29th March 2026: Another Note on M/s

while this is a follow-up to Some Notes on M/s, i think this actually serves as more of a 101. certainly, this is my attempt at gesture towards the something that would make someone unfamiliar with this whole thing “get it”. i finished slavecraft. i have thoughts. here is my final-for-now note on M/s.

Unleveling the Playing Field

Let’s briefly define egalitarian relationship styles. This is going to be a lacklustre definition, but what definition isn’t lacklustre? Egalitarian relationships are where two (add your own “or more” for all the hypothetical couples I’m going to be writing about) people approach decision-making in a relationship by accounting for the differences in their capacities. For example, if a couple were having a disagreement and one of them were in a wheelchair, they might ask the other to sit down rather than standing over them because they find that intimidating in that moment. The inequality is still there (and will be in every instance because people are not the same as each other), but it has been accounted for in order to have a discussion on equal terms.

Let’s now take this to the realm of D/s (using my definition of D/s as distinct from M/s). Say you wanted to have a serious conversation with your dominant. However, you’re in a chastity cage. If you just went up to your dominant and said you wanted to have this serious conversation, they might well engage with you in perfectly good faith, but your side of things is going to be tempered by this constant expression of their dominance. Depending on the conversation – if it was important that you express your own autonomy – you might have to ask the cage be taken off first. Maybe you’d even need to jack off if you hadn’t done that all week. You’ve entered into a state of post-nut clarity, unlocked and ready to talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you. And sure, there will still be things that are impossible to know in advance, maybe even impossible to account for, but as they come up you’ll do your best. You are trying to level the playing field.

None of this has anything to do with service. Someone getting you coffee every morning or making you dinner when you get home or even kneeling to worship your feet before bed every night doesn’t create a power imbalance. If you are negotiating all these things accounting for your inequalities, if your submissive boywife gets to take off the maid outfit to talk to you seriously about moving in together, you are in an egalitarian relationship.

Where then are the possibilities for meaningfully different relationship styles? It’s not a division of labour thing per se. One of us works and one of us is a homemaker is egalitarian so long as the differences that arise from that are accounted for as much as possible. Obvious this is a scale of sorts, but what’s at the other end? I’m going to posit two different ends of the spectrum. Think of it like a triangle. Equality is equality, but power imbalances come in all sorts of different shapes.

Let’s try to find the right words for this. How about explicit control styles as our first contrast to contrast egalitarian styles? It’s the best I can do right now. First, we’re using control to contrast egalitarian. In the opposite of an egalitarian relationship, decision-making is approached through emphasising or creating differences in capacities. This is where your submissive boywife’s maid outfit stays on during the big conversation. He is made to feel weak, subservient, and is constantly reminded throughout the conversation about the gulf between you with your business suit and office job, and him with this frilly apron and a gap in his CV. You are exerting control.

How then might you exert control? In “lifestyle CNC” as well as your archetypical abusive relationships (not to conflate the two, but only to identify a common mechanism for control), you exert it explicitly. This means that you might threaten to beat your boywife if he takes the maid outfit off, or you’ve forced it onto him and locked it up at the back, or you’ve gotten control of his finances and can force him into a situation where his only option is to move in with you. Obviously this seems abusive on the face of it, but if this is a dynamic that has been freely agreed to then it’s lifestyle CNC. Perhaps there are mechanisms for switching into an egalitarian mode of decision-making; perhaps there aren’t. The key thing is that some power exchange / authority transfer relationships are based on explicit control – that is, decision-making capacity ultimately lies on left side of the slash and they can enforce that directly.

To add a little nuance, this doesn’t mean that s-types can’t contribute to decision-making. Your submissive boywife might tell you that they can move in but if you don’t stop buying peanut products they might have an allergic reaction at one point or another. You can make them move in regardless, but you probably want a living live-in maid. Similarly, not every decision has to be made by you once your boywife is in the house. Probably the specifics of what cleaning products you should have is something you’d rather not deal with. What’s important again is that if your boywife gets you laundry detergent that’s a fragrance you can’t stand, you can make him pour it out and buy a new one, even if it’s his favourite. You might not even have to drag him to the store in his maid outfit to make him pick out one you like. The control is explicit so long as it is derived from some direct expression of power. He might just go to the store when you mention the fragrance thing because he knows you wouldn’t unlock his cage for him to jack off that night if he didn’t.

So, clearly the third point of the triangle is implicit control styles of relationships. We’ve explained control already. The boywife is in the maid’s outfit. Now let’s explain what it means to implicitly exert control. This is a little less clear and also basically what I think M/s actually is in a fairly substantive way. At least, I mean M/s as delineated from lifestyle CNC though lifestyle CNC kind of comes under the banner of M/s. This is where I am going to talk about what I think is the most important thing for doing the M/s that is talked about in SlaveCraft and Building the Team – the kind of M/s that feels like M/s without having to get beaten up all the time about it. Let’s talk about accountability and transparency.

Let’s do transparency first. Raven honestly goes too hard even for my comfort level with this so I’m going to start with Guy’s section about this in SlaveCraft:

Slaving is the primary and favorite source of bliss in my life. i crave to be owned, body, mind, heart, and soul.

But i cannot be owned if i cannot be seen, because the Master cannot exercise ownership of what He doesn't know about. And, at least for now, i believe that He cannot master me if i am hiding from Him in any way. In fact, to the extent that i can hide myself from the Master, i am not surrendering to Him. By hiding something, anything, i undermine His power and my respect for Him – essentially, i castrate Him (figuratively, of course) without His even knowing it and, simultaneously, sabotage my surrender. Ball cutting slaves are the undoing of Masters. i believe this because i have asked Them about it.

For me, my secrets keep Him from knowing me and from having me entirely. The capacity within me for secrecy has become my enemy. my slavery is compromised by any obscurity within myself. He can see my body and can take and use it for His toy, but He cannot see into my mind unless it is transparent – open to Him. And it is my job to make and keep it transparent. So, Transparency .... [sic] openness, is one of the principles that guide me in my submission to Him.

This is something that is also brought up in all of Raven & Joshua’s writing best I can tell, though they extend this sense of transparency of thought to letting your M-type read your DMs. I don’t think that’s essential for what I’m getting at here so let’s constrain transparency from here on out to mean transparency of your internal experience. You presumably don’t want to know about the surprise party your submissive boywife is throwing for you, right? But for this style of M/s, you do want them to be transparent about how excited they feel, how nervous they might be, and transparent about where they are opaque, as in, “There’s something I don’t want to talk to you about right now. It’s nothing bad and I’ll be able to talk about it soon.” There is I think some push/pull here where you might say, “Look I hate surprises just tell me,” and then expect them to tell you about the party, but leaving it knowingly unknown doesn’t diminish anyone’s authority. Judge Holden is not the blueprint.

In this way, transparency doesn’t rely on full self-knowledge, only a willingness from the s-type to be transparent about what is opaque even to them. As Guy puts it, “It is axiomatic that the actual Content of what we talk about is much less important than is the Process of the disclosure and resolution.” Transparency is an act then. We can already see the differences forming between the picture we are building up of implicit control, where transparency is essential, and explicit control, where it is irrelevant. Of course transparency can help us to form better explicitly controlled relationships, as with the boywife telling you that he’s allergic to peanuts and is nervous about living with you if you keep eating them, but your authority over your boywife is not predicated on understanding his internal experience.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s move to accountability. As Guy puts it, “slaves do not interpret, we [sic] obey.” What this means is that any decisions made are ultimately accountable to the M-type. By accountability in this sense, what I mean is who is responsible for (not quite the outcome of decisions made in a relationship, but) the way things play out. When your boywife gets that detergent with the fragrance you hate, it is up to you as the M-type to figure out what you could have done differently to get the fragrance you like and what you need to do to correct that now. Did your boywife forget after you told him? Make him go back to the shops in the maid’s outfit – he won’t forget that. Did you forget to tell your boywife that you wanted a specific brand of laundry detergent? Make him write down a list of preferences you have for household goods and keep track of it so you don’t have to. In both cases, it is up to you to make sure you get the fragrance you want. If your boywife keeps getting it wrong, or gets it wrong intentionally, it is up to you to figure out why that is and correct it. Is he understimulated and wants to get punished just so you’ll spend time with him? Is he just really forgetful and gets stressed out in the shops? You are the person whose responsibility it is to figure out how to get that to change. For you to do that, you need transparency. The M-type can only be accountable to the extent that the s-type is transparent.

Guy points out that M-types must demonstrate they are effectively able to take accountability in the relationship in order to be allowed greater control (derived from transparency) over the s-type:

In functional Master/slave relationships, Masters must win the submission They desire and enjoy, and this is one way They do that. Before Masters receive our absolute obedience, They must demonstrate that They can be trusted with such an awesome power. They must first demonstrate that Their appetites for both control and responsibility are in balance. Until Masters do this, the most They can expect from us is a highly conditional slavery with a very negotiated submission. This is usually a less than satisfactory outcome for both.

In MasterCraft, the afterword to SlaveCraft, Patrick also explains this interplay between accountability and transparency which lies at the core of M/s:

The process of entering an erotic slave relationship is every bit as consensual as negotiating a scene, but it is a very different experience. The key difference, I believe, is that at a certain point the slave must turn himself or herself over to the Owner, Master, or Mistress. There must be a moment of surrender or giving up. The Master must take what is his, seize both the flesh and the soul it houses, and the slave must cede.

From that point on, it becomes the proprietary party's responsibility to monitor the slave's well being, the Master or Mistress's option to meet or deny a need of the slave's. The slave's responsibility is to monitor his or her state of surrender and do whatever emotional work is necessary to keep the commitment to obey. The nature of the Master/slave relationship makes it absolutely crucial for both parties to check each other out thoroughly before embarking on this journey together, more so than any other sort of sadomasochistic power exchange.

Where then are we at with implicit control styles? My contention here is that M/s creates a power imbalance by this specific division of accountability and transparency. If, in a lifestyle CNC dynamic, the s-type waives their right to withdraw consent, the authority transfer stems from this agreement that the M-type can back up their decisions with force. The control is explicit. However, in the M/s of Guy and Patrick, the s-type waives their right to a private life, and the authority transfer stems from this agreement that the M-type can singularly make the best decisions for them both. As Guy puts it, “A slave must come to trust that his submission will add to both their lives rather than diminish the lives of either Master or slave.” The control is implicit in this trust, in the s-types faith that the M-type is in the best position to make decisions. Here is our stick/carrot dichotomy, I suppose.

Both these types of control, over time, create a lasting power imbalance in a relationship. Learning to trust someone implicitly, learning to “not interpret”, learning to offer yourself up even when met with privacy in the case of implicit control; or learning that your autonomy will be violated, learning that you best do things without question, learning that every request can be backed up with force in the case of explicit control: these things have an impact on an s-type’s ability to account for any inequality in capacity to make decisions about the relationship. Maybe the boywife doesn’t even need a chastity cage at this point because he’s been conditioned so that he can simply no longer cum after the M-type realised he gave more eager and enthusiastic service while horny out of his mind but having no distracting avenue for release. How then do you sit down and have a conversation as if that weren’t the case? How do you correct that in any sort of timely fashion? Patrick brings up aftercare in M/s dynamics as a necessary part of relationships ending. He states, “Breaking up with a slave is not like divorcing a peer.”

For the right side of the slash, this is part of why partner selection is so important. While in scene-dynamics, partner selection is obviously important to a degree inasmuch as you want to have a good time and trust that your consent won’t be violated, in M/s and lifestyle CNC you have to be willing to trust your M-type more than you could ever trust yourself. As AncillaL wrote in response to a hypothetical “What if your M-type asked you to jump off a cliff?”-type question, “if they do ask me to jump, I will do it because I believe they have done the due diligence, believe this can be managed, have considered all factors specific to me of which they are aware, are not maliciously motivated and are not asking simply because they have the power to ask.” [NB, this was written in the context of lifestyle CNC but applies to both dynamics.] Similarly for the left side of the slash, partner selection is important inasmuch as you can trust your counterpart to trust you, engage with honesty, and not go to the cops about it – but I think this is the same type of skill in partner selecting for scene-dynamics, just with higher stakes.

Okay, we’re hitting 3,000 words. Let’s wrap it up.

When I talk about the M/s that I do, I’m not talking about an egalitarian relationship with service elements. I am talking about a relationship where I get to decide what life is going to be for both my flatmate and myself. My control over how we arrive at the decisions we make is in tension between explicit use of force in the form of punishing him when he gets my honourifics wrong, and implicit in the way he is transparent with me so I can make the best decisions for us both, to which I am accountable. This is maybe another way of phrasing my play-/possession-logics, or another way of phrasing adversarial/team-building styles, but this is the language that gets at what’s actually different about M/s – not just what it means that there is a power imbalance, but how we actually go about unleveling the playing field.