What about unowned boys' hair?

It seems odd to me that I've never answered this publicly, but a question from the peanut gallery:

Should an unowned boy keep his hair how he wants, or short like a master would, or what?

I believe unowned boys should keep their hair long, as long as they can stand it and as things like jobs allow (military boys obviously won't grow shoulder-length hair).

There's no complicated philosophy behind this, just that it's better for the boy's next master. Consider this table of a boy's hair options and what the Sir might want for him.

	Sir wants boy's hair long	Sir wants boy's hair short	Sir wants to cut boy's hair himself
Boy's hair is long	Sir is happy	Sir is happy as he can take boy to the barber	Sir is happy because he can cut boy's hair
Boy's hair is short	Sir is unhappy as he must wait for it to grow out	Sir may be happy if it matches his style or can be cut to do so	Sir is probably unhappy because boy's hair may be too short to have fun cutting

See that? On the first row, where the boy has long hair, all three outcomes make the Sir happy. On the second row, one might be OK, one is probably not what Sir wants, and one is definitely not what Sir wants.

Seems pretty easy to me.

What if boy gets his hair cut off in a scene?

First, good for the boy! *grin*

Second, if a boy gets a radical haircut in a scene, I say he should feel just fine about keeping it that way for a while if the boy wants. If the boy will continue to play with the Sir who cut it, this may be prudent. But after a couple of months, if no Sir is keeping it short for him, I say the boy should start growing it long again.

Obviously it's up to each boy to decide if the orders of an online Sir are reason enough to cut his hair. However, I would note that there are dozens if not hundreds of online masters who will tell boys to cut hair (or shave their heads), and obeying all of them would keep all boys perpetually shorn. This displeases masters who want longer hair, or who want to decide how to cut a boy's hair. So I would generally reserve haircutting authority for in-person scenes or very, very serious online relationships.

Oh, and I don't think any boy should get his first short haircut simply from an online order unless he has absolutely no plans to follow through on his BDSM desires in person. But I doubt that those boys are reading this. :-)

Things I've learned this year

Just because something is over, and you know it can't start again, doesn't stop you from wanting it.

I'm not going to argue with you.

More than once this week, someone has rather haughtily asked me, "Have you ever stopped and considered that you might be wrong?"

The answer is "Yes." If you're under 70, the answer is "Yes, and fuck you."

Also...

...I still miss the piggy boy.

That iswasall, until he contacted me. Now I'm both hopeful and sad.

...and now I'm just sad again.

What I Seek

This day has frazzled me in unexpected ways, and maybe that's not the best day to write about what I want in a boy. But I'm also frazzled that Recon profiles are short, gay.com profiles are both short and impossible to read (and the service is too expensive to use without a discount), and Grindr profiles are basically as long as Twitter messages. I opened a Twitter account just so Grindr could link to it and let people know what the hell it is I think I want.

Before I get into the asshole parts: I'm a nice guy. I'm smart, I'm funny, I'm not so ugly that I break mirrors but I'm never going to be on a magazine cover unless I do something really smart. I lead a mostly quiet and mostly private life. I love training new boys in BDSM, but I'm not really good at explaining the concepts to those who've never heard of them. Plainly, I'm a BDSM dominant. If you don't know what BDSM is, click here.

I do not require boys to have previous BDSM experience, but I do require them to be submissive—that is, to submit to what I want to do—and to know that BDSM arouses them. Don't sign up for sexual play that doesn't arouse you. "I'll try anything once" is not a good enough reason to get tied up.

Yes, tied up. Bondage. Also discipline, oral service, toys, long-term bondage, TT, CBT, and chastity, enforced with padlocks. Google can tell you what these things are if you don't know. And fucking is not a big deal for me. If you're looking primarily and regularly to get fucked, you're not looking for me.

I don't post pics online. If you do, I'm glad for you. I enjoy looking at your pictures. This does not change that I don't post pics online. If we get along well enough that I invite you to play here, I'm likely, but not guaranteed, to find a way for you to see a pic. If this post-telephone age has left you incapable of conversing with someone whom you can't see, there's not much I can do for you. I grew up in the telephone age. We talked to people we didn't see all the time.

And yes, often I'll expect to see a picture of you even though I don't return one of me to you. I'm the dominant. It's a one-sided relationship in some ways. A submissive needs to submit, but he can't do so unless a dominant man is willing to be dominant. Submission means I get my way. Limits are encouraged. If you don't know what limits are, read this. But be warned, at my age and experience level, I am not very likely at all to let a boy have this limit.

I love having conversations even with guys who are not into submission. If I message you and nothing indicates you're submissive, I'm probably just saying "hello" and maybe complimenting you on a profile or picture. I am not trying to get into your pants just because I send you a message. That said, all I really ask of anyone in chat or online is that you be honest and reliable. Don't say untrue things. Say "I don't know" if you don't know something. Don't say "I don't know" when it's clear you do know.

I am looking for a boy between 18-30 or so. I've had good conversations with boys who are older, and even some boys older than me, but I have never effectively dominated submissives outside of the above range. This wasn't so bad when I was younger, though as a 23-year-old Dom, it was hard to find younger subs. I will talk with people younger or older, but there will definitely not be any BDSM or sexual play with anyone under 18 (this is my rule, so don't lecture me how the law where you are allows 16-year-olds to play; I don't care), and I have yet to imagine the circumstance where there'd be play with someone older than that range. New things happen all the time, but if you're older than about 30, I'm not considering you as a slaveboy.

No smoking. Period. No cigarettes, cigars, pipes, whatever. I never liked tobacco and a bout with pneumonia a few years back has left me even less tolerant of it than before. I know many BDSM folk are horribly turned on by cigars or forced smoke or whatever. I can't help you there, and you can't smoke around me.

I think that's about it. There are safety rules in BDSM, but I don't need to go into those here. In my world, safety is always a submissive's choice in BDSM—that is, the sub can always require safety and it will be granted. The sub can request unsafe play, but that doesn't mean he'll get it. I'm not much into anal sex at all, so those who want to be "bred" and "filled up" and all that probably won't find anything they like here.

But I am kind (though still dominant), witty, reasonably smart, a good conversationalist, and someone who wants everyone to find his best happiness no matter what his sexuality may be. I may be cranky at times and outgoing at other times, but I like to think I'm a good friend to those who've made the effort. Maybe you'll be one of them.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I must admit, I'm not taking the past few weeks as well as I'd hoped.

A time of transition

If the last few (but infrequent) posts have not been clear, it had been a relatively stable few years for me, with my Puppy collared and a new, more local boy both in and out depending on his mood. At this point it's probably wise to be clear about the status of boys I've written about.

• I remain on good terms with the first boy I mentioned on this blog, but he has largely moved on. He travels a lot, rarely gets to chat, and hasn't played here in about two years.


• The other local boy I've mentioned repeatedly, who has been in and out for about ten years, has also moved on. He's moved to a different part of the metro area and, when doing so, pretty much fell out of contact. This happens; he and his partner are planning to move to one of the U.S.'s larger cities this year, and his play here always tied him in emotional knots even if he didn't go through with anything.


• My puppy, and that name sticks, has been on hormone replacement therapy for several weeks, with an unexpected but welcome side effect: he is happy. One of the reasons I didn't hesitate much with our otherwise remarkable relationship was that I was one of the few people or things that genuinely made him happy, even for brief periods. Now that he's beginning his transition (puppy becomes "she" when he presents as female most of the time, at least in my language), he's happy almost all of the time. He even realizes how good looking he is. You can't argue with that.

The final boy, whom I have said I "owned" for the past seven months, was mentioned here. Despite professing happiness at being owned, he's had a ton of issues.

The big one turned out to be over, shock of shocks, shaving his head. He delayed playing for about a year because he wasn't sure he could handle it, even though he'd had short buzz cuts multiple times. I made clear that I would not only do it, but make him keep it that way and he eventually agreed. He didn't freak out, he seemed to enjoy it for a while, and went through the first month of an upperclass college semester that way. Then he wanted to let it grow out, and I was ok with that.

Then he tried to blow up the relationship, and when I let him back in, I shaved his head a second time. A week or so before that, he had told me that if I wanted to shave his head again, it would be best if I just did it and didn't tell him ahead of time so he couldn't worry about it. I followed his advice, because as regular readers know, I expect total and complete honesty from submissives. I can't know what can and can't be done unless I can accurately judge a situation. It is the dominant's moral duty to protect the sub, even while pushing him through those things he craves but can't do on his own.

Ever since then, he's tried to blow up the relationship again every 6-10 weeks. Last time, this month, I told him to take the rest of the month to decide, and that I would not use or order him before February 1. Within just a few days, he'd decided that he wanted to stay in—but wanted me not to shave his head, which I wouldn't promise. (I didn't intend to do it again until his spring break, provided he behaved himself.)

He's been back and forth since then on the whole hair thing, but last night he dropped the bomb: he said that shaving his head in October had "fucked him up." That it created "emotional damage."

As most dom readers will understand, that felt like a punch to the stomach.

Just a few weeks earlier, he had been keeping his head shaved, and had only indicated to me that he was just tired of it and wanted to grow some hair out (but keep it short, preferably buzzed; I preferred him to grow some longer hair if he was going to grow it out and ordered such). It had never crossed my mind that doing it again about 4 weeks later would cause any significant problems, especially since he had recently advised me to do it without warning if I wanted to do it.

He was upset at the time, but he seemed to calm down rather rapidly afterward, and later apologized to me for being upset. But in the past few weeks, he's been more and more insistent that I not shave his head again in the future. I felt that he obviously could handle it because he'd shown—twice—that he could. I honestly felt he just didn't want to. When the dom and the sub have colliding wants, the dom wins. Also, since he'd obviously done it before, I had real trouble letting him set it as a limit, since it's easily my #1 all-time BDSM turn-on.

I wasn't quite sure what was going on, but I was pretty confident that he was simply dealing with the side effects of, you know, being in his 20s: having a rather limited self-image, finding it hard work to deal with changes to that, and so on. (He also didn't want to be collared because others would see it, and since I had shaved his head, I readily consented to that request though I had very much wanted to collar him.)

But when he said "fucked up," the train completely derailed. He has since tried to back off some from the obvious meaning of that term, saying now that it was more like a paper cut that should have healed but he kept picking at it and picking at it until it didn't heal properly.

He's only now beginning to understand that doesn't help.

This is not about law or blame or any of that stuff. It was a consenting relationship between two adults, and he's rather accomplished for his age, which I liked. There's no "blame." There's just the fact that ethically, a dominant is responsible for submissives in his care. The dom must know how well the sub is handling everything: pain, endurance, edging, milking, whatever. The dom must know he can trust the sub's word. If the sub says "I can take more, Sir," but he really can't, that's bad news for everyone.

It does not matter one whit whether he accurately communicated his emotional state about the haircut or not—even though he has apologized for not communicating it well (and I accept that apology, boy, if it wasn't clear). It's irrelevant—when he's tied up, I'm the one taking action.

Let's pick a more obvious example. Suppose a sub has a thing for drinking piss and wants to be made to do so with a funnel gag. Legally, all that matters is his consent. Ethically—a higher standard—once that gag is locked in place, it's my responsibility if he then pukes while his mouth is obstructed. That's why I would likely test his ability to handle it first with several smaller sessions not involving a gag, watching to see if he had to throw up, seeing if eating recently or not recently made any difference, and so on. Once he's bound, I'm the only one who can take action, so what happens is my ethical responsibility. (The law cannot and should not cover such things. It can only prohibit actions, not judge whether people should have agreed to them or not. Think of contract law.)

I knew he didn't want his head shaved again after that incident. I did not know his bad reaction to it lasted longer than the 20 minutes after the event itself. Finding out was a kick in the nuts, because even if it was entirely his fault, it's still my responsibility.

I don't see how I can ever dominate him again without worrying that I've completely misunderstood his reactions, so our BDSM relationship is over. I won't risk not understanding what he's feeling. As angry as I am at him (largely over how all this came out, including some really shitty things he said to me), I will miss him terribly.

---

With the end of that relationship, I currently have no boys I expect to play here any time soon. I've been talking rather seriously with an even more local boy who seems very interested, but he's not sure about submission right now. After all this, I can't possibly play with him until he's 100% sure. Even then, I may not be ready. It's going to take me quite a while to figure out how much of what happened here was him not telling me everything, or not showing me his reactions—and how much was him trying to tell me and me just missing it. Was I not looking for it because he'd had it done 4 weeks earlier? Was I dismissing things he said as his earlier tricks to try to gain control of the relationship? Was there something for me to miss, or did I see everything that was there? And if I saw everything, could I have figured out what was going on within him? If not, can I still be comfortable playing with boys, taking actions while they're (consensually) tied up when unsure about the future?

It's been the better part of three years since I haven't owned a boy or been very close to doing so. This didn't lead to lots of sessions (the Puppy lives over 800 miles away; the recent boy has a very busy schedule) but it led to a different state of mind. At the moment, I'm not anticipating any partners for a semi-significant period of time, maybe even the rest of this year.

I'm not saying things won't come up. Situations can change, the world is a wondrous place. I'm saying that right now, my confidence is in tatters and I won't risk anyone's physical or emotional well-being without full confidence that I know what's really going on. (I used to believe all Doms were that way; I know that the good ones are, and I want to believe the good ones still outnumber the rest.)

But the Puppy's collar is off, the local boys have all moved on, and I'm not sure I'm ready for the one new one who might be on the horizon. 2011 is going to be a different year for me.

How to talk to people

OK, you'd think this wouldn't be difficult, but every time I go into anything but the largest chat rooms, there's total silence. This doesn't bother me, but it seems to bother other people, because they try to start conversation, and they fail, and they get mad and blame everyone else.

I covered the basicsa while back, but I see guys make the same few mistakes every time, so let's get them out in the open.

Things not to say if you want to start conversation

1. Hello.
   
   OK, you can say "hello," but don't stop there. My response to "hello" is, to no one's surprise, "Hello." This is followed by "how are you," but no one really cares how I am, so unless I deliberately respond with "oh, everything sucks," the topic dies right there. But chances are if I wanted to talk about my problems, I'd already be doing it.
   
   I mean, be friendly and everything, but "hello" is not some magic key that unlocks conversation in other people that they were dying to start.


2. Why isn't anyone talking?
   
   Because no one's said anything that they can respond to. I have nothing to say about why other people aren't talking, and neither does anyone else. Talk about something real and you'll have better luck.


3. Does/is anyone …
   
   I'm not everyone, so unless you ask a question I can answer affirmatively, I'm staying silent. "Does anyone know a good place to eat?" Well, my tastes are probably different from yours (and I have dietary restrictions), so no. "Does anyone know where all the fun is?" If I did, I probably wouldn't be chatting.
   
   Now, if you ask me where I would choose to eat, and why, I'll probably answer that because I can. This isn't to say I know everything, it's to say that if you want a question answered, ask someone, not anyone. Find someone who's talking, or who's just entered the room, and ask him. If others chime in, all the better.

It's basically all the same stuff as I said 18 months ago—talk about something and people will usually respond, if they're paying attention at all. Talk about nothing and you'll get nothing in return.

I have no boys collared

As his needs continue to change through his transition to womanhood, my puppy today decided to remove the collar I placed on him more than 27 months ago.

This was not unexpected given the journey he is taking. I didn't write that post until months after he'd told me, and I genuinely hoped he would never remove the collar. But I suspected he would. A relationship between two gay BDSM men can survive a lot, but I'm not sure that changing gender is among those, at least if both of them aren't bisexual.

In the words of a different Mary Chapin Carpenter song, we have grown "closer and closer apart" over the past year, and I could never, in good conscience, expect him to remain in a relationship that is not fulfilling to him. We remain extremely close friends, and as I said before, he will always be my puppy, even when he becomes a magnificent bitch.

I placed the collar on him in late July 2008; he had worn it himself for a couple of months before that, and wore a chain for a few months before that. In the 27-plus months since that day, the collar had never been off his neck, not for one moment, until today. His love for me could not have been more perfect, and I could not have asked for anything more.

I only wish that our paths had not diverged. Having him on my path has been the most emotionally fulfilling time of my life.

The next post has been cancelled

For a few weeks, I've been mentally working up to the next post, "So, there's another boy." (In addition to Puppy, whose transition was discussed last time, except I got something wrong: surgery is most definitely an option.)

However, it seems the new boy has decided not to stay.

I make him happy, and he has requested that I stop doing this because other people would not understand why he is happy. Or, conversely, that I be a different person so that other people would understand why he was with me.

As the second option is not up for discussion, I'm leaning very heavily in favor of granting the first part of his request.

Update: It's official, he's gone.

Update 2: Well, now he wants back. Long-time readers will understand exactly how reluctant I am to allow this, but I am considering it.