Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook (4 page)

The Lesser God generally prefers slaves to
submissives and, in either case, often considers them simply as expendable
vessels to be used for his own pleasure or procreation.  He is more likely
than not to be polyamorous and/or polygamous
.
 When the Lesser God
has a full stable of slaves, whether real-life or role-played, it is relatively
common to see a high degree of specialization among the acolytes.  Some
may be considered
breeders
and used solely for the purpose of bearing
and raising children, while others may be considered pleasure slaves, income
earners, or recruiters of new slaves.  For the Lesser God, being called
“God’s
gift to mankind”
isn’t an insult at
all;
it’s a way of life.

The Collector Dom

The
Collector Dom
(sometimes referred to
as a Farmer Dom)
is a type of Dominant who is far more likely to be
encountered
online
than in real life.  The Collector is focused on
building a stable of submissives, similar to a
harem
.  For the
Collector,
quantity
always trumps
quality
.  In
his
way
of thinking, the measure of a Dom’s standing is
how many submissives
he
can accumulate, without much regard for who, or even what, those submissives
may be.   It is relatively common for a Collector Dom to attempt to
collar a submissive
mere minutes
after meeting her for the first time in
an online chat room or on a BDSM social network, which sometimes results in the
so-called Dom being comically unaware of his own submissives’ ages, genders, or
even their names
.

The Collector is typically an adolescent male in his
teens or early twenties who has recently stumbled upon D/s in an online chat
room or lifestyle-related website.  He is agog and obsessed with the
thought that he can
actually acquire slaves
online the same way he shops
for
Pokemon
cards.  He typically doesn’t understand the difference
between a submissive and a slave
and may, in fact, be completely
ignorant of the meaning of the term
submissive.
  For the Collector,
it’s all about slaves
and
more is always better
.  To
absolutely no one’s surprise but his own, he soon learns that
keeping
them is an entirely a different matter - a matter to which he hasn’t given an
iota of thought.  Luckily for the Collector, there is always an endless
supply of naive teens willing to role play
“slave for a day.”
  The
important thing, for the Collector, is to be able to boast,
“You have a
slave? Hah! That’s nothing! I have twenty-seven of them!”

There are two
very good reasons
why the
Collector Dom phenomenon exists almost exclusively in the
cyber realm
,
rather than in the
real world
.  First, being a sophomore in high
school and having a ten o’clock curfew can be problematic in the accumulation
of slaves in
real life
.  And second, it’s a lot harder in real life
to keep twenty-seven angry slaves from beating you to a bloody pulp.

The Ineffable Dom

I’m going to invent a final unique category of
Dominant, which I hereby christen the
Ineffable Dom.
 
Ineffable
is a word that essentially means
“impossible to be categorized or adequately
described in words.”
 It’s a word that became fashionable during the
middle-ages as a way for many philosophers to oxymoronically describe God as
indescribable
. 
My reason for creating this category out of whole cloth is in recognition of
the fact that many lifestyle Dominants just can’t be neatly pigeon-holed into
any of the other categories.  They are, quite simply,
atypical or
unique
. 

The Ineffable Dom is typically a Dominant who has
been in the D/s lifestyle for several years or longer and has, mostly through
trial and error, learned what does and doesn’t appeal to him and what works
best in his D/s relationships.  Over this span of time, he has consciously
explored and borrowed traits and characteristics from other more traditional
Dominant categories.  Additionally, the synergy created with each new
partner brings new facets to the Ineffable Dom’s understanding and
interests.  The Ineffable Dom steals unashamedly from any D/s lifestyle
tradition that strikes his fancy, taking what he considers the best bits and
pieces of each and tossing them all into a hodge-podge D/s stew that,
surprisingly, can turn out to be quite
delicious.
 Never discount
or underestimate a Dominant simply because he cannot adequately describe in 25
words or less what
kind
of Dominant he is.  He may just be an
Ineffable
Dom
.

The Tin Pot Dom

The
Tin Pot Dom
is no more a Dominant than
the person who wears a dollar store eye patch on
Talk Like a Pirate Day
(September 19
^th
, by the way) is really a
pirate.
  Tin
Pot Doms generally fall into two categories. 

The first is the
role player.
  This Tin
Pot Dom doesn’t consider what he does as a
deception;
he considers it
role
play
.  As far as
he
is concerned, D/s isn’t a
lifestyle;
it’s
entertainment.
  He sees what he does - role playing the part
of a Dominant - as a perfectly natural and appropriate behavior, mainly because
he believes he is interacting with people
who are doing precisely the same
thing
.  It hasn’t quite dawned on him that those people
really may
be Dominants and submissives,
and not just
acting out roles. 
The
role player Tin Pot Dom believes that
everyone
is simply making it up as
they go along, so he feels pretty confident doing so
himself
.  The
ridiculous notion of doing any
homework
on how
real Dominants
might conduct themselves
makes about as much sense to him as trying to
learn how
real vampires
behave. 

Eventually, the role player Tin Pot Dom realizes his
mistake but, by then, it’s usually too late to recover from it
gracefully.  The great majority of them will simply drop the role
completely, quickly assume another identity, and
then
start doing a
little homework on the lifestyle.  Some may even go so far as to explore
how they might fit into the lifestyle in
reality
, rather than through
role play.  If they are smart and/or lucky, they will find mentors or
friends who will help them navigate the tricky path from
role play
to
reality
. 

You probably know more of these folks than you
think.  They’re usually the people who tell you, “I’m a submissive (or
switch),
but I used to be a Dom.”
  Translation:  “I used to
role
play
being a Dominant until one day, I realized that there really
were
such things, and that
I wasn’t one.”
  

Just because someone
discovers
the D/s
lifestyle through
role play
doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t
successfully adopt it as a
way of life
and find happiness in a D/s
relationship.  All who arrive at this lifestyle come by different paths, and
no path is intrinsically better than another.  The important thing is that
they arrive safe and sound.  Such is
not
always the case with the
next
type of Tin Pot Dominant.

The second category of Tin Pot Dom is the
self-delusional
variety.  This poor bastard
really believes
in his innate
superiority and unrecognized demi-godhood,
despite the overwhelming body
of evidence to the contrary.  He develops his strategies and techniques,
not out of any sense of deception, but from a purely pragmatic sense of what
has worked for him in the past.
 
He simply plays the odds.  He
knows
that if he approaches twenty complete strangers and commands each
of them to drop to their knees and submit to him that nineteen of them will
slap
him silly
, but the
twentieth
just might do it.  He knows that
eventually, he will find someone who is willing to
buy into his delusion
and
feed it
, and that’s all that matters. 

If you happen to be that unlucky person who has
bought into his delusion, he also knows that separating you from the D/s
community-at-large will insulate you from dissenting voices which might warn
you about him.  He knows he is shunned by others in the lifestyle but,
then again, what else would you expect from such
riff-raff?
  He
knows
all of this, because
he’s seen it work for him
time and again, and it’s
hard
to argue with success
.  Anyone who steadfastly refuses to recognize
his innate superiority is simply a
bit-player or antagonist
in a grand
drama that is played out on center-stage in his own little parallel universe
.
 

You might be tempted to
pity
the
self-delusional Tin Pot Dom until you realize the full magnitude of the
damage
that his kind does to submissives, to the D/s lifestyle, and to society in
general.   As a result of this person’s delusional and often paranoid
behavior, submissives often end up stripped of their dignity, sense of
self-worth, self-confidence and trust.  Others in the lifestyle are forced
constantly to defend our way of life because of the widespread stereotypes and
misconceptions that result from the actions of these bad apples.  Even
worse, there are those high-profile, extreme cases where the worst of these
self-delusional
,
criminally insane individuals kidnap people and keep
them chained in their basement or bury them in their backyards. 

Now, before I am accused of engaging in
fear-mongering,
or the wanton and indiscriminate
slander
of all the poor, innocent,
harmlessly self-deluded Tin Pot Doms everywhere, I hope you’ll allow me to just
say that I did
not
mean to imply that
all
self-deluded Tin Pot
Dominants are
psycho loons
.  I meant to imply that
most
of
them are.

Alrighty,
then.  Let the accusations
fly.

There you have it, my perspective on what I consider
to be the eight
major
categories of Dominants and a
ninth
for the
TPDs who are role players or self-delusional.  My perspectives on this and
other D/s lifestyle topics have been shaped and impacted by thirty-five years
of D/s relationships, a lifetime of unusual life experiences, and an admittedly
eccentric world-view.  I suppose the key to getting your money’s worth
from this book will be your ability to take from it what is useful to your
relationships and activities, and to simply disregard the rest.  There
isn’t much in the D/s lifestyle that can be characterized as
right or wrong
. 
It is either useful to you, or it is not. 

Frankly, I fully expect that some of the things I
say in this book are going to cause some people to foam at the mouth and
perhaps even say
not-nice
things about me.  That’s
okay.
 
It’s all part of the
process
.  I’d be far more concerned if
everyone were
agreeing
with me, since that’s usually my first clue that
I’m dead
wrong
about something.

Speaking of
being wrong
, I am truly fortunate
to be able to count among my dearest friends my former collared submissive, a
woman who has turned
tactfully telling me that I’m wrong
into a virtual
art
form
.  She has been an invaluable aide and adviser in the production
of this book from concept to completion, and I trust her instincts and opinions
without reservation.  So, when she
ever-so-tactfully
told me
well
into the writing of the book
that I was
doing it wrong
, I listened.

She told me that my readers wanted
more
than
an informative or even entertaining book about D/s and BDSM
relationships. 
Anyone
could write
that
book, she
said.  What they
wanted
, she assured me, was the chance to be
voyeurs. 
They wanted a
peek into my head
.  They wanted to know how
someone like
me,
a Dominant with over thirty-five years of experience in
this lifestyle and in these kinds of relationships,
thinks and feels and
acts.

And, to be brutally honest,
I wanted
absolutely
no part of that.

I have always been an exceedingly private person,
and
not
without
good reason
.  At various times in my life, I
have been targeted in one way or another by criminals, enemy soldiers, union
thugs, law enforcement officers, political activists, crooked lawyers,
newspaper reporters, and even jealous husbands.   Some of those people
pointed
real guns
loaded with
real bullets,
at me.  
Others used less obvious, but even more insidious methods that, frankly, made
me nostalgic for
gunplay
.  I learned some important lessons from
all of that, the most valuable being: 
Don’t make yourself a target.
 

And now, I was being asked to do
just that.
 

My immediate reaction was to simply dismiss the
idea, outright.  I really did
not
want to make any part of this
book
all about me. 
I’ve spent my entire life playing my cards
close to the vest.  I wasn’t about to suddenly start playing them face up
on the table.  Paranoia may not be a winning strategy for
everyone
,
but it’s always worked pretty well for
me.

I promised her that I’d at least
think about it
. 
And, I did.

After about a
week
of thinking about it, I
realized she was
right.
 There really
was
only one thing I
could offer to my readers that
no one else
could, and that was
me
- or more accurately, my own unique experiences and thoughts.  The rest of
it,
anyone
could write.
 
I gave it a little more thought,
and finally arrived at what I believe is a reasonable
compromise
between
“The BDSM Textbook That Anyone Could Have Written”
and
“Mike Makai’s
XXX Memoirs.”

At the end of each chapter, I’ve added a section
called
“My Two Cents.
”  There, you’ll find personal anecdotes,
opinions or reflections culled from my lifetime accumulation of unique
experiences in the D/s and BDSM lifestyles.  The stories range from
pleasant recollections to painful memories; but they are true, and they are
told from the heart. 

If you prefer your BDSM relationship handbooks to be
more
scholarly
than
memoirish
, feel free to skip merrily past
those parts and on to the next chapter. 
Seriously
, I won’t mind.
 Not
one teensy-weensy bit.