I’ve posted a fair amount of BDSM dating advice elsewhere, no reason to stop now.

Do not work on your profiles and personal ads when you are sexually aroused. Seriously. If you are feeling horny go masturbate before writing. Otherwise you are apt to make promises you can’t keep and get caught up in stressing specific fetishes more than you mean to. To write a good personal advertisement you need to find a happy medium between being aware of your needs and almost clinical detachment from them.

You want to let your passion shine through but with enough impartiality to show you are capable of coping with those passions with some degree of reason.

Neither neediness nor mania is attractive.

Be honest and balanced.

When I first used the web to meet people I remember being startled by how incoherent they often were.

Instant messages looked like automobile license plates. And getting past the opening “how are you” seemed like moving glaciers.

And my few recent test experiences show no sign that the increased popularity of using the internet for finding partners for doing BDSM has made things any better.

If you are looking to bring some fantasies to life why not go ahead and say what those latent longings consist of?

Sometimes it is if you have to pry one word at a time out of someone who has written you. I’ve listed as both top and bottom and I’m long past worrying about grammar. (Not that ellipsis abuse doesn’t continue to annoy me.) Getting a concrete sentiment, specific desire is tough enough.

It is extra baffling when a top is both unable to spell and unwilling to say what he wants. I wouldn’t mind trying to gently top from the bottom for a novice dominant but I can’t do anything for them is they are hidden behind a verbal fog. A pity. There may be more potential with someone like that than a character that insists on capitalization protocol.

What Catches Your Eye?

Looking at an erotic photograph is hardly an objective experience. Your response brings forth a fairly broad range of your sexuality: the realities of your past, things hoped for and foolish fevered dreams.

Looking at this cover of The Bitch Goddess, what catches your eye?

The woman’s legs? For me they are just a framing device, her presence provides context.

It is the man. Because I’d like to be him. On my knees. The joy of restraints, the bit gag (much sexier than the traditional ball gag). Looking up at someone who has me helpless, my mind torn between anticipation and dread at where I’m about to be taken. My body her plaything. Lashes that will cut into my mind as well as my flesh.

What do you see?

A gay male top in his fifties complete profile:

19 and slim is nice

Another by one in his forties:

looking for 18 years you have no rights .total slut pain slave

I know that yearning. There was an attractive young waif in my store the other day. Ah to be … again.

I write as someone whose last two lovers were over twenty years his junior. Sure that was nice, no reason to lie about it. Their comparative youth made me nervous at first. Turning into a pathetic old chickenhawk isn’t on my list of aspirations.

These older gay masters are fantastically delusional. If you’ve reached that age without being able to distinguish which of your wants are plausible you have doomed yourself to a life of frustration.

Not being able to enjoy someone near your own age leaves you an erotic cripple. You doom yourself to a solitary old age.

Honestly I can’t claim to feel compassion for them. Profiles like that evoke only contempt.

(This happened in 2000 I think. I wrote it up a year or two later on my old Live Journal account.)

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Psychology of the Sissymaid

When I first encountered the subcultures of femdom and heterosexual male submission it was almost as if I’d fallen into a parallel dimension. I started to say time machine but while some of the underlying assumptions made me think of 1950s TV sitcom gender roles it was all too askew to hark back to Donna Reed or Ward and June Cleaver.

It was all so damnably sexist. You see I don’t have friends who begin sentences with “women are … ” or “men are … ” Not a one. Most of the past decades have been spent without a television set. I don’t buy slick magazines. Foolish me I thought this had all gone the way of cars with tail fins and McCarthyism.

Foolish me indeed. Femdom caused me to become aware of Dr. John Gray, a thinker on the same lofty plane as Elise Sutton. Rendering the normal majority invisible is a nice thing but can leave you vastly ignorant of your fellow man. Female executives and feminist theory haven’t actually dispelled gender stereotyping.

Eventually I got over feeling as if I’d stepped in something icky and began to see. Really I repeated an extension of, if not empathy, understanding that followed my discovery that I found some transvestites sexually alluring. Many crossdressers - being born male - have (dated) conventional male clichéd image of what being female implies. Femininity means pleasing the male, being subservient. Most transvestites are submissive; many are masochists.

Similarly I found that many closeted bisexual men who lived as heterosexuals - mostly married - wanted to bottom. Not just in the physical sense of surrendering their sphincter muscle. There was usually a subtle - or vivid - wish to be dominated. To be rendered less masculine.

Reading bogus blogs and fantasies presented as fact it seemed to me that many submissive men are unacknowledged transvestites and bisexuals. That is why they want the woman to ‘force’ them to wear panties. And cuckold fantasies often feature the man servicing the wife’s bull.

I can’t see any value in judging these men. Not to deny that I often find their emotional gymnastics distasteful. Watching someone fib to themselves is always ugly. But fairness requires that we admit that struggling to face up to certain truths about ourselves can be a struggle.

I think it very important that these men become able to perceive and accept their transvestitism and bisexuality. That is a necessary initial step in becoming less painfully incoherent.

Self-awareness should enable them to better cope with their needs. To find women willing to help them realize their desires.

Dear Mr. Profile Person,

Your profile (or personal ad) says you are a heterosexual man. But you write to me. Since you never say anything like “I’m a straight guy who wants to humiliate a homo,” I have to guess that you are really bisexual but don’t want to state that visibly even on a website devoted to helping us kinky perverts get together.

I do know the misconceptions that monosexuals both heterosexual and gay often have about us. They are sure we can’t be faithful and suspect we’re likely to be disease ridden.

But as someone who listened to his father disown him - tell him he didn’t care if he starved in the street - rather than lie to a question about his sexuality I find it awful hard at times to feel really sympathetic.

So butch up: especially if you call yourself a top. I’m not looking to be dominated by a scaredy cat.

So butch up!

Yours faithfully,
Richard

Suddenly a submissive male or female that you’ve been playing with fails to show up for a scheduled visit, doesn’t answer emails or phone or text messages. Why?

People outside of D/s are just as baffled when those things happen to them.

It took me far too many years to catch on the psychology of this kind of behavior. People often won’t tell you why they are dissatisfied with a relationship. They may not even tell you that they aren’t happy and fulfilled. They’d rather just retreat and hide.

Despite all the social aggression we witness most people are reluctant - afraid - to cause a fuss, endure friction or be thought a ‘negative’ person. They’d rather hide in silence, retreat behind walls.

Have you ever applied for a job only to find it nearly impossible to discover whether or not you’ve been hired? You haven’t but the person who chose someone else gets his or her stomach in a knot at the prospect of telling you. So they hide behind their secretary.

Many years back the stress that bosses felt when firing employees caused ‘dehiring’ consultants to do the dirty work for them. Corporations paid fat fees so managers wouldn’t have to look a discarded employee in the face.

It is the same weird timidity at work.

Similarly in the most conventional romance people will suddenly become unable for a date. They claim to be too busy with work or school. They’d rather invest huge amounts of time contorting themselves than admitting that something about the relationship hasn’t worked for them. And rather let it end than cope with the emotional risks of being open enough to discover if there is a solution.

Some fear appearing in a bad light. Others just want to move on if the thrill they expected wasn’t found.

A bottom may have found what he or she was experiencing boring. Boring in a way that left them without any desire to continue. While enduring ennui can be a part of submission it can just be tedious and nothing more.

Or the bottom may find some experiences uncomfortable and unsatisfying. But be trapped by that. Emotional state that leaves a bottom unwilling or unable to complain and explain. So they just give up.

Tops may feel that their authority or competence has been challenged. There are tops that feel confused or guilty about this. The ability to negotiate vanishes and they lapse into silence. While tops are mere mortals like the rest of it some find admitting that unendurable.

Unconfident, playmates and lovers would rather let a relationship die than undergo the demands of honest discussion, the challenge of emotionally naked conversation.

This is sad. The shy man or woman, rendered unwilling o speak loses a valued friend in fearful silence. And as those who can push past these fears can attest many of the best relationships are built on foundations that looked rocky at first.

It hurts to be shut out. Equally it hurts to be the one closing the door.

Female tops ( - it probably happens to male tops and submissive persons as well - ) recount stories of the man who never show up for a scheduled first date, Other dominant women express empathetic chagrin and submissive males wonder how anyone can be so foolish.

Dominant women often employ extensive vetting and screening in selecting guys to meet. Any sane person who uses the web to search for hookups and romance does likewise. That will never prove completely foolproof. Flakes and fools will always manage to slip past the most carefully conceived filters.

Why would a man invest time and energy in currying the interest of a dominant woman, achieve it and then fail to meet her.

He’s married or partnered or whatever the right term is for someone in a committed relationship with another person. That he not be is probably the first criterion: on the web nobody knows you are phony At least until.

Fears of being caught cheating or the lack of resources with which to cheat successfully stop many men from taking the final step. In a way the women are lucky. Becoming involved with him and then discovering his falsity would be worse than sipping coffee alone.

Just plain fear: this I suspect covers the majority of no shows. Fear of:

• Exposure: of blackmail maybe but mostly of by some mysterious means that others will learn of their submissive sexuality. They fear being laughed at or damaging their career.
• Fear of you, the woman. Whatever they may have written in the back of their minds an image of dominant women as pitiless, cruel creatures. They cultivate horrific fantasies that no one could really endure.
• Fear of being found inadequate. Like so much to do with fetish and kink this is universal to all social-sexual interaction. Even though they may dream of a top mocking them as worthless that isn’t the same as meeting someone and being found literally and objectively not worth knowing.

There may also be men for whom negotiating and making the date is all they ‘need.’ Those acts are sufficiently sexually gratifying. Cynically they never plan to meet. But I think them rare.

How many men I wonder make the date, approach the location only to freeze and retreat. Maybe they watch for you across the street. Or just as they start to open the door to the restaurant selected for the appointed rendezvous stop and run away.

This isn’t to excuse their incivility. At the very least they could follow-up with an email admitting that they don’t want it takes to translate their desires into reality.

If a man has pissed you off by making a date and failing to arrive for it perhaps you can find vengeful comfort in this thought:

For perhaps the rest of his life the guy will regret that he wasn’t brave enough to meet you. And he’ll spend many nights wondering what might have been.

The idea that others may have multiple profiles disturbs some people.

Is this some subtle erotic hypocrisy? Who are we hoping to fool? What do we have to hide?

One advantage of creating alternative profiles and personal ads is to emphasize different aspects of our sexuality.

Many people don’t read past a profile’s heading or first paragraph. Should the profile actually contain more than one. So even if you are strictly submissive but open to both casual play and a serious romantic commitment you may want to insure that you capture the attention of both kinds of searchers. The more a person is open to exploring the more easily confused some people are.

Even the best intended of us may judge a personal ad by too few words.

Switches suffer from a special curse. People often assume that if someone is a switch they want to be both dominant and submissive in every encounter or relationship. That most people are either tops or bottoms is something every switch quickly learns.

Much online reading is hasty: presenting nuanced editions of yourself is about emphasis, not concealment. Who really wants the extra work it requires?

Have you ever noticed those personal ads that say something like:

I want a 24/7 slave. Must be completely willing to obey all orders at all times.

Real slaves only. No fakes, part-timers, scene players, phoneys, fake slaves, wannabes, Your goal must be to please me with no thought for yourself and nothing else.

I am real. UB2!

And how they have the same ad running five years later, there account is active and they are still looking.

Even though there are bottoms advertising:

I am a real slave and masochist. I want a Lord and Master who will teach me true and total slavery. I will have no rights and ask for no pity or compassion. Train me and use me for your pleasure. Abuse me and hurt me. I will be nothing and you will grind me into the dust.

Your future worthless dog slave.

Ads like that run forever as well.

Why don’t they get together?

Because they are propounding what for most people is unlivable. And as long as they cling to these hopeless extremes of M/s lives they’ll stay single. And they seem willing to do so forever.

Is this a sane choice?

Profile by a master in central North Carolina:

Looking for worthless slaves to be
used as fuckmeat and cum receptacles. Prefer naturally submissive, shy, quiet, unassuming, low self-esteem.

Not looking for
relationship, scenes, etc., Just
something to fuck and discard until
the next time, without any regard as a person, like a mangy bitch dog.

If you are in this category and know
this is what you deserve, let me know.

Age and physicality are not an issue. Just be totally submissive

Some women would say this is just a typical male.

Let’s be honest there are plenty of people who will find this exciting to read. To be brutally frank this sort of arrangement is probably the best some bottoms can hope for (or - perhaps - capable of).

But.

BDSM without the option of a safeword is a serious risk.

There’s no promise of safe sex. Is the risk of becoming HIV+ really worth it? Are you that desperate?

Someone who is looking for men and women with low self-esteem could very well be a predator, a sociopath.