The Third Arm

For me, one of the best parts of training a slave is what I call the Third Arm. This is a feeling that starts to set in after several sessions, once the boy and I have started to find our groove and he trusts me enough to do as he’s told without much hesitation and I trust him enough to obey me without hesitation.

The Third Arm is the feeling I have that I can use a boy the way I use my own arms. I don’t think about using my arms to pick up a pencil or scratch an itch or stroke my cock or whatever; I just do it. And once I’ve reached a point where I trust a boy to just do as told, I start to treat him like a third arm–I just give him orders, confident that he’ll obey them.

Getting to the Third Arm requires me to know the boy well enough to know where he will and won’t hesitate. If the boy is used to cleaning my kitchen, I can just casually tell him to clean the kitchen and I know he knows what to do, where all the cleaning supplies are, and that he’ll find doing this task meaningful enough that he’ll set to it promptly. But just because he knows how to clean my kitchen doesn’t mean I can casually tell him to change the cat box. That’s a different chore, a smelly task that, for a lot of subs, is a whole lot less exciting than cleaning the kitchen because it’s not part of our erotic vocabulary. And the sub might not know where I keep the fresh cat litter and the scoop.

So if I want that slave to clean the cat box, I can’t just casually tell him to do it, because I’ll need to show him where the cat litter is kept and more importantly, giving him that order is pushing him further than cleaning the kitchen because it’s a different sort of chore. So I have to pay attention. I have to anticipate that he might hesitate when I give him that order. He might be my Third Arm for doing kitchen chores, but he’s not my Third Arm for the litter box yet.

Another way to think about this is that when a slave comes to me, he’s a person. He has boundaries and limits and I have to learn to negotiate those. If he’s a slave at heart, he and I need to learn that he’s less of a person and more of what Aristotle called a ‘living tool’. He has to know that I have an agreed-upon right to use him as a tool and he has to learn to behave as that tool, while I have to know that he accepts my right to use him and that I can regard him as that tool. To become my Third Arm, he has to become less of a person.

But when I reach that state with a boy, it’s wonderful. I become greater than a normal human, because I have a Third Arm and most people don’t. I can use him to make my day easier and I can let myself express my needs knowing that he will follow my orders to meet those needs. It’s a deep form of intimacy that even most married couples don’t really achieve, because the slave is becoming an extension of me, being absorbed into the expanding circle of my identity as his identity changes and diminishes.

The flip side to this, unfortunately, is that once that feeling starts to set in, if the dynamic comes to an end, I suffer an amputation. I lose my Third Arm, and I have to get used to being less than I was, more human. And that’s a really unpleasant feeling.

I first discovered this feeling when I had to dismiss my first slave. He was a complete mess as a person and our dynamic wasn’t working for me at all and he was becoming a serious drain on my emotional energy and on my finances, and we had a fight about something and it just became clear to me that I had to dismiss him because I was exhausted trying to be his master. We had a long and unpleasant talk and I had to spend a good deal of energy comforting him. And at the end of that, I sat down on my couch and suddenly realized I had just amputated my arm. I wanted him to do something trivial for me–maybe fetch a glass of water–but I no longer had the right to tell him to do that, and it -hurt-. Learning to let go of that phantom limb took two or three days.

One of my cashslaves asked to be dismissed today, so I’m dealing with that amputation feeling again. Our dynamic didn’t last as long as the one with my first slave, and since we are in different states, that Third Arm feeling hadn’t completely set in, but I was beginning to feel it a few weeks ago, and I told him so. It was feeling good to give him casual orders for things I wanted him to do, knowing he was going to do them. But the distance meant that he had needs I couldn’t directly address and it became clear to me even before he said so that he was detaching himself psychologically from me.

So it didn’t come as a shock when he asked to be released, but the amputation still hurts. We parted amicably, and I wish him well, but now I get to work through this phantom limb syndrome again, and it will leave me a little moody for a day or two. Because it sucks just being a regular person.