Don’t Be That Kinkster 1

This is probably going to become a periodic feature of this blog, looking at common mistakes that (mostly) novice kinksters make, based mostly on my own experiences and perhaps stories I’ve heard.

Recently I was chatting with a boy who identifies as an uncollared slave. He badly wants to be a permanently collared live-in slave. The following is a not-literal rendering of part of the conversation:

Me: How much experience have you had, boy?

Slave: I’ve served a number of guys before, but what I really want is to find a life-time owner to serve. If you owned me, how would you have me dress?

M: Tight clothing that shows off your body. Slaves should seek to be eye candy for men at all times.

S: What sort of chores would you have me doing?

M: The typical things: dishes, sweeping and dusting, mowing the lawn…

S: Would I be wearing a hood?

M: Hoods can be hot, although they can be impractical for yard work.

S: Are you into boots?

M: I can’t have a hooded slave out in the yard where all the neighbors can see him.

S: How many pairs of boots do you own?

M: Several. So tell me about the previous times you’ve served as a houseboy.

S: Would you have me lick your boots clean?

M:…

You can probably already see the point I’m going to make. This conversation made me feel like I was walking a highly excitable dog that kept chasing squirrels and dragging me along behind it when what it should have felt like walking a well-trained dog that follows my lead. Eventually, I pretty much said that and he calmed down and we started to have a much more fruitful conversation where I was able to start getting a better sense of how his mind works.

What’s the issue here? The sub was showing his enthusiasm and talking about his kinks, so why am I saying this is a mistake? Simple. He was so focused on what he fantasizes about that he wasn’t leaving any room in the conversation for me, a Dom he had expressed some interest in serving.

As a dom, I want to know that if I meet up with a boy, the leadership of the interaction is going to fall to me. I want to know that the boy is paying attention to my desires and working to please me (and it’s my job to make sure that in the course of pleasing me, he will get what he needs). By letting his fantasies run away with him, he was leading me to think that he wasn’t going to be able to take direction from me and that he wasn’t going to be thinking about what I wanted.

Additionally. he was making me feel like just a prop in his scene, an actor with lines and stage directions he had scripted out for me. (What Adam in Leather God Descending describes as “a human sex toy”.) Being so heavily scripted usually makes me feel disempowered, and that’s the last thing I want as a dom. As a dom, I want to feel powerful, in charge, and at the center of the action. When a boy tries to give me a detailed script, he’s trying to be the one in charge and I’m just a service top. Occasionally that can be interesting, but it’s generally not what I (and most other serious doms, I think) want from a scene.

Finally, what he was doing made me think he wasn’t a serious kinkster, that what he really wanted was just someone he could unload his fantasies at. Pure sexytalk has its place, but in a conversation that was ostensibly about seeing if we were a potential match, just unloading fantasies at me wasn’t what I was looking for. So by not listening to my end of the conversation, what this boy was doing was gradually pushing me away, making me think that I wouldn’t enjoy a more serious interaction with him.

What should he have done? He should have done what he did after I told him to calm down, which was to listen more, answer my questions, ask his own questions in response to what I was saying, and generally have a genuine conversation with me in which I was leading but still responsive to him. Once he did that, I started to get a better sense of what he was really looking for and whether I might be able to provide some of it. He showed some awareness of the difference between reality and fantasy and demonstrated that he had learned things from his previous efforts at serving a master.

What this boy did was relatively common with novice kinksters. It’s a natural thing for an inexperienced sub who is excited at finally having an opportunity to even talk about what he wants. This was definitely not the first time I’ve had that basic conversation. Most guys who are like that turn out to be time-wasters, although I think this boy has more potential. So if you’re the sort of boy who is inclined to let his fantasies run off with him, fight that urge, because it almost got me to just end the conversation.

Don’t be that sub who doesn’t listen and doesn’t let the dom take the lead. It’s probably gonna make the dom just walk away before anything interesting can happen.