for me. Throughout my childhood my dad was an ascending star at work, from entry-level engineer to senior management of a multinational, multi-billion dollar publicly traded company; the idea of that sort of incredibly slow and tedious progress pained me. By the time he could afford to retire and do anything he was already old.

But it was all I thought I could do, so I practiced my art of accepting that I don’t get what I want and went to college, got a degree, and got a nine-to-five job. I even got a vanilla boyfriend and tried eschewing polyamory and kink. When people called me successful as I tread in my father’s footsteps up the bottom rungs of a wage-slavery ladder I nodded and smiled, even as the voice in my head laughed bitterly and contemptuously at being congratulated on my enormous failure. When I got my own loan on my own home by age twenty-two and made more on my own than the median household income it was easy to be content. I had a boyfriend and friends and family that loved me. It was just the best I could do. It wasn’t what I wanted my life to be, but it was the best I could do. For a while, in college, I was even pretty happy with my appearance; see exhibit A.

But time wounds all heals, and I soon enough failed to work out or eat well. I wanted over and over to break out of suburbia and write a trading program or start a rental business; anything to escape the tedium of my day job. But I came home and played video games, for some reason. I read D&D manuals and fantasized about living in a world of strictly understood magic anyone with intelligence could master, and about living forever and achieving wealth and power. I just dreamt instead of doing anything. I was content; I have trained myself too well that I won’t get what I want. My ability not to fight people, not to try and upend the life I had built with people I love was too developed. I had become placid, overweight and lethargic.

I made paltry efforts to compromise with my partner to try and engage in kink; I tried to make myself work on a trading algorithm. I tried to make myself go to the gym. Instead I came home from work, went out to dinner with my boyfriend, and played video games. Eventually, yearning for more, I saw a counsellor; I couldn’t not seek changes. I pushed my partner until we moved downtown; but I wasn’t done pushing and he wasn’t ready or able to change as much as I needed. We broke up after seven years of a sometimes-open, vanilla, single-partner relationship.

The next few months were rough; I had had depression for at least the end of our relationship and probably a good portion besides. I was content, but my failure to achieve my goals brought me low self-esteem. About a month after breaking up I decided to explore submission; within a few months I was committed to serving Faberi, and had started a strict diet, was seeing a personal trainer at the gym, and was staying chaste, collared and otherwise nude at home, omitting use of all furniture but my bed.

I once again began to like how I looked (exhibit b); as before when I was in shape I had grown distant from my friends, seeing them only once every few weeks, and had few social obligations. I was making no meaningful progress in my professional life, but at least some of what I wanted for myself was being done. Over time, though, as my relationship with Faberi deepened, things inevitably changed. My value to him was in our emotional connection and friendship; we spent more and more time gaming or co-domming boys and less and less focused on my submission. Eventually I grew resentful of being told to do anything; I didn’t really feel like a submissive, didn’t feel like his inferior, and didn’t feel like I was getting the sensation of control and inferiority I needed to be submissive. After some discussions I transitioned to his boyfriend rather than his slave and co-dommed the rest of his pack.

I’d once again become content, placid; I still wasn’t where I wanted in life in terms of my career, nor honestly in terms of kink, as I had always wished either to have or to be a live-in slave subject to strict discipline, expectations and control. And in time I lost the progress I had made physically.

Recently I was talking to Faberi about my dissatisfaction with these things; and I am forced to agree with him that my problem now is that I am content. I have boyfriends and boys I love, who love me; my job isn’t intolerable; I have nothing to push me except myself, and I’m too placid and good at accepting I don’t get what I want to be fired up about it. Maybe it’s time for me to talk to him about being submissive again; maybe it’s time for me to find a way to dom myself. Maybe a counsellor can help.

I’m content and it’s killing me.

I’m launching this blog now, in a pique of depression, and we’ll see how it goes. I formerly blogged on tumblr as the-monstrous.tumblr.com; I met a lot of people I really value there, and the loss of tumblr as a platform (may it rest in peace) does sadden me, even though I myself had removed my blog before its demise (at the time thinking it would be necessary to go in to teaching; I think I am about ready to discard that concern). This space will, perhaps, be the continuation of that blog, though it will probably contain a far higher percentage of original content to re-shared things I like.

For those who didn’t know me before, I am a middle-aged gay male kinkster in a polyamorous relationship. Formerly in Dallas, Texas, I now live in Michigan.

I have found the concept of slavery interesting and appealing since I was a young child–my first erotic memories include an illustration of Hagar’s wife kneeling as she is sold in to slavery in an illustrated children’s Bible from when I was perhaps eight or nine; some small part of my brain insists it remembers fantasizing about lego-scale (and perhaps even lego-shaped) men clad in nothing but loincloths being bought and sold prior to third grade, which would have been when I was six or seven; and I talked to a my best friend of first and second grade about a fantasy world in which all people (all free people?) wore diapers and either then or later imagined it would be the humiliating duty of slaves to change and take care of them. Of course, the concept of slavery was and is heavily stigmatized, so I was deeply closeted about these interests–even as I continued to feed them by picking up quite a collected of illustrated children’s books about ancient history.

My interests as I see them now focus around TPE (total power exchange) and humiliation/status differentiation; I expect to explore those topics quite a bit, should I end up really taking the knife to this pristine white canvas and littering it with the taint of my thoughts. Shortly: I have come to believe my deepest desires will get no satisfaction.