You've not been hypmotized

Another rule of chat: boys who advertise a "hypno" interest and who seem to fall into trance automatically are fakes until proven otherwise.

Now, I know this, but every now and then I chat with one anyway just to see how it goes. Despite not looking for cyber, a little of it every now and then isn't so bad for your fantasy life. Yet I always wind up disappointed or disgusted at the things these fakers say are happening, because people who don't know they're fakes would be really, really disturbed. (Since they are fakes, and no one they describe actually exists, there's no actual harm, but still. I won't go into details, just so you can sleep better.)

Not everyone is susceptible to hypnosis in the first place (IMHO), and of those that are, very few can easily fall into trance online. If you think you have such a boy in chat, the thing to do is issue commands that you can verify, either over webcam or over the phone. More likely than not, you'll find that these boys magically don't have webcams (or even still cameras), or can't do phone, or as I said before, somehow can't do anything that you can verify.

If you're interested in hypnosis, try visiting a reliable site and getting some self-hypnosis audio files. Listen to them (or have the boy listen to them) for a couple of weeks, minimum, and then try some simple triggers that are verifiable but not too intense, like obeying simple orders on camera or telling the truth or something like that. Don't rush it. Don't be surprised when you're not sure if you're going into trance or not, because it doesn't feel much difference than just lying (or sitting) there listening to the file. Give it time, and don't be discouraged if it doesn't work. It's not for everyone.

---

As for me, I've had health ups and downs in the past couple of months, and loads of work, but I'm doing OK. I miss my boy tremendously, but I hope he can visit over the holidays.

I lost contact completely with two local boys in the past two months. One was only a casual acquaintance who showed more interest once he learned he might get to play with my boy (who is quite well-endowed), but I won't allow that unless he wants to play here without the boy, too. Inserting a new boy who's only interested in the other boy is just asking for trouble. I think this other local boy is probably a good person, but he's very flighty, way too interested in getting drunk for his age (which is incompatible with my scenes), and eventually just stopped responding again. Oh well—I would have enjoyed initiating him, but it doesn't seem to be for him.

The other one has been a disciple (whatever the opposite of "mentor" is, I guess) and friend for about eight years, but two months ago, he simply broke off contact. He'd done something that he should have consulted with me on first, but failure to do so wasn't a mortal sin—until he told me a story I simply couldn't believe about it.

I didn't make a scene or anything, so I thought I'd wait to see how things worked out. A few days later, we were both at an all-day function where he was near me and made eye contact several times, but didn't say a single word. He knows I've been increasingly annoyed over the years by his closet-based refusal to let other people know he knows me, so this just amplified my annoyance.

I thought I'd wait to see what he said about it—and he never said anything. After one month of silence, he fell off my chat lists. It's now close enough to two months that he's fallen off the rest of the things I do, both for BDSM and in "real life."

Yeah, this one hurts—but honestly, he's pulled stuff like this so many times over the years that each time it hurts a little bit less, and I feel less and less compelled to invite him to "fix" it. He's well past college age, and if he still can't approach friendship with me in a mature fashion, it's just time to move on.

That's just a part of life, but it still sucks.

The new gay.com survival guide

It's kind of odd—when you own a boy, even living several states away, there's not as much angst in your life. Well, there is at times, but it's about helping him through things and missing him, not about the existential nature of existence itself. I can't wait for his next visit.

In the meantime, he can play with permission, and I can play at will, because I'm the owner and that's how that works. So I still usually leave a spare computer (if there is one) logged into gay.com. Like everyone else, I've dealt with the ups and downs of the new site launch, and I'm not as pleased with the results yet as I was with the previous system.

Nonetheless, the pure amount of bile and anger expressed by guys online who don't want to know the truth is both astounding and depressing. Every day, I read angry people shouting "This is so much worse than the old system! They shouldn't have fucked with it!"

Well, no. You lose, no turtle wax for you.

Nearly everyone who's pining for the old system wasn't actually using "gay.com chat." They were using Chat Client, or Chattage, or Gaysenger, or another third-party program to chat on gay.com's servers. These programs were not written by the people who run gay.com. They were not endorsed by gay.com, and not supported by gay.com. They worked mainly because, behind the scenes, gay.com was using a network of more-or-less standard IRC servers behind the scenes to manage the chat.

These third-party programmers did network snooping, figured out how to log into the servers, and wrote their own front ends. It's clever, and I used one myself, but it's like riding a skateboard while holding a rope tied to the back of a car. If the car stops or turns, you're shit out of luck—and the guy driving the car may not know you're even there. And if he knows, he may not care. It's his car, not your skateboard towing service.

So if you didn't want to use one of those clients (most of which only worked on certain computers or operating systems), you were stuck using the browser-based interface to gay.com chat. If you hadn't used that in a while, let me remind you:

gay.com's browser-based chat sucked donkey dicks.

It used a Java-based application that was slow, unreliable, and unfriendly. It spawned six billion windows and, even for premium members, covered up everything with ads. It was awful.

And things "weren't just fine" before the upgrade. It seems like several times per night, half the guys in a room would "disconnect," just to "reconnect" a few minutes later, if you were lucky. I think that was an IRC split—where multiple servers around the world lose their connections to each other. A split divides the network into two parts, and you get to keep chatting with the guys on your part, but not with the other part. And you don't get to choose which part you're on.

On top of that, the server side of gay.com was creaky and needed improvement. Only ten pictures? Sign-up procedures that let automated bots all but take over the chats by creating new headless "guys" every day to use for ads? Pig, pig, pig slow operations and searches? At least once this past year, the "old" and "just fine" gay.com completely thrashed my bookmarks, and I logged in one day to find that the site had bookmarked about 120 guys I'd never even seen. Given its pig-slow operation and bad interface, it took me a couple of days to fix it. (Did you ever notice that half the time you'd click on a "bookmark" or "hot list" link, gay.com would take you to an empty page using the old appearance from pre-2006? And not actually do what you told it to do? Wasn't that fun?)

Have you noticed that you can now have blank lines in your profile again, after three years of no blank lines and no URLs in an attempt to foil bots with the older servers? That's a good thing.

So yeah, the infrastructure was old and crusty. They needed to upgrade the servers and ditch the insane Java-based chat. The new browser-based chat is worlds ahead of the old browser based chat. And while the performance isn't everything I want, the interface is actually better than Chat Client was. Now I get miniature pictures in the user list, and mini-profiles, and it doesn't feel like I'm reading chat in TextEdit or emacs. If guys can't see that, they're just fucking stupid.

That said, there's plenty that gay.com needs to do. It's still too slow, and it's way too unreliable, with system outages every damn day. If they were going to rebuild this system, they should have done it with third-party capabilities built in so that the Chattage and Gaysenger people could make their own supported clients, either for a licensing fee or for agreeing to show ads in a less-obtrusive way. It's not flexible enough—I should be able to turn off pics in the user list to save space if I want, and it's transferring too much data for what it's doing.

So if you want the least painful experience on the new gay.com, follow a few simple rules.

• Use Firefox. Yes, it should work with Internet Explorer 6 and Opera and Safari and whatever else, but thinking about more than two browsers is apparently more than gay.com can do right now, and I keep seeing people using unspecified versions of "IE" (even on Vista) having trouble. So bite the bullet and download Firefox 3 and use it for gay.com.



• Consider using a browser only for gay.com. Firefox isn't my default browser, so I set Firefox's home page to gay.com, and I launch Firefox only for gay.com (usually). That way, when I do other things or click on other links, they don't open in Firefox and screw up the chat.



• Read what's in the damn windows. Click on a guy's name in a chat room and you'll see his mini-profile. Want to see the full thing? Click "Go To Profile." Want to send him an IM? Click "Send IM." It's really not fucking hard, guys. Look at the "gay.com Messenger" window. See where it says your status? Change it if you want. Change your description if you want. It's not hard.



• Turn off all pop-up blocking for anything that ends in "gay.com". Actually, since I only use Firefox for gay.com, I turned off all pop-up blocking, and it works. Yes, that sucks. Yes, gay.com needs to fix it so that information only comes from *.gay.com and not from "pno.net" or "listen.gay.com" or "chat.gay.com" or any number of a bazillion other domains they could use. But until they do fix it, you're gonna be happier if you turn off pop-up blocking in the browser you're using for gay.com. This is another reason to use a completely separate browser for it.



• Close the Messenger window when you're done. Until you actually close the "gay.com Messenger" window, gay.com thinks you're still logged in, and other guys will think you're ignoring them. For reasons yet unknown to normal people, simply quitting the browser is not the same thing. You actually have to log out or close the Messenger window. (If you close the Messenger window, your status changes to "Online (No Chat)", but it still thinks you're logged in. That's generally good enough, because then guys can't send you IMs that you won't see. If you really want to appear offline, you must actually log out.



• When gay.com is "down", hold down alt while refreshing the home page. All browsers cache data from the Internet, and Firefox does not necessarily ask for a fresh version every time you click refresh. Hold down "Alt" (or "Option" on a Mac) while clicking "refresh" to make it ask gay.com for the home page again. Sometimes you'll find that the site is back up when you had been looking at a cached version of the "we're down" page.

These things make gay.com better, but not perfect. Here are some of my favorite absolutely boneheaded things about the new system:

• No blocking for non-premium members. And my boy tells me that he can only enter one room at a time now, instead of the two rooms he could enter before. That's a sucky way to treat your customers.



• People with "." in their screen names are incredibly fucked. For reasons I've never understood, gay.com has always (apparently) internally changed "." characters to "|" characters, and changes them back to "." before displaying them. Usually. In Chat Client, I would occasionally see guys with names like "interesting...guy" that would show up in Chat Client windows, but not in chat windows, as "interesting|||guy". Now the same thing happens in the regular (and only) chat method, using the browser. If you see one of those guys in a chat room, you can't get a mini-profile or send them an IM because it says "interesting|||guy" doesn't exist.
  
  To work around it, view the profile directly by appending it to "http://my.gay.com/", as in "http://my.gay.com/interesting...guy" and you'll get to see the profile. Gay.com rewrites the URL, but it does work.



• Requiring a face shot as a primary picture. Are they insane or just on drugs? I'm fully out of the closet, but I don't advertise my BDSM interests except in BDSM-type forums, or around local gay guys. I just don't want to deal with things like the UN Weapons Inspector who had his BDSM interests splashed all over world newspapers when he said true things like "BDSM is safe and sane between people who consent" and "Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction." (And no, I'm nowhere near that kind of high-profile person, but I have enough to deal with in my life without explaining BDSM to people who don't undersatnd and don't want to understand, or to people who seek to discredit me for their own reasons.)
  
  I get that this is a ham-handed attempt to ban the bots with their faceless pictures, but it's just tone-deaf dumbassery.



• Not actually telling people when the system has gone down. I think it's gone down right now, after unscheduled maintenance this afternoon—my chat room is slowly shedding guys, and no one new is coming in or responding, but the home page insists it's all fine, and the chat windows stay open. They've got to have monitoring software, and time-outs in the JavaScript that tell your browser "hey, no activity in 10 minutes means the server is down."



• Still spawning dumb-ass windows. When I close the chat room window, I do not want a new gay.com home page window opened instead. When I close a window, I want a window closed. Stop opening windows that are not absolutely necessary.



• Showing no people in rooms that are split into multiple rooms. If you click on "Leather" in the "Topics" area, you don't see a list of people in the room now. You see a list of rooms, and you have to click on one of those to see who's in there. The previous way of only showing who was in the newest room was wrong also. This should all be a preference, but until it is, it should show you everyone in all the rooms for a topic or area.

Anyway, yeah, there's plenty wrong with the system, largely that by breaking all the (unsupported) third-party clients, men no longer have their choice of ways to use the chat, not that there were lots
of choices before. But while it needs to be debugged, they needed to upgrade the servers and replace the old Java-based chat. The new chat, while still sucky in too many ways, is light years ahead of the old browser-based chat.

If you refuse to understand that, you're going to be bitching about it for the next three years, and no one wants to hear that, so shut the fuck up.

A brief new rule of chat

Desperation is not an aphrodisiac.

I'm waiting for the hammer to fall

My new boy visited me last weekend, as in "one week ago he was here serving me."

It was wonderful. I was completely comfortable around him. You'd think that masters would always feel comfortable around their slaves, but it's not often the case with new boys. They're scared, they're nervous, they don't know if they can handle what they want, and all that's on top of the normal new relationship problems. ("Can I handle Sir's snoring? Does he smell funny? Will I like what he eats, or think his place is ugly? Can I see myself serving him?")

OK, maybe that last one's not a normal relationship problem, but still.

He's not going to live around here for a long time, so it's going to be a long-distance ownership for the foreseeable future. I may play with other boys, though I am not "looking" in any chat sense of the word. (I'm more open to playtime with boys I've played with before, or at least talked with extensively before, than I am with complete strangers, in case you're wondering for some odd reason.) He can play with others with my permission.

I had a fantastic time even though I went fairly easy on him in several areas—not all the areas he was worried about, but in some. I'm omitting details because a certain local boy couldn't speed up his 22-week decision process to decide if he wanted to come out and meet the new slave, so he doesn't get to find out what happened for a while. The local boy has to be trained to move faster than global warming, and filling him in on all the details of things he missed does not serve this purpose.

(He knows who he is.)

It was a great weekend. Neither of us is swimming in what the financial channels call "resources," so if we're lucky, we'll see each other a maximum of two more times this year (and "one" may be more realistic, but I'm not giving in until the bitter end), but I already can't wait.

The odd part? Neither can he. That's a good feeling. I'm not used to things going well, so deep inside, I still expect everything to completely fall apart at any moment. I wonder if that feeling ever goes away.

Ownership isn't easy

The boy I mentioned last time? He's still mine, wearing an even more personally important collar than he was at the time.

This isn't always easy, despite experience and good intentions on everyone's part. He's new (but within all applicable rules of eligibility, you dirty-minded people), and he has issues.

But he's also adorable, fiercely smart, and seems to fit in with my quirky personality as well as anyone I've ever known. He's conquered lots of adversity but still bears scars from the battles, and I know something about that. His huge desire to submit does not always translate into an ability to take the next logical steps, and that makes it challenging at times.

But I'm not going anywhere. If he is not the right boy for me, then there is no "right boy for me." If he's not Mr. Right ("boy right?"), then Mr. Right isn't out there.

He's going to play with others (with permission), as will I, but he is mine. This makes him intensely happy, and not much has been able to make him intensely happy. It's just not going to be a whirlwind romance.

But aren't the good things always the ones you have to work for?

Asymmetry

First, thanks to those of you who like reading this and asked for more. It's surprising but gratifying.

I haven't updated anything in a long time because I have a boy collared in another state, and I'm spending most of my free time talking to him. I think rather highly of him, and hope I'll get to put the spurs to him in person sometime in the next few months. Cross your fingers.

In our talks, one thing that's come up is the asymmetrical nature of the master/slave relationship. On the surface, and to outsiders, it looks completely one-sided: the master gets what he wants and the slave provides it. Those of us in the community know it's a lot more complicated. The slave finds what he needs in service, just as the master finds what he needs in ownership. Some people cannot imagine finding satisfaction in service, be it sexual, religious, community, or otherwise. It's their world that's smaller for that lack of understanding, not mine.

There can be no master without a slave, no dominance without submission. But that's not balance by itself. As noted previously, the relationship is still unequal. The slave has to tell the master everything, but the master can only tell the slave what he needs to know. The master makes choices for both of them. The slave obeys, the master directs. Even if both find satisfaction in that service, the master still has far more power.

But some master/slave relationships last longer than some marriages. So where's the balance? What is it that most people aren't seeing in this asymmetric relationship?

I think it's the slave's consent.

Start by imagining a simple weeknight session. Sure, once the slave is bound, the master can do anything he wants with the slave within the agreed-upon limits. But nothing forces the slave to go have the session in the first place, or return for another one.

Yes, I have a boy collared right now, and I'm thrilled. But he can take that collar off if he chooses and end it, and I know it. Not only can I not do anything about it if he does, I shouldn't be able to do anything about it. When he puts himself in my hands, I have total control—but only he can choose to let that happen.

There's the hidden symmetry. Not only can a sub walk away at any time when he's not serving, I would argue that he must walk away if he knows the situation is wrong for him. Within the rules of our community, a sub/slave can't leave in the middle of a session, and therefore must be prepared for what comes during that session. And while I can understand a boy's reluctance to walk away from a master, he must also realize and accept that if a relationship or situation is wrong for him, he must walk away.

For every slave who's frustrated at not being allowed to cum, or at being collared, or bound, or worked over, there's a master who's frustrated that the boy he wants won't come back, or come back often enough, or move past a few limits the master wants him to drop. There's the symmetry: the master is in control during service, but the slave controls himself the rest of the time.

This obviously changes somewhat in long-term ownership contracts, but by that time, the master and slave have come to know each other well enough for the slave to know he belongs with the master. That's just another reason that contracts shouldn't be entered lightly, nor should they be too restrictive, nor (I would argue) last too long at first. If a first-time boy signs a contract for longer than six months, he's being too optimistic. It can always be extended at the end, but if he wants it shortened, he may be shit out of luck.

(All of this ignores the fact that true inescapable slavery is unconstitutional in the USA, by the way. I'm talking about consensual relationships. Master/slave contracts in this context may be about property rights, income, assets, and the like: a boy may sign a contract obliging him to service for a given period of time and assigning his assets and income to his master during that period. Legally, the sub can walk away any time he chooses, because otherwise would be kidnapping, but that won't necessarily untangle the property contracts or assets. That's the point of modern slave contracts—not to enforce captivity, but to state intentions and to discourage slaves from walking away on a whim because a particular session became too difficult.)

Masters have the power to do anything to a slave within the agreed-upon limits, but that doesn't mean that everything the Master can imagine is a good idea. Similarly, slaves can walk away any time they want, but that doesn't mean leaving at the first difficult is a good idea. It's a lot more balanced than most people think. If you don't believe it, ask all the masters seeking slaves why they don't own one already.

Ah, the adventures of a slut

This is not about BDSM in particular, so feel free to call Teh Internets and get your money back.

More than once in this young year, a local boy has told me in chat that other people (either "everyone else" or someone in particular) thinks of him as a "slut." (The first case was even worse, when he said "everyone says I'm just a worthless slut.")

Of course this sets my teeth on edge. Here's a definition from a feminist site that seems about right to me:

The sexually charged nature of abortion leads to what I like to call the "slut is someone who's had two more partners than me" principle. I came up with that rule in college when I noticed a lot of women were obsessed with their "number" and defining who was and wasn't a slut, and since a slut is always someone else, most women's rule for what constituted "too many" partners was always about two more than they had. It's how women reconcile their self-esteem under the patriarchal regime of female sexuality where you're damned if you do (slut) and damned if you don't (prude). You agree to the rule that having a sex life is somehow despicable, but only if it's somehow more than yours in some way.

Wikipedia says:

Slut has also been reclaimed as a slang term in the BDSM, polyamorous and gay and bisexual communities. It may be used by the person concerned as an expression of pride in their status, or as an expression of enviousness in the "success rate" of others.

So, in much the same way that gay men can call each other "fags" but outsiders shouldn't, a guy can call himself a "slut" to express pride in his sex-positive life. But that's not what's happening here. It's more like the earlier "a slut is someone else" rule.

The term seems to have become an insult to describe women who were immoral enough to actually have sex and like it, and not have the "decency" to hide it. There's still way too much ancient sexual politics mixed up in this, because you almost never hear a top referred to as a "slut." Just bottoms. It's similar to how straight men who like sex are "pussy hounds" but straight women who like sex are "sluts" or "whores."

In the local gay community, a "slut" appears to be a bottom who is either having more sex than you, or sex with guys who won't sleep with you, or sex with guys you wouldn't sleep with. It escapes me how someone calling someone else a "slut" can think that it makes the other guy look bad instead of himself.

Sex is good. Sex is part of our very being. It would probably be a bad thing if someone was having lots and lots of sex not because he enjoyed it, but because he felt it was the only thing he was good at, or the only way to make friends or be accepted.

But, of course, that's not what we're talking about here, either. We're talking about guys who have sex and enjoy it, and other guys who think there's something wrong with that and try to make them feel bad for it.

It says a lot more about the person using the word than the person it's aimed at.

Immaturity in action

When I point out the flaws of "college-age boys" on this blog, I don't mean all boys between 18-22. Many of those are fine, intelligent, serious people with valid questions, a need for exploration, and a desire to be reliable.

The problem, though, is that many more are not.

I chatted two or three times with a semi-local (in-state, but not too close to me) boy whose gay.com profile indicated and interest in BDSM. It was fine to talk to him—he mostly seemed to want someone to top him immediately, but he had a valid interest and seemed somewhat serious in his pursuits.

The third time we chatted, he didn't remember who I was, and wanted me to explain everything all over again. I thought this odd, but I did it.

The fourth time, just a couple of days later, he didn't remember me at all again, and once again demanded that I explain everything, including typing the things in my various profiles, re-answering a ton of questions, etc. This time I declined, and in the public Oklahoma City room, he told me to fuck off. He, the young heartthrob, couldn't be bothered to remember someone as inconsequential and undeserving as me, and if I wasn't willing to embrace his unwillingness to show me the respect of remembering little details like, you know, that we'd talked for hours several times, then I could just do without his august presence.

Fine with me.

That's usually where such stories would end. However, a few weeks later, this guy sends me a private message out of the blue, wanting to know how I am, etc. I'm confused by this, given the last public conversation.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn't seem to remember.

I remind him. He gets mad very quickly. In short, he said, "Dude, I was HIGH! That's why I didn't remember you!" He did not say at the time that he was high, or I wouldn't have been chatting with him that day at all. (People in BDSM scenes must be sober. It's a safety rule. No exceptions.)

Now, which do you think would be the correct, appropriate, human way for him to continue that explanation:

• "I'm sorry if I pissed you off, and I'll try not to do it again, if we can talk some more," or



• "That was weeks ago! You're the one who's immature if you haven't gotten over that yet! I can't believe you'd still be mad about that! Fuck you! You don't deserve an apology!"

Now, if you haven't already, guess which response I got.

Another fake clue

I've mentioned problems with online BDSM chat before (like here, here, and here, for example), so I've made a new category for them.

And to break it in, here's another post about how you can tell someone on gay.com is very probably a fake:

My computer is bad so I can't read your profile.

Sorry, boys, but this is bullshit. If you can get gay.com's insane Java-based chat app working, you can read profiles. If you have enough know-how to use a third-party chat client, you can read profiles. Maybe clicking on what looks like a link doesn't bring up someone's profile, but you can find any profile on gay.com by appending it to the URL "my.gay.com". So, if your nickname is "fake_boy", I can get to your profile at http://my.gay.com/fakeboy, and you can get to mine by using my nickname.

If you're not a premium gay.com member, you can't see adult pictures in profiles, but unless you're illiterate or an incredibly shallow fucking wanker, that's not the same thing as "I can't read your profile." If you say you can't read profiles, then you don't want to read profiles—either because you're too lazy and want other guys to repeat everything there for your convenience, or because you want to project the image of someone who can't manage technology (and therefore can't post pictures, send files, or other ways that masters might use to verify your obedience).

Either way, you're not worth talking to.

I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong here, so drop me a line if you actually can't read gay.com profiles and let me know, but in years of chatting, I've never seen a convincing reason why it might be true, and most of the boys who said it easily proved to be fakes if I pursued it further.

I'm open to evidence against this position, but absent it, boys who say they "can't read profiles" are overwhelmingly fakes and liars. Sorry, boys, Your attempts to manipulate other guys online need some new tricks.