If It Ain’t Fixed, Break It – To Train or Not to Train?

The temperature in a room usually drops a couple of degrees when training is mentioned. It can leave many people who identify as M/s or D/s mystified. Common reactions include “BDSM is between adults, why would any intelligent person require training?” and “the only thing he ever needed to teach me was how he takes…

Is It Time To Kill the Facebook Profile for Your Kink Persona?

It’s the norm in the kink community to maintain an identity specifically for “the scene”. That’s usually a scene name, used on social media and at events, and perhaps a separate email account. For many of us, Fetlife is the only source of “kinky social media” that we need, but quite a lot of people…

The Cuckold is Not Worthy of Your Glorious Being

Discussions on cuckolding tend to get complex very quickly, so let me start this with a couple of definitions from the BDSM Glossary Group on Fetlife: cuckold: A man with an “unfaithful” long term partner (i.e. a husband and wife where the wife has sex with other people). There are many variations on cuckolding, but…

Informed Consent

If we were writing some kind of guide to the principles or philosophy of BDSM then “informed consent” would probably be our opening chapter. Nearly everything else we talk about, when you distill it, is based on informed consent. It’s the dividing line between BDSM and abuse, it’s the basis of SSC and it’s the…

The Four Stages to Exploring Your Fantasy

No-one wakes up one morning and says “check it out, I’m into kink now”. We come to all things through a process. A desire takes root, and we prod at it and probe it to see whether it will stick or is just a passing fancy, and how important it is to us. Most of…

Illustrated Guide – Measuring for a Chastity Cage

This illustration is by Pup Capri, who keeps a great chastity blog on Tumblr. Getting the right fit for your chastity cage will make or break the experience. A common mistake is to buy a chastity cage that is too large. Probably the most crucial point for comfort is the base ring, and I would…

You’re An Alpha Sub? What Do You Mean By That?

If you ask someone to identify themselves by role, there are all kinds of hybrid combinations you might hear in reply. One that’s sure to cause confusion is the Alpha sub, because there are several different ways to use the term, and at least one is contentious in the community. SOCIAL HIERARCHY The term “Alpha…

Calling Yourself an Alpha Dom Just Makes You Look Bad

You might think you are the most Domly Dom to ever have Dommed, but here’s a news flash: you’re not. Sorry, but with so many “Alphas” inhabiting the kink scene, not everyone can sit at the top of the BDSM food chain. There are certainly a few valid ways to use the term “Alpha”. It’s…

Illustrated Guide – Non-Monogamy

From casual sex and swinging to open relationships to polyamory to D/s play… there are a lot of ways to do non-monogamy. And then there are the “don’t ask, don’t tells”, the 100 mile rule, cucks and hot-wives, and many other variants. Franklin Veaux created a map of non-monogamy in 2010 that pops up in…