20th March 2026: Some Notes on M/s
this is more of a (very long) blog post than an essay, so, please read this with a degree of understanding that everything here is at best half formed. what’s the value in it then? well it’s my blog and i’ll forget what i’m thinking if i don’t write it down. plus, sometimes it’s nice to have something to show people and for them to disagree with something i’ve written so i can develop the idea. i do value feedback even if it makes me pissy, you know?
so anyway, this is going to be half personal stuff about M/s and half trying to figure out why and where disagreements about and within M/s come from. if you are reading this and don’t know what M/s is at all, i want to note that this is not a 101 and it’s not a 10X resource. i think this whole numbering system is a bit silly but i guess i’d describe this as a 20X summary of 201+ level discussions. still, i’ll do the barest of primers before we get to the main thing: M/s stands for Master/slave. it is a way of structuring relationships through authority transfer where the “Master” has authority over the “slave”. in that way it is a lifestyle dynamic. it was also historically synonymous with “leather” but that’s less true now. it is consensual, or at least consensual in some sense of the word inasmuch as it is mutually negotiated and freely agreed to. and to really emphasise this last point, when i say my flatmate wants or asked for something, i mean that literally and explicitly. we talk about everything at length.
yes, also, the terminology is suspect. i will be using M/s and M-type and s-type to refer to everything in this piece because that’s the historically grounded language, but Owner/property, Dominant/submissive, Total Power Exchange, and numerous others can (read: can) refer to effectively the same dynamic. similarly, some people use power exchange instead of authority transfer to refer to basically the same thing. well, that’s a source of argument. we’ll get into that, i guess, but we’ll get into this first:
Finding the Right Words (part one)
You (referring to you, yes you!) can tell from the intro that clearly I don’t care about slash-speak. If you were going into this thinking that all the lower case i-s made me the s-type then alas, I am strictly an M-type for this type of thing. Maybe not strictly, certainly I can imagine enjoying performing service (we’ll get to “service” later) for a week, but only effectively as a holiday – in the same way that I turn my phone off when I go camping with my flatmate. The day-in day-out of erotic [sic?] servitude is my idea of hell, which is part of what makes it sexy to fantasise about, mind. (As Emily Horne Joey Comeau put it, “Civilization is the ability to distinguish what you like from what you like to watch pornography of.”) At any rate, my point is that “yr girl, yvette” remains lowercase most of the time and if I’m writing casually then I largely do away with capitalisations. I do not make my flatmate, who is my s-type, use “i” rather than “I” or capitalise “My” pronouns. The reason for this is that I find it a bit silly when I do it (though hot elsewhere; see The Subordinate), and I guess I don’t want to limit my own or my flatmate’s ability to be expressive, since that expressiveness is something I value both in him and as something that makes relationships work. There are some exceptions to this – I make him call me “Miss” rather than my name, for example – but there are also exceptions to those exceptions. I’m not going to get upset with him if he intentionally disobeys that one because he thought, for whatever reason, my actual name suited the conversation better. If he unintentionally gets it wrong, then I’ll throw in some punishment (we’ll get to “punishment” later too) because what is a rule if not enforced, but I really do trust him to make his own decisions about when a rule shouldn’t apply. All the protocols (as above) we’ve got are flexible like that, and the worst that happens is we disagree on whether a specific circumstance is the right place to flex them. In the moment, I get the final say – which is what makes this authority transfer – and later we can discuss and try to figure out who was right. I’m always open to being wrong.
You may also be able to tell from the above paragraph that I am obfuscating any specific terminology we use for ourselves by referring to us as M-type/s-type. Obviously I am not going around the house saying “As your M-type…” in any sort of sincere way. Perhaps less obviously, I only use the term “Master” for myself jokingly too. This is absolutely a personal taste thing. The term feels so divorced from any of my actual experiences and so exaggerated to me that I can only use it as parody for myself. Similarly, if my flatmate ever calls me “Master” I know he thinks I’m acting like a dumb-ass. What terms work then? My flatmate prefers “property”, which I guess makes me the “Owner”. Still, that has pet-play connotations for me which I don’t find resonant. We intentionally don’t use “Dominant” and “submissive” because we see that as something which encompasses a broader range of power dynamics than what we’re doing. While I do like “Goddess”, that’s not actually the vibe I want for what we’ve got going on. Maybe that’s to do with the fact that I am fallible, that I will be wrong about things, and that it is important to call that out and not to take my word as law if we want a relationship where we live together to actually function. Words are important, and I find it impossible and unbearable that I can only find the right ones for fleeting moments. Even “Miss” is a compromise because what I really want is “Ma’am”, but that doesn’t resonate here in the UK. All that’s left to do then is gesture to the space where a word should be – “M-type” instead of “Master” or “Mistress” or “Mommy” or “Ma’am” or “My Goddess” or whatever – and use whatever feels right in the moment only when that feels right.
There is a self-seriousness to language in this context which I wish I could avoid. I think not leaning into it has gotten me into trouble. My songs are all silly and my stories are all fake. If only there were a way to say, “No, what you see here is also silly and fake as much as everything is silly and fake.” The response is to ask why I’ve written this, why I’ve not written a song or a story. I guess I’m not used to people taking me seriously, and I’m always taken aback when they do. When I try to write about this sort of thing, this sort of thing that is serious and real because we are dealing with the structuring of entire lives, I have to take responsibility for the words I put down. I can acknowledge that on occasion (on many occasions), I have not found the right words, without turning around and blaming you for believing that I meant the words at all. As Virginia put it, “It is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication... they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.”
Doing the Work
So my flatmate registered for MsC Worldwide and he realised I hadn’t really engaged with much in the way of education beyond what he had talked to me about. So we spent a week cuddling in bed every evening and watching talks from various leatherfolk about M/s dynamics. It was here that I was introduced to Tomo, Liza & Liza’s slave Jody, Raven Kaldera & Joshua Tenpenny, and Akasha Eden. In addition to all the talks, my flatmate also bought a bunch of books and made me read some of them. I’ve now read Miss Abernathy’s Concise Slave Training Manual, Building the Team, selections my flatmate wanted me to read from Dear Raven & Joshua, and at time of writing I’m part-way through SlaveCraft. So I’ve been getting a more formal education in something I had previously been vibing out (under the informal tutelage of my flatmate, mind).
I’d like to stake a claim that all this more formal education has a value that cannot be replicated elsewhere. I guess we need some delineations and definitions if we’re going to back up that claim. Firstly, we can describe “vibing [it] out” as intuiting something through context, where the context is an environment, a conversation, or your own attempt to do something. You might vibe out how to crack a whip for example from being in a dungeon and watching other kinksters do it, from talking to someone where they describe the feeling of cracking a whip and working backwards from there, or from buying a whip and thrashing around at home until you find the motions. Secondly, we can describe “being taught” as explication and demonstration of something in an educational context. This can be a zoom call presentation, a book, or a friend showing you something in a dungeon, so long as there is an attempt to teach you something rather than the assumption that you already know. Thirdly, we can recognise that these can occur at once. For example, my flatmate taught me how to do a single column tie the other day but I vibed out what he meant by locking off. Furthermore, vibing it out and being taught exist in tension. Someone can teach you how to crack a whip but you will always have to vibe out for yourself the exact motions which no one can teach you because no one else has your exact body. Wow look: a dialectic. Anyway.
Being taught involves an admission not only that you don’t know something, but that you don’t know this thing in specific. As my old chemistry teacher was fond of saying, “You have to know what you know in order to know what you don’t know.” Vibing it out is a way of not admitting that you don’t know this thing in specific, which can then complicate your own understanding of what you do already know. A somewhat bizarre analogy but the best I can do right now is to think of this all like Moser’s Circle Problem, which is a sequence that goes 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and then 31 and onto more not-exclusively powers of 2. A group of people might mention this thing in conversation, you might gather that it involves sections on circles and numbers of points on the circle edge, you might be able to visualise this up to n=5 if you’ve got a really good visual imagination, and then you think, Okay I get where how this works it’s just powers of 2, and you would be wrong. This could be avoided if you moved from a vibing it out mode to a being taught mode and asked, “What is Moser’s Circle Problem?” and if the group described the problem without giving away the twist, you could then ask, “What is interesting about Moser’s Circle Problem?” At that point, if they don’t give the twist away they’re just lying to you and that’s on them and you should hang out with people who aren’t talking about dorky math shit.
My point broadly is that when you don’t admit what you don’t know, you end up making assumptions about what you do know. In an M/s context can look like misunderstanding the principles guiding M/s dynamics by assuming they operate on the same logic as authority transfer dynamics in play. Again, this is the next section so I won’t get ahead of myself, but what I want to convey right now is that even realising that there were two different logics at play here took me saying, “Okay I guess I don’t really know what M/s is,” and watching Tomo explain his understanding of the difference between D/s and M/s. An extension of this admission is that my understanding of the difference between (what I’ll term) play-logic and property-logic is traceable to and developed from one of Tomo’s talk at MsC Worldwide (as well as other things, which I’ll get to). Vibing it out makes “it” unaccountable to any particular source of knowledge since there was no intent to teach. If someone came up to my flatmate and said, “Hey I watched your Just the Whip scene and tried that with my partner and it turns out that was totally the wrong way to whip someone,” his response would be, “If you had asked, I would have explained the we were intentionally using the whip as effectively an outsize flogger because it’s heavy, has no cracker, and we wanted to do maximal damage, which is not the way whipping scenes generally work.” Because this hypothetical someone didn’t admit they didn’t know how to whip, they make an incorrect assumption about the principles our scene was operating on.
Know what you don’t know, and then you’ll know you don’t know more than you ever knew you could know.
Working Towards a Logic of M/s
What’s the difference between a submissive and a slave? Just kidding… unless?
Okay for real I’m going to try to explicate some of my thoughts here as succinctly as possible. There won’t be much in the way of argumentation or background because that could fill a whole zine – and perhaps it will one day.
So, as alluded to earlier, we’re going to delineate between play-logic and possession-logic. Play-logic is the logic that governs kink dynamics centred around domination and submission, and possession-logic is the logic that governs kink dynamics centred around ownership and property. Caveat here: as mentioned, some people use domination and submission synonymously with mastery and slavery which I’m not going to argue with because you have to choose the words that are right for you – however, I think using these words this way in this section allows the most clear delineation between two different modes of authority transfer. Similarly, I am using ownership and property synonymously with mastery and slavery, but again, the most important thing is the difference I am going to be describing rather than getting caught up on if someone who calls themself a slave should really be called a submissive or whatever.
We can view domination and submission as they are talked about in contemporary kink communities (or at least the Scottish kink scene) are a form of play. What this means is that there is a space where different rules to the rest of life are set and two or more people go about having something resembling fun. This is where canmom would bring up magic circles. It is generally not cool to go about whipping someone without negotiating the scene, saying when it starts, and having a way out. The “dominant” and “submissive” are roles to be played by equals, with bounds on when those roles begin, end, and how they should be played. If there is a sense of possession, it is only playing at possession. I could not, as your dominant during a scene, order that you send me several thousand quid. I’m not dominating every aspect of your life; I am only dominating you inasmuch you have given me the authority to tie you to a cross and put some stripes on your tits for however long you can bear it. This argument for why causing you pain in this way is okay is what I have termed play-logic.
Ownership and property aren’t play. This is not to say they are more serious than dominance and submission (and I would like to note here that play of all sorts can be very serious, which is why we take so much care to make sure it doesn’t go wrong), but that they are not a different set of rules to the rest of life. Instead, they become the governing rules for life. Canmom, I am certain, would mention magic circles again here, but if everything is magic circles then everything is magic circles and all our conversations get more circular and less magical. Owner and property are then not roles played by equals but refer to an imbalance in a relationship where one person has total authority over the other. If you were my property (my s-type) and I put some stripes on your tits with a whip, what makes that okay isn’t that we sat down and negotiated the scene and said when it starts and made sure you had a safeword – play-logic – it’s that you at some point willing gave yourself up to be owned by me and as such I have the right to do as I please with you. This is possession-logic.
Let’s complicate this a bit. Firstly, “total” is doing a lot of work, and not really how things end up playing out (so to speak) in many actual M/s dynamics. Still, we can see this in the difference of expectations when a relationship is operating on play-logic versus when a relationship is operating on possession-logic. In a couple of Tomo’s classes at MsC, he mentioned that he had cut his hair and his M-type was shocked because she had assumed she had authority over that. They had to have a whole discussion about it. While in a play dynamic, this would be considered a major red flag and overstepping of boundaries, in a possessive dynamic this is pretty par for the course. A lot of MsC and M/s literature is dedicated to working out these sorts of kinks (so to speak). The ideal which is strived towards in possessive dynamics is one of total ownership and property, or even if it is not strived towards per se, it is the measure by which relationships are marked. You can think of it as having to opt out, rather than the opting in exemplified by play where saying “You can hit me with a whip” does not mean that you can hit me with a paddle as well.
Secondly, the magic circle of dominance and submission can extend beyond the walls of the dungeon. D/s lifestyle is still categorically lifestyle in that it can be indefinite and extend into vanilla life. Wearing a chastity cage is my go to example here (for obvious reasons) of lifestyle play. This is something I’ve negotiated into previous relationships to cede control of when I orgasm and what I can do with my dick. I’ve worn one 24/7 for weeks on end. However, the chastity cage doesn’t imply a level of authority transfer beyond the cage itself and perhaps some associated humiliation play, which is still something that is negotiated at least through the tone of the initial and ongoing negotiations. This is still authority transfer lifestyle, but the difference between this and an M/s dynamic based in ownership and property where the s-type is wearing a chastity cage is that the former is created to imbalance an otherwise equal dynamic whereas the latter comes from an already imbalanced dynamic and is an expression of possession. In other words, in M/s, you don’t agree to wear the chastity cage, you agree to give up the right not to wear the chastity cage.
Still, M/s contracts end for reasons beyond time elapsing. There is always the question of abuse in any given relationship, and even outwith abuse any relationship can still be unfulfilling. I don’t think it’s a necessary feature of ownership and property that the s-type can never leave of their own volition, though I know Hannah and others find value in the framework of irrevocable consent. At the behest of our friends and with my encouragement, my flatmate and I have a way of talking out of role to set limits and negotiate stuff like this. We can conceptualise this more as a magic circle within the magic circle of M/s where the usual M/s rules don’t apply, rather than stepping outside the M/s magic circle. In other dynamics, there are clauses that just break the contract, such as taking a slave collar off. The underlying feeling here is that if your s-type would do something like that, you don’t want them to be your s-type. So in most M/s dynamics, the property can always dispossess the owner of itself.
Even without these exit clauses, there are different ways that play-logic and possession-logic are used to disaude abuse. (A note here: I mean disuade abuse from people who aren’t bad actors. Anyone can abuse anyone in any kind of relationship if they set their mind to it. Much of the abuse that takes place in kink scenes is done without breaking any limits or violating anyone’s consent. What dissuading abuse means in the context that I am using it is more on the lines of encouraging partners to treat each other well.) The former, play-logic, uses limits and consent to define the rules of play and encourages an almost sportsmanlike conduct. You do not hurt your partner beyond what they’ve agreed to because those are the rules, and you don’t find your way around the rules because out of scene you two are equals and friends and they would be upset with you. The latter, possession-logic, doesn’t rely on this idea of “out of scene” because there is no scene (or as Guy Baldwin would describe it in SlaveCraft, the scene is infinite). Instead, possession-logic and much of Raven’s writing use this sense of propriety to encourage treating your property well, and Guy Baldwin seemingly coined the M/s slogan: “Protect the property!”. Raven brings up that what an owner wants is functional property, and the way to have functional property in the form of another person is to not abuse that person, so you should really listen to them when they say that they don’t want to clean the gunk out of the sink right now, for example. The calculus of the owner is different to the calculus of the dominant. Whereas the dominant would weigh up what it would mean to push past a stated limit and (fucking hopefully) decide that limits should be respected, the owner has to weigh up whether their property would have a serious reaction on their hands to more cleaning today, whether the texture of the gunk would cause them to have an autistic sensory meltdown, or whether they just find it icky in a normal way and want to get out of this order. Pushing past the first instance means the property is less functional (and upset with you) for the next little while, pushing past the second instance would mean getting the job done ineffectively but perhaps could be worked around if you went out to get some heavy duty kitchen gloves, and pushing past the third instance is kind of just what M/s is about.
(As an aside, one could probably write a defence of owner/property dynamics where the mode of propriety is more akin to custodianship rather than the ancient Roman idea that you have only really have the right to destroy property (see The Dawn of Everything), but that would create the most sublimely fucked kink discourse I can imagine.)
I think that because of these two oppositional logics, there can be confusion as to what M/s actually is – or at the very least as to what certain M/s relationships are actually doing. Much of M/s is non-erotic, at least in my experience, though there is a diffuse eroticism to the whole thing. When I ask my flatmate to bring my coffee, I’m not rock hard in bed as he delivers the cup to my bedside table. He’s doing that because he thinks it’s worth it to serve me and make my life easier. God knows why, but my end of the bargain is to make use of that service to continue to be someone worth serving. Presumably my flatmate enjoys that I read books, that I talk to him about the books we read together, that I go see new films pretty regularly, that I write songs and stories which I share with him first of all, that I hang out with a lot of different people, that I do community organising and continue to develop and push myself as a community organiser, that I try to be kind and calm and curious even when things are stressy, that I can have a good bitch when the time is right, that I really do care about and love my friends and that I love them so openly. That’s certainly some of what I see in myself, and it would be a misuse of the leisure he’s offering me by following my orders (and getting me my coffee and doing my dishes and writing down all the shit I want noted out but cannot focus enough to write down) to turn my back on all these things that are difficult and sink into the comfort of playing some video game, having meals delivered to me in bed. The M-type really ought to be obliged to exhibit mastery over herself, not necessarily before gaining an s-type, but certainly the relationship with the s-type should be used to develop this self-mastery.
What this can end up looking like, however, when people have vibed out lifestyle from a background of play-logic, is gross negligence at best and abuse at worse. This is because the underlying principles of what makes lifestyle functional and ethical are different when you are approaching what we’re doing as effectively an extended scene (and I do ultimately disagree with Guy Baldwin on that one). You might look at the way we’re talking about limits, about consent, about how we feel and why we do what we do and what we do together and what I have the right to do in the context of our relationship and say that we’re doing D/s wrong. But we’re not trying to do D/s. I am not going to do anything intentionally that would reduce my flatmate’s capacity to be the person he wants to be because that is obviously counterproductive. I am going to keep having conversations about how he feels and how I feel and issues that have arisen or might arise so that everything I do is informed and every effect that comes out of my actions is as intentional as anything can be. We do not need to set a limit on selling his kidneys or fucking him while he has a UTI for me not to do those things. Still, we’ve got the protocol for having out of role conversations if something where a limit needs to be set does come up.
Finding the Right Words (part two)
So the whole above section is a bit inelegant, right? Are those really forms of logic? Are “play” and “possession” the best way to describe a difference that I see in two types of lifestyle dynamics? The important thing that I want to get across is that there is this difference in the typical M/s approach to things where people are going into lifestyle wanting to do service and situations when lifestyle has arise out of people who scene together wanting to inject eroticism into daily life. I don’t want to toss these words aside at the first sign of trouble, as if I’m not using “play” and “possession” for a reason, but I’m also willing to be convinced that there’s a better way of describing what’s going on here in a way that is more illuminatory, or that “play” and “possession” aren’t really oppositional but instead are things that are more or less present in a different opposition found in lifestyle dynamics and I’ve confused what is underneath for the ripples on the surface. There isn’t much in the way of an M/s scene here in Glasgow, or even the Central Belt as a whole, but at time of writing one is starting to form, so hopefully I’ll be able to develop these ideas in conversation with other people who are also reading the writing and living the lifestyle.
Part of what makes this present lack of community so frustrating is that idiosyncrasies develop and become points of fixation rather than acknowledged and accounted for. The only example I really want to bring up here is the term “consent”. I am aware that I use “consent” in a fairly idiosyncratic way, and that I’m generally happy to say that something isn’t consensual and that can be fine if there are other mechanisms for maintaining a sense of autonomy or personhood or whatever it is that consent is meant to preserve. However, this is clearly unpalatable on the face of it and also not how basically any of the authors in M/s literature use “consent”. Guy Baldwin, Raven Kaldera, Hannah the Scribe, and Miss Abernathy all emphasise that M/s relationships are “consensual”. Raven also states that he has used conditioning, teamwork, and magic to put Joshua into “internal enslavement” which he can never escape. I would not consider that “consensual”. If something cannot be rescinded, I do not believe that it is consensual. I think that consent is effectively worthless as a tool if we are defining it as “some agreement that happened at some point with or without context and knowledge that may or may not be rescinded depending on what was agreed”. When I use the word “consent”, it is in a much stricter sense than any of the writers I am responding to. However, in the sense of the term that Guy, Raven, Hannah, and Miss Abernathy are all using it, everything I do is consensual. I just don’t want to use the term because to me it feels like I’m trying to make what I do more palatable at the expense of a framework which does have a specific and important use-case. This then can get me into trouble because it looks like I don’t care about consent, when in fact I do care about the thing that consent is trying to preserve, I’m just using different language to get there because I think different language allows us to trace that boundary in a way that can allow for more exciting and fulfilling play.
Okay, I used “play” there in a way that seems to contradict the way I was using it earlier, or at least that seems to be a much looser definition of the word “play”. I guess that brings me to my next point that no M/s literature uses language consistently at all. Dom/Master and sub/slave are used pretty much interchangeably in Raven’s books. Drummer uses M and S to refer to “seeking Master” and “seeking slave” respectively, even outside of personal ads. Master and slave are also sometimes used as scene-specific titles rather than referring to lifestyle. All this linguistic confusion is brought up in the opening to Dear Raven and Joshua, but there is no real linking of concepts between books of different authors and there’s no history of M/s specifically that takes it as different from what I’ve described as D/s. Maybe the closest we get is the difference between “soft world” and “marketplace” in The Marketplace series (as described to me by my flatmate; I’ve got The Slave sitting at the top of my TBR pile), which is fictional. What adds even more confusion to all this is that all this language we’re muddling together is the bedrock for people’s relationships, identities, and lives. “What’s the difference between a submissive and a slave?” becomes such a heated argument because two people doing the same thing might for whatever reason use one term over the other, and then we can’t come to an agreement that there even is a difference because we’re too focussed on our personal attachment to the words rather than the thing the words are trying to describe. This is why every MsC Worldwide class starts with “sub in [so to speak] whatever terms are appropriate for you in your dynamic”, which is a great way to avoid arguments but completely contrary to fostering a shared language through which we can communicate and develop our understanding of what’s actually going on when we do M/s. It becomes an endless point of contention and frustration, this trying to have a conversation and mutually having to figure out whether we agree on everything except the language – whether we agree on the language and nothing else.
(Anti-)Protocol
Okay let’s get onto talking about fun personal stuff. Protocol! We all love protocol. So, Akasha’s class on Protocol, Ritual, and Ceremony was great and definitely changed my perspective on the value of protocol and ritual. I kind of bounce off anything that sounds spiritual so I wasn’t too into describing anything my flatmate and I did as a ritual, but Akasha provided a really compelling discussion on the value of ritualising recurring moments between M-type and s-type. Similarly, Tomo also made the case for the value of protocol and relying on protocol when the initial energy of a relationship runs its course. As Akasha put it, “Chemistry is finite.”
So here I’m going to talk about my understanding of protocol, rituals, and the primary disagreement I have with the way protocols and rituals are formed as presented in the M/s material I’ve engaged with. Firstly, protocol is a way of defining behaviour in M/s. Akasha presents this as a series of “if [x] then [y]” statements. An example of this is if my flatmate is awake before me, he makes me coffee and brings it to me in bed. It’s also the way that you might do something. My flatmate knows that when I ask about the weather I want both the BBC and Met Office forecasts and I want information for the next few hours when I’ll be out or later if I’m going somewhere and then coming back that night. Yes, we do have a protocol about telling me the weather forecast. The value of protocol is that it is something to fall back on when there is uncertainty in other parts of the relationship. Tomo explains that leaning into the protocols you’ve already developed is a way of remaining close and reminding yourselves why you’re doing what you’re doing. This is pretty normal relationship advice, being effectively equivalent to telling partners who are struggling with each other to continue doing the housework they’ve agreed to do and not start breaking the communal agreements of their household just because times are tough – to still conduct themselves as part of that relationship.
Ritual then is is a way of chaining together protocols and finding the time and space to do these with some degree of regularity. When I get home, my flatmate takes off my boots for me. We have a whole little dance about it where he kneels and I put my boot on his chest and you can imagine how it goes. These rituals have an emotional valence in the way that bringing me coffee or checking the weather doesn’t. Protocols, of course, can have emotions associated with them, but rituals always do. The value there is to create a moment of connection and draw out particular emotions. Again, this is the equivalent to telling partners that they need to have a date night if they want to still feel the romance when the initial chemistry runs out, or that lighting candles, putting some Marvin Gaye on the tape deck, and giving your partner a massage is what gets you in the mood for sex with someone you saw throwing up all over themselves after getting food poisoning the week prior, for example. In our M/s, these rituals in part symbolise the authority transfer, and all the associated emotions contains shades of ownership and property, but this is the kind of thing that recentres us and gets us in the sort of mood that makes service sweet. Initially, I had discarded the whole idea of conceptualising anything as ritual because I thought it was a bit silly, that control and service were enough to sustain a relationship. The realisation for me was that all of that rests on the bedrock of an emotional connection that has to be actively sustained through these sorts of moments that re-energise the M-type and s-type alike, and ritual is a way of doing that reliably, both in terms of frequency and in terms of emotional valence.
Okay so clearly I don’t sound anti-protocol, right? Again, this might be an issue of finding the right words. What I disagree with in M/s literature is the idea that the way to form protocols and rituals is to start with the end and work back to the beginning. To put it more comprehensibly, the way protocols and rituals generally come about (as per Akasha and Hannah) is that the M-type and s-type start with what they want a protocol/ritual to achieve, then think about what is possible in the lives they live, and then figure out what a protocol/ritual could look like, and then test it out for a while. This attitude is, in my opinion, fairly lathed (another idiosyncrasy; see The Lathe of Heaven) in that it is trying to enact a top-down design on one’s own emotions. Clearly this does work for a lot of people doing M/s. Anti-protocol, then, is not an opposition to protocol per se but an inversion of the priorities when constructing protocol. My flatmate didn’t come to me and say, “Hey I want a moment of connection and care that makes me feel really submissive and in love and safe,” and I didn’t reply, “Sure okay let’s try you taking off my shoes.” What happened was I wanted my shoes off one day and I was too tired to bother with it myself so I made him do it, and then he did it and it was fun and had this kind of spark to it, so we did it again and that spark grew, and we formalised it and channelled the fire of emotions that had formed into an engine for generating something specific that was latent from the start. We didn’t build the engine and then try to get it firing, to put it another way. There are a lot of things we do that don’t develop into these sorts of rituals because they have no emotional valence, like the coffee thing. However, even the coffee thing developed out of me asking him a few times to do that while I was still in bed and then deciding we could probably formalise that into a protocol, rather than starting with the idea that I wanted coffee every morning, trying to figure out at about which time I would want it and if I’d want him to wake me up, and then getting him to do it for a week and see how it felt and adjust. Anti-protocol focusses on behaviours and emotions that are emergent, and it builds up and builds on what is already there.
For us, this works great. Protocols and rituals never feel useless or like they exist just to be doing the M/s thing. There clearly has to be some level of design in that we’ve agreed to structure our relationship in this way, but we structure our relationship in this way to allow for acting on what emerges through everything we get up to that is only possible because of the ownership and property dynamic. Similarly, there is a flexibility to the design. I write this now having just come back home and taken off my own shoes in full view of my flatmate because he’s working and I just want to lie in bed for a bit and I know I’m going to get my shoes back on for him to take off later. Even if you can think of protocol as an “if [x] then [y]” statement, and even if you can think of ritual as protocols strung together, we don’t have to create a series of rules that take into account every edge case. We know we both want to do the protocol/ritual, and if one or the other of us isn’t following it in the moment, there’s probably a reason for that. This is most apparent with my flatmate calling me “Miss” rather than my name when he’s talking to other people. That is, obviously, not appropriate all the time. At the end of the day I ask him if he got it wrong at all so I can appropriately discipline him. I’m not concerned as to whether he ever intentionally used my name, only whether he unintentionally used it. He knows whether any given instance was wrong or right.
Who Does Service Serve?
Service is an idea that’s tied up with M/s to the extent that being an s-type can be interchangeable with being “in service”. I’ve asked my flatmate for a definition of being in service to someone and he’s said, “Just kind of prioritising their wants and their whims… Do you have to put the ‘just kind of’ in?”
I would see service as the act of working to create leisure for someone else. I’m sure we can think of a hundred different ways of conceptualising this. What’s important here is the valence of service. There are a few different ideas within M/s discourse about this. Attending MsC talks and participating in the circles, you can hear variations on “the s-type serves the M-type and the M-type serves the dynamic”, “the s-type serves the M-type and the M-type serves the s-type”, and “the s-type and the M-type both serve the dynamic”. An idea here is that “the dynamic” is something extant that can be served, or that it is useful as a metaphor to conceptualise continuing to bring this power imbalance into existence as two people who do in fact have the same legal rights. Another idea here is that the M-type can serve the s-type, or serve the dynamic which in turn serves the s-type, by allowing the s-type to serve them. The most hidden-in-plain-view idea to all of this is that no one serves themselves.
This is where I would like to interject. My flatmate and I conceptualise service in opposition to the idea that one should not serve themselves through M/s. I have repeatedly emphasised that his side of his service to me should ultimately serve him. As mentioned earlier, it should be worth it. Every act of service should be, in some way, self-satisfying. When I order my flatmate to clean the dishes, for example, he’s said that it feels nice to be able to cut through the ADHD and just get it done. When he unties my shoes, he gets a sense of calm and contentment. When I say that he isn’t allowed to orgasm, he finds it hot. He finds that it makes his life more vibrant and that it makes him more capable to be in service to me. I don’t believe this dynamic would work if the act of serving me itself didn’t do it for him.
On my end, it should be fairly obvious what I get out of having this extra leisure and making him do all this stuff that I find really hot. It should be said that I do care about him and I want to have a good experience of service, but that involves finding ways to want something that he wants to give me. One of the questions in Dear Raven and Joshua amounted to “What do I do if I’m not being challenged by the service I am expected to perform and I get bored?” This generated a really stimulating conversation between my flatmate and myself in reference to Raven’s answer, which amount to telling the s-type to find the challenge in being content with the unchallenging service. My flatmate leans more on Raven’s side of the discussion and says that service should never create more work for the M-type and if something isn’t wanted then it isn’t really service. Our hypothetical in this question was an M-type who wants Kraft Mac n Cheese every night for dinner and an s-type who is understimulated by this easily conquered task. Making the M-type a three course meal of the finest produce from the market is clearly not service when the M-type really does just want mac n cheese again. I think that this occurring can point to a dissatisfaction in the s-type’s life, which is ultimately the prerogative of the M-type to account for in some way. This could be redirecting the s-type to make some friends and throw a dinner party if what they want is to get better at cooking and have that demonstrated in a communal context, or it could be the M-type doing some introspecting to bring up their more peculiar desires which would provide a challenge to the s-type if what they want out of it is to impress their M-type with something that is self-evidently difficult. We can imagine an M-type saying, “Look, you’ve gotta keep making the mac n cheese, but I want you to learn pottery so we can have new bowls for it.” This tension of finding ways to serve yourself that allow the other side of the slash to serve themselves is what makes the push-pull of M/s so exciting to me.
Raven brings up this idea of “alignment” in some of his writing. This is the idea that ultimately the M- and s-types should think about things in the same way and want the same things (though in inverted directions where appropriate). For him, this “way” and these “things” are solely determined by the M-type. I hope it’s clear by now that I don’t totally agree with that. Still, I think there is something to be said about both sides of the slash coming together to find ways to channel desire in a way that is mutually self-serving and that generates new possibilities for fulfilling service.
M/s Dyads: Control-oriented/Service-oriented & Adversarial-styles/Teamwork-styles
Some people say the word “spectrum” when I really think they mean the word “dyad”. This is kind of just a vibe, but I get the sense that people sometimes default conceptualise two oppositional concepts as sitting at either end of a big line. This allows us to think of these ideas as oppositional, but creates the illusion that there is some middle point where you can be half one and half the other. Allow me to introduce the humble taijitu, which visualises an intertwined duality. So when I think about oppositional concepts in M/s, I don’t visualise them as existing on a spectrum (or at least not a one-dimensional spectrum), but instead of existing in a kind of taijitu: separate and yet containing the other.
With that in mind, let’s break down control-oriented vs service-oriented M/s. The former is M/s that centres around control over another person, not for the aim of service. Here the goal is control for its own sake. The latter is M/s that centres around being served by another person, regardless of whether you actually exert control over them. The “holy grail” (to put it as Liza & Jody did) of this style of M/s is anticipatory service, which is an s-type understanding their M-type so well that they can serve without being ordered to do anything.
These styles can occur in parallel. We can imagine an s-type who cooks breakfast for their M-type without being asked, putting effort into figuring out what they might want today, but then as soon as things get into the dungeon, they are to follow commands to the letter and not have anything even close to an original thought. However, these styles can also occur within each other. A particularly masochistic s-type might stop working out to make themselves weaker than their M-type so that they can be controlled all the better, which would be service for the sake of control. On the other hand, an s-type with ADHD might need to be told which three eggs to scramble in order to get breakfast made, which would be control for the sake of service. You can probably see where I’m going with this.
My flatmate has talked to me about his inability to follow most time based standing orders. If I said that he was supposed to do the dishes every day before 6pm, he would spend the day stressing out in waiting mode about it and then barely get it started at five minutes to. However, if I make a judgement about his capacity to do the dishes and then order him to do so, it allows him to cut through that indecision and get it done right then because I am exerting that control then and there. Our dynamic is effectively a service-oriented dynamic wrapped in a control-oriented dynamic. It’s not half one and half the other, but instead is all of one wrapped in all of the other. When Joshua writes in Dear Raven and Joshua that control-oriented dynamics tend to fizzle out because what’s the point, I see that not as a failure of control-oriented dynamics, but instead as a failure to ground the control in and as context for service. Similarly, we need to acknowledge that service always constitutes and is constituted by control in M/s, otherwise we aren’t M- and s-types, just egalitarian partners doing nice things for each other.
I think something similar applies with adversarial and teamwork styles of M/s, as outlined in Building the Team. To sum these styles up quickly, adversarial M/s dynamics conceive of the s-type having to be forced into control and service (to the extent that they have freely signed up to be forced into control and service), whereas teamwork M/s dynamics conceive of the s-type working with the M-type to achieve whatever the M-type wants. Adversarial relationships motivate the s-type through discipline and punishment, whereas teamwork relationships motivate the s-type through appeals to the joy of being on the team and long conversations about why orders/protocols aren’t being followed when they aren’t being followed. Adversarial relationships also typically are sustained by erotic energy, whereas teamwork relationships typically are sustained by making progress in life (whatever that may look like for the team).
There isn’t quite the same dynamic between adversarial and teamwork styles to how control and service mutually constitute each other. I think you can have dynamics that are purely adversarial and purely teamwork – dynamics that are entirely motivated by fear of punishment and dynamics entirely without punitive elements – but I also think it is possible to have both at once. For my flatmate and I, this looks like using teamwork to achieve an adversarial style of dynamic. A lot of what we enjoy are discipline and punishment, but we use a teamwork approach to generate situations where we know we can dip into punishment. For example, the earlier protocol of my flatmate having to call me “Miss” is something he occasionally breaks by accident. The result is some form of punishment rather than a conversation about whether there are strategies he can use to remember in future because what we want is the dynamic opportunity for punishment and we’ve found a protocol that he will invariably forget occasionally and can get punished about. Okay, I want to talk more about punishment here, so I’m going to push move onto a dedicated section for that.
Disappointment & Punishment
So, in Building the Team, Raven writes the following about why punishment is ineffective as tool for preventing undesired behaviours:
For some slaves, the fact that they'll get punished when they do some forbidden action merely sends them into a whirl of strategic calculation as to whether the punishment is something they're willing to endure if they really want that tempting thing bad enough. It "legitimizes" the option of doing it anyway and getting punished tar more than a simple blanket "That's never OK, and if you do it, you're breaking the trust of the relationship, and letting the Team down, and being bad at your job."
For me, the following is something that should only be said as something that indicates an issue which would result an immediate break-up. My flatmate knows that it’s never okay to serve me peanuts either knowingly or through negligence, and he also knows that if he did, I might the survive the anaphylactic reaction but the relationship almost certainly wouldn’t.
The thrust of what I’m trying to say really is that I cannot stand and do not see a use for disappointment in relationships. Guy Baldwin writes in SlaveCraft:
And so, when we disappoint Them, or don't know how to follow where Masters lead, They can sometimes become frustrated, disappointed, and may even accuse us of not being truly submissive, or dedicated to our surrender, or of being insincere in our desire to submit. i find this reaction from Masters generally abusive and more often, a reflection of Their lack of understanding rather than an accurate evaluation of a slave's sincerity.
Disappointment to me is corrosive, infectious, and indicative of a relationship that either needs to end or drastically alter in structure. I have been on both sides of disappointment and I have worked hard to keep that out of my emotional toolkit when navigating a situation in a relationship. Ever saying “You’ve let me down” should be followed by “and so I’m breaking up with you”. This is maybe a strong stance but every alternate follow-up is so fucked that I’m willing to stake a claim here.
I think disappointment is a key motivating factor behind teamwork relationships also. If the satisfaction of helping the team is the carrot, “letting the Team down” is the stick. This isn’t to say that disappointment is a form of punishment (though I suppose playing at disappointment can be), nor that punishment in the form of whips and canes and cuffs and chains isn’t ever indicative of disappointment, but disappointment calls into question the existence and validity of “the Team”, which in this context means the whole structure and existence and validity of the dynamic that determines both the M- and the s-type’s senses of self. That’s unbearable. I refuse to make my flatmate feel like that without following through and actually dynamiting the whole structure and existence and validity of the dynamic. And I refuse to do that without being “let down” in a way that I cannot reframe as either an area for developing my own expectations or reframe as a misassessment of his own skills and capacity. When my flatmate forgets to do something even after I’ve mentioned it or he says he’ll do it in a minute and then doesn’t, I don’t feel let down. Instead, I remember that I probably shouldn’t have expected him to get it done unless he could do it as soon as I asked, and that he did genuinely want to do it but he misassessed how quickly the task he was finishing up would take as well as how good his ability is to hold the order in his head between contexts. I’m not even coming up to him like, “Hey this is making me disappointed we need to work on better strategies for it”, if it happens repeatedly. We can develop strategies for improvement without conceptualising the current state of affairs as “letting the Team down”. What’s weird is that Raven is also anti-blame and seems to both support the approach I am outlining as well as find value in disappointment. I think disappointment inherently carries blame with it, but I guess we’re parsing something somewhere in there differently.
So instead of disappointment we do a lot of punishment. Punishment has to suck, otherwise it is a scene masquerading as punishment. A lot of the talks at MsC disauded participants from using punishment in M/s because it either causes resentment or results in punishment seeking activities, but I disagree. If my flatmate were to choose between a dynamic where the stick is punishment, disappointment, or absent, he would choose punishment (which he has done by freely agreeing to this dynamic and knowing exactly what I’m like). Clearly then, my flatmate also sees value in punishment and doesn’t seem to resent me for it.
How do we square this idea of punishment sucking while also having value? I think that the value is derived from being in an environment where punishment can happen as a result of not following these strict rules. This takes the pressure off for s-types who are forgetful, clumsy, a brat, in a mood, or anything else that might cause inconsistent adherence to protocols and delivery of service. It is not worth making someone feel bad about not being able to hold up their end of the dynamic. The M-type is also signing up to what the s-type is like as well. This environment where punishment can happen is also something that we find hot, and we find that it gives protocols, rules, and orders an edge to them that they otherwise might not have had. There are consequences to using my name when my flatmate meant to say “Miss”, and those are consequences that he doesn’t have to feel bad about or that throw the whole dynamic into question.
This erotic edge to protocol requires the punishments to suck. They have to not be fun or generate pleasure. My flatmate and I both find value in bottoming impact beyond the realm of pleasure into sheer pain and panic for the sake of that experience itself, but we also generally find value in asking for what we cannot want. What I mean by that is we have used a teamwork style (i.e. the asking for) to allow for reliably emergent adversarial moments (i.e. what my flatmate cannot want). My flatmate would be upset if I never whipped him again because he’s asked to be in a situation where he can get whipped and it only feels like a situation where that’s an option if that does come about sometimes – but in every specific instance of him accidentally calling my by name, he doesn’t want me to whip him.
I saw this brought up in MsC a couple times as “atonement”, where the M- and s-types can alleviate feelings of disappointment through punishment. I’m not sure that’s exactly what’s going on here, but I see punishment as a non-judgemental way of enforcing protocol and energising heavy scenes, as well as making every task infused with a spark of excitement at the possibility that it could go wrong and result in bruised thighs. There are plenty of practical considerations as well, and it should be noted that punishment seeking behaviours can occur if the s-type isn’t getting enough attention and knows that breaking a rule is guaranteed to result in the M-type spending some quality time with them, and also that the severity of the punishment and when it is applied has to be tailored not to cause the s-type an endless panic attack over following every little rule perfectly. Still, those are things to be worked through rather than issues with punishment itself.
Finding the Right Words (part three)
there is no smooth transition. there are no more capitals. punctuation is going to get a bit messy. we’ve all read bukowski. it is one forty two ay em and i am writing the last section of this thing. let’s go, i guess.
so i’ve started feeling crazy again. i want to write about this thing that i do in a way that is comprehensible to other people and sometimes i feel like it’s impossible. there’s this tension between being humoured and being understood, right? maybe that’s the wrong way of putting it. maybe there’s this tension between reading something and going, this is what i think you’re saying, and going, this is what you’re saying. i want to say the things in the right way without you having to mentally adjust to all my idiosyncrasies. i also want to say things that you will take in good faith probably as someone who knows me or knows a bit about what i do and can trust that when i say i don’t think some play that i do is consensual i mean it in an idiosyncratic way rather than that i want to encourage rape.
i don’t know how to tell if i’m doing this right, if my whole section on the logic of this sort of play makes any sense. you might think i have learned by now to assess and believe in my own capacity to convey meaning as someone who has released songs that people like and written stories that have made people cry, but i really see the meaning as what is generated by the person engaging with the art, the role of the artist is to provide fertile material for the generation of meaning. that’s at least how i think about it when i do it.
message a friend, except my friends develop the same idiosyncrasies as i do, or except my friends just won’t read it because this is ten thousand words long, or except my friends will read it a bit and tell me it’s good to be nice without really thinking about it because they know me and know what i’m trying to say and can’t see the words for the words. i recently had an experience where i co-wrote something and a friend told me they had read it and thought it was good, then turned around at the end of the month and told me that they didn’t read all of it and thought it was bad. i just literally do not know what i am supposed to do with that information. it’s very unmooring.
all of this master slave shit is so distinctly unpalatable, also. i do not mean to be mean spirited here, but this really hits both cis het conceptions of unacceptable erotics and anarcha queer conceptions of hierarchical possessive relationships. yes, i guess i do conceptualise my flatmate as my property. i don’t really know how else to describe whatever was going on when he said he wanted to serve me and give me authority over him. it feels dishonest to couch it all as play because it doesn’t feel like play.
what makes this all worse is that we have a hole in our written history. what makes this worse is that we don’t have a shared language. what makes this worse is that half of the way we do talk seems to be to make it palatable to other kinksters in an potentially unfriendly community than to be intellectually honest with ourselves about the nature of what we’re doing. what makes this worse is that the consequences for not finding the right words can leave you dry heaving on the floor of your bathroom at five in the morning trying to think of something to say but you can’t find the right thing to say because the person you need to talk to you hasn’t said anything and you can never make sense on your own terms, you can only respond.
that’s what’s hardest about all this for me. if you (referring to you, yes you!) could start the conversation, set the terms of engagement, and laid out the linguistic weaponry we were going to use in this discursive combat, i would be able to wield it just fine. ask me to do the same and you’ll find out why i’m better on the back foot. i visualise things and graph things out and try to imagine sensations in and through my body and sometimes sounds work and a lot of it is just referential with all these emotional resonances that build into an understanding and i do use words but only if i’m imagining talking to someone to try to explain to them what i’m getting at in what i imagine their natural language to be. if you find the right words for me i will arrange them as best i can.
this all maybe sounds a bit psychotic but i’ve been told i am a bit psychotic. everyone finds me immediately off kilter at least and completely insane at most and sometimes i understand because i too listen to the things that i say and sometimes i don’t understand because when i listen back to myself i make as much sense as everyone else makes to me. what’s the answer here? you’re crazy i can’t understand you and you’re crazy but i can understand you feel about as bad as each other when i can’t understand what it is that has/n’t been understood.
so i hope something about this has illuminated something about my relationship to this whole weird thing as well as my relationship with my flatmate. if you don’t understand what it is i’m talking about, it’s maybe because you haven’t read the things i am writing in reference to. but it’s also maybe because you’re reading some mentally ill woman’s ranting on her blog. sometimes i worry that the patterns i see wiggle won’t stop moving, or that the music i hear when it’s quiet sometimes will come back louder after i’ve tuned it out. a lot of the time i worry that the entire inside of my head is so disorganised and disconnected from reality that i am incapable of communicating my actual internal experience with other people, and that this will never get treated as a serious issue because i have learned to use the language of whoever is talking to me as a way of keeping them talking. so here you are, some words that i have found, i can only hope they’re alright.