Putting the dragon in the dungeon since [redacted]

The first is to practice saying no. Practice saying no to your dominants in particular. Say no for no reason other than to say no, so that you get better at saying no when it matters. Develop your own sense of your own boundaries to a point that when you really need to say no to something, you both know that you can say no, and you know how your dominant will respond to you saying no. You'll learn a lot about how much your dominant respects your consent when you tell them no. If all you ever say is yes, you may give them the impression that they can do whatever they like to you without having to consider your own wants and desires. If all you ever say is yes, your dominant may second guess what they do with you because they won't know if you can or will say no.

The second is learning how to translate the things you enjoy into things you can actually do with others. If you come forward saying you're very into a particular kind of fiction, but don't tell Me what it is about it you want to be subjected to I may take inspiration from the parts of it you find less enjoyable. Identify what kinks you enjoy with from it: is your favourite part of the kidnapping story you read the part where the characters were taken care of, hypnotised into compliance, beaten into submission, or their devotion for their captors? Work out the actual tangible play the fiction inspires in you, and then - perhaps most importantly - communicate that to your dominant. A shared enjoyment of a piece of fiction can get you started, but roleplaying a part in that fiction will only get you so far in developing your own relationship and play with your dominant.

i think it's important to be able to engage with the world at different levels. Recognize that something that is true in kayfabe isn't true outside it. That something that may be true at the individual level ceases to be useful above it. That something may be true in a momentary now that ceases to be true later. Logical organization promotes a nesting doll-like. Of course the hierarchy can be queered. But it still exists and is useful. For some, our ability to perform sanity healthily depends on keeping a healthy nesting doll as such.

All this to say, I hope we can establish some things to be true, necessarily, and work backwards from that to show that some things must then also be true. I hope that even if you disagree with my initial claims, you may agree with my later beliefs.

An underlying assumption that I like to make is that there is no fundamental difference between a desire for a receptive action and a desire for a proactive action. The desire to achieve orgasm by another's hand is not magically different from the desire to guide another to orgasm by your own hand. The desire to tie someone up is not magically different from the desire to be tie up by someone. The desire to be hurt by someone is not magically different from the desire to hurt someone. Desire exists in a social context, and while such desires may come from different places, I do not believe their character is meaningfully different.

Then, an observation about material reality. Submissives can abuse their dominants. This may be counterintuitive to you. In our idealized model of kink, the submissive concedes their autonomy to the dominant. Can someone without autonomy do abuse? Surely not. However, nonetheless, it is true. Because the concession of autonomy is never truly complete, and you will always exist as an individual. This is where the concept of kayfabe becomes useful to me. In the kayfabe, you cease to be an individual, you are below your dominant, and you are fully an object that is acted upon. But, we must remember even if the knowledge is locked away, that this is not entirely true. That there exist layers of reality upon which this is false. And that these layers of reality are analytically useful and important.

(I tend to understand kayfabe as the narrative layer, the layer that is real because its emotions are real. But if I can fake an orgasm than you can certainly be a one-sided recipient of the emotions. And yes surely this is a failure of communication but personally I believe that doms deserve safewords and aftercare and this is why.)

Because, as I see it, outside kayfabe, the dominant and submissive role are essentially indistinguishable. Not meaningfully different. This may be where I get controversial, but I do not believe either role should be truly making all material decisions, either. And the safety equipment, the safewords and the aftercare, the other friendships an other relationships you can turn to, the communication and the way out. These all must exist outside kayfabe, then, if your kayfabe cannot support all of them. Because outside kayfabe always exists, regardless of your best efforts. We may queer hierarchies but they still exist.

And, finally, a special case. While my posts may seem to be within a kayfabe, and they are within a scene, so to speak. You are not part of the scene. You may bear witness to it, but you are watching it from within the dungeon as a non-participant. By my more hypnotic writing, you may feel as if you are, but any sacredness granted to it is granted by your hands alone. You and I do not touch, we do not know each other, and we do not make contact. But, let me restate this more clearly:

Everything I post, it is not me and I am not it. Every piece of writing is a complete work, cast off to the void, and you are finding it and making it special for yourself. But this is not a gift from me to you, it is a magic that you perform on your own. Nothing is sacred before you place your gaze upon it. I am glad that you can bestow such meaning upon my art but I believe that it is you that is doing that, not me.

And, I am just a not-quite-person. Please, always remember, that being a dom does not make me above you. We have no kayfabe between us, no scene, so there is no fabric for you to claim that you are below me, so we are merely individuals. Being this as it may be, perhaps you look up to me. Perhaps you see me as this great writer or brilliant kinkster or whatever. This is an illusion, granted to you by your own perspective. The brilliance and the greatness is contained in a layer of light within your eye. No one you look up to is better than you are.

Thus, I hope you can understand, if you wish to approach me, if you approach me assuming I owe you my dominance, assuming that I am above you. There is no fundamental difference between a desire for dominance and a desire for submission. I hope you can understand that to treat strangers as if they were below you in a sexual way is generally regarded as a particularly harmful form of harassment.

...

This post is basically a transcript of a speech I give to newbies to the D/s scene all the time IRL. I figured it might be useful not only to people curious about kink IRL but also to smut writers here on the smut writing website.

For the purposes of this post, I am sending specific physical acts out of the room. Right now they don't matter, because you can meet an emotional need through any number of physical acts. So when I say that there are many ways to dom and many ways to sub, I am not referring to many kinds of physical acts. I mean that there are many emotional needs that doms and subs bring to scenes, and those can change the scene more than the choice of physical acts that will occur in that scene.

I say this to newbies to the scene because they tend to have a narrow view of the motivations and needs that bring people to D/s, biased by both the newbie's own preferences and the depictions of D/s they've seen in media. The same is true of people who write kink fic. Kink fic is very biased to a narrow subset of the wide range of emotional needs that people might bring to this kind of play.

It's really important to understand this in D/s IRL because a mismatch or miscommunication about these needs can lead to a bad scene. For example, let's take the approaches of sub-as-beloved-pet and sub-as-object. If a dom treats a sub as a beloved pet when what they really want is to be treated like an object, then a sub who went into a scene needing to be ignored, or at the very least the illusion of being ignored and disregarded, is suddenly in the spotlight of a lot of intense attention and affection. Again, I will note that both of these scenes could potentially involve the same physical acts, just approached differently. Let's say it's a service submission scene where the sub is naked and cleaning the room for the dom. Sub-as-beloved-pet would get frequent praise and lots of patiently repeated instructions, while sub-as-object would get one detailed instruction at the beginning and no reinforcement except a punishment if they get part of the instruction wrong.

I'm going to go through a bunch of different styles of dom and sub, with the emotional needs that underlie them. This list is not exhaustive. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of or encountered, so feel free to reblog with additions. It may also be a bit dom-biased because I'm a dom, but I think that might be for the best, because the emotional needs of doms are generally less understood than those of subs.

Various consensual kinks discussed below. Kinkshamers in the notes will be blocked with extreme prejudice.

Nurturing and service oriented dominance is a lot of fun to play with, a space of being needed and competent and needed rings my bell pretty hard.

however submission as an object d'art or a cherished entity of some sort delights me as well.

I’m so glad you asked! Let me list off what I’ve got for you:

Books I personally recommend:

- The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book, by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy

If you’re having kinky sex at all, you need to read at least one of these two books. Point blank. They’ll teach you the very basics of negotiating properly (which is critical!), and help you identify what you are and aren’t into.

- Mindfucking Mindfully, by Sir Ezra Where this book really shines isn’t actually in helping you “mindfuck” people, it’s in taking a close look at how to do so ethically. It’s a great answer to the question “how do I get someone to consent to something and still surprise and shock them with it?”

- Real Service by Raven Kaldera and Joshua Tenpenny This is a slightly niche pick but there simply isn’t a better book on the subject. It’s written from a 24/7 M/s perspective, which is not what I do, but the book itself is an indispensable guide to giving and receiving service. The phrase “if the Master doesn’t want it, it isn’t service” will be burned into my psyche for quite some time. I love this book a lot. Maybe my favorite out of all of these.

- Enough To Make You Blush: Exploring Erotic Humiliation, by Princess Kali This one’s high on my reading list; I’ve heard it recommended by a number of people whose opinions on these things I trust.

- Pretty Much Anything Midori Has Ever Done Midori is a great resource for this stuff - I haven’t personally read much of her work, but she’s a well known sex educator and great at what she does. She’s known for bondage, but has a lot of range beyond that.

- This Negotiations Worksheet from Bex Talks Sex This is what I default to using a lot of the time for negotiations. Forget BDSMtest, you don’t need that, it’s no good. Just look through this worksheet’s wordbank with your partner. Big fan especially of the “how do you want to feel?” section.

Books I can kind of recommend:

- The Ultimate Guide to Kink, edited by Tristan Taormino This book is weird. There’s a lot of good info for experienced players, but some of what’s written here skeeves me out. I think if I had a top that thought the way some of the tops in here think, they would not be topping me for long. But there’s some good techniques and so on to pick up that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I liked the distinction one of the authors makes between being sadistic in the sense of inflicting pain and being sadistic in the sense of doing something your sub doesn’t “enjoy.”

- The Ritual of Dominance and Submission, by David English Man, this book fucking sucks. The writing and editing are garbage, and the fear and protocol play described need way more careful negotiation than he ever lets on, let alone recommends. This is some 50 Shades bullshit. The only time I recommend this book is to tops like me who tend to be very affirming to their partners and need a guide on how to really scare them - when their partner consents and when you negotiate it, which this book sucks at teaching you. Really good content on fear, punishment, and protocol play, really terrible presentation of the topic though. Don’t read this if you don’t already know what you’re doing.

- Paradigms of Power, by Raven Kaldera I love this book. Great book. Very focused on 24/7 M/s play though, and, being an anthology, some chapters are better than others. If you can’t read something and pick out what is and isn’t for you, don’t bother. But some really great inspiration, and generally pretty well written. Big fan of the discussion of leather throughout the book.