communication

11 Ideas for D/s Writing Assignments

Kate Sloan

I’m a writer, an overachiever, and a submissive, so of course I love when my dominant gives me writing assignments. They feel like a task at which I can tangibly succeed – plus, unlike with many other types of scenes, I’ll have the evidence forever if I want to look back at it. Writing tasks have become a major (and majorly satisfying) part of my dynamic with my partner.

That said, we weren’t always as amazing as we are now at coming up with these assignments – so I’ve put together this list you can refer to if you’re similarly strapped for ideas. How many of these have you tried?

Describe a fantasy

This can be one of the most deeply embarrassing things to have to write as a submissive (depending on what type of person you are), so of course, it’s a favorite with dominants! It’s one of the sexiest and most tangible ways for a dominant to gather information about what a submissive wants, making it a highly useful tool in a D/s dynamic. The sub can make lists of their fantasies, write one out as a short erotica story, or use any other framing the dominant desires. This is a great way to unearth some unexplored desires or just expound on some desires you already know you have.

Recap a past encounter

IMO, it’s always fun to hear about sex you’ve had from the other person’s perspective. You get to find out which parts they particularly liked, what turned them on, what they want more of. The sub could write out the events of a past scene, erotica-style, or they could list some favorite past scenes and explain why they enjoyed them so much. You could even do this assignment as a collaborative task, with each of you filling in details of the session as you remember them.

Keep a journal

Some dominants require that their subs keep some kind of diary for them. This could be all-sexy-all-the-time, like a daily log of masturbation or fantasies, but it could also be geared toward making positive changes in the sub’s day-to-day life: they could be required to log their food or exercise if that’s an issue for them (tread carefully!!), keep tabs on the ups and downs of their moods and the factors that influenced them, or make a note every time they do something nice for themselves. Becoming more aware of your patterns is the first step in changing them, and a D/s writing assignment can be a lovely way to achieve that.

Summarize a book

I don’t know about you, but the books I was required to write about when I was in school are the ones that have stuck with me the most. It’s a good way to make information stick in your head. A dominant could assign their submissive a book about kink, sex, relationships, or anything else they want to learn more about, and the submissive could write up a classic essay-style book report, a bullet-point list of things they learned, or any other type of book review the two agree on. (Shout-out to Sinclair and rife for initially introducing me to this idea!)

Keep a to-do list

My partner and I have done this for nearly a year now (wow!) and it’s served us very well. My daily to-do list is kept in a note which I’ve shared with them via the Apple Notes app, which syncs across all our various devices. Particularly in a long-distance relationship, it’s a lovely way to maintain a feeling of connection to each other and involvement in each other’s everyday lives. My dominant can keep tabs on me, see how I’m doing with my tasks, and reward or motivate me accordingly.

Craft an instruction manual

Remember the time my partner made me write directions for giving me multiple orgasms as though I were a literal toy? That was one of the first tasks they assigned me, and it’s still one of my favorites. Especially early in a relationship, the sub might know their body and mind better than their dom does, and requiring them to write an instruction manual is one way to ascertain that information from them without breaking role. They could provide directions for physical skills, like how to give them a nipple orgasm or how to spank them properly, or for more mental/emotional skills, like how to comfort them when they’re depressed or how to best help them relax when life gets stressful.

Research a skill

There may be times in a D/s dynamic when either the submissive or the dominant wants to learn or improve upon a skill, in order to better serve/please their partner. These could be kinky skills, like flogging or bootblacking, or they could be “vanilla” skills, like cooking or cleaning. Either way, it’s fun to have the submissive research the skill and write up their key findings, perhaps including a list of links to more detailed information. (KinkAcademy remains the best place to learn a new BDSM skill, BTW!)

Write lines

While traditionally understood as a punishment, making a submissive write out the same sentence over and over can also be a process of edification and improvement if you approach it that way. For example, if your submissive is chronically self-critical, you could make her write “I am a good, kind, talented, and useful girl” 50 times. That said, it can also be a punishment, as I learned the time I forgot to wear my collar when specifically instructed to and had to write lines and mail the page to my partner as proof. Ooh, how mean!

Help the dominant

My dominant has sometimes required me to put together a report specifically designed to assist them with something – like the time I made some recommendations for androgynous clothing items when they were midway through coming out as non-binary, or the time they asked me to recommend some fragrances I thought they’d like. This is a fun way for a dominant to feel served and catered to, while making their submissive feel useful and needed.

Write a love letter

Love letters are romantic and bonding, and they also help create a tangible record of your romance. I think more people (including vanilla people!) should write love letters, because it’s good for your relationship – and in D/s, you can make this mandatory!

Collaborate creatively

Some of my most satisfying moments with my partner have happened while we’ve been collaborating on something: a song, a podcast, a book. You could do this in-person on paper, or online via the multitude of cloud-based writing tools available, like Google Docs or Evernote. Try retelling the story of your first date together or writing a collaborative poem about your relationship, for example.

 

What are your favorite writing-based tasks you’ve assigned or been assigned in a D/s dynamic?

Protocol Diaries: Love Letters

Kate Sloan

“Dear Matt: It’s hard to know what to write to you in a love letter because we are already so forthcoming about our feelings. A letter of this genre should be juicy, revealing, exciting, and you already know the juiciest thing I could tell you, which is that I’m extremely, embarrassingly, unchill-ly in love with you and have been for a while.” -April 1st 2018

When Matt came to visit me in Toronto for the first time, 3 months into our sparkly new long-distance relationship, he brought me a present: a little blue Moleskine notebook and matching pen. Tools for my favorite vocation, in my favorite color. I glowed from the romance of it.

Once we’d spent a lovely weekend together and he’d flown back to New York, I began pondering what to do with this adorable notebook. In discussing this via text, one of us mentioned something about love letters, and the other said, “I was thinking that too!” And so began one of our many romantic traditions.

“I love you, Kate Sloan. Come fly with me. Be my co-pilot as we chart new adventures together. The plane I’m in is about to land, but six months in, I still feel like our journey together is just beginning. Yours with love, Matt.” -June 22nd 2018

We each hand off the notebook to the other every time we see each other in person. We jettison it back and forth between Toronto and New York (and, on unique occasions, Boston, Alexandria, and Montreal). Each time we say goodbye, the person who now possesses the notebook writes a love letter for the other. Then, when we’re together again, Matt reads the new letter aloud to me, whether he wrote it or I did. Typically, there is cuddling and crying. And then we go out for dinner.

“Dear Matt: You know this already, but let me reiterate how happy it makes me that you are coming out as my partner this week. It makes me feel so loved, I feel like my heart is going to overflow and explode. It makes me feel like I’m really a part of your life, and like you want me to be.” -October 19th 2018

I dutifully copy each of Matt’s letters into my own notebook, so I’ll have them to review even when our tome of love letters is in a different country from me. They remind me, at difficult times, that I am loved and appreciated. I am a verbally-minded person who absorbs information best when it comes in the form of articulate words, and so these letters are one of my best tools for combating the “Does he really love me?” shadows that come creeping in. Of course he does. It’s right there in black and white. (Or blue and cream, as the case may be.)

“Don’t be afraid that you or your feelings are too much for me. Their muchness has helped me get in touch with my own in a more authentic way than I have in a while. Your transparency and empathy as a partner are striking and rare. I treasure you, your tears, and the sense of relief that comes when we’ve said our deepest truths to one another.” -November 9th 2018

The practice of writing love letters – a new one every other month or so – is an exercise in mindfulness and being present. I have to dig deep in my heart and ask myself honestly: What do I love about this person, and how can I express it to him well enough that he will deeply, truly understand?

It’s so easy, in long-term relationships, to stop complimenting each other on the qualities and behaviors you love, because you’ve loved them for so long that it seems unnecessary to point them out further. But, as Matt once told me, some things bear repeating in relationships. “I love you” is one of those things. I want to say it as much as I can, in as many ways as possible.

“You’re serious about me, and I’m serious about you too. I want to be with you for more years, more laughs, more trips, more late-night phone calls, more milestones, more orgasms, more kisses, more everything I can experience with you. I want to work hard to make this last and to make it good. That’s what I mean when I say I’m serious about you, Sir.” -December 11th 2018

I also appreciate our little notebook as a record of our budding romance – the way it has bloomed, deepened, and aged. For all my past relationships, I only have my own journal entries to refer to if I want to remind myself how each romance felt. For this one, I have direct windows into the people we each were when we were newly in love. Our limerence leaps off the page, and re-reading our letters always reinvigorates me, like: Oh yeah. I can feel like that. That’s amazing.

“Even at times when you feel sick, anxious, depressed, or exhausted, I want you to know that I’m happy I’m with you. I love taking care of you, holding you, figuring out ways to help you smile, relax, and feel safe again. I’m here for you through all of that, little one, and I want to be. I’m not going anywhere.” -December 28th 2018

We’re about halfway through the notebook now, more than a year into this tradition. I hope we keep it up until the book is filled, and beyond. I hope we can remember, even on days when our connection may be strained or the distance may be hard, that the most basic and important thing you can do in a romantic relationship is to love your partner and to make sure they know that you do.

No matter how many different ways I say it, no matter how many letters I write, no matter how much time passes or how many miles we are apart, one thing remains true: I love Matt and I want him to know it.

5 Underrated Measures of Compatibility

Kate Sloan

I’m not sure I really know anything about compatibility. I’ve only been in 2-3 relationships I would consider “long-term” in all my 27 years, so I’m maybe not the best person to advise you on what works. But I do know a lot about what doesn’t work, having lived through my fair share of disastrous relationships destined to fail. (Bleak? Yes. True? Also yes.)

You hear a lot in sex/dating media about well-known measures of compatibility: sharing similar interests, for example, or being able to make each other laugh. But here I present to you, for your consideration, 5 measures of compatibility that I think are under-discussed, rarely understood, and deceptively important…

Sexual desire style. Disregard this point if sex isn’t part of your relationship, but if it is: have you heard of responsive desire? Brought into popular consciousness through Emily Nagoski’s excellent book Come As You Are, responsive desire is a way of wanting sex that differs from our culture’s usual “lightning bolt to the genitals” understanding of how the sex drive works. “Instead of emerging in anticipation of sexual pleasure, like spontaneous desire,” Nagoski explains, “responsive desire emerges in response to sexual pleasure.” In other words, instead of wanting sex and then going to get it, folks whose desire is responsive often need to encounter sexual stimuli (dirty talk, porn, erotica, sexual touching, etc.) before they become aroused and start wanting sex.

Learning about this was revelatory for me, and many other folks who may have felt broken for seldom craving sex out of the blue. But here’s where compatibility comes in: I prefer to date and fuck folks whose desire style is closer to the “spontaneous” end of the spectrum, because when I date another responsive-desire person, sexual initiation can feel like the dreaded “Where should we go for dinner?” conversation: “Where do you want to go?” “Well, where do you want to go?” A person whose desire is spontaneous, to continue the metaphor, is likelier to say, “Here’s where I want to go. What say you?”

This is not to say you can’t date another responsive-desire person if that’s how you operate; it may just mean you both have to take a more proactive approach to purposely arousing each other (and yourselves) rather than waiting for someone else to bestow arousal upon you.

Decisiveness vs. indecision. Speaking of the “Where should we go for dinner?” conversation… I am a chronically indecisive person in many areas of life, partly owing to just lacking confidence in my own choices and tastes. It’s no secret that I’m submissive, so I like to be bossed around in bed, but I also find it affirming to be (consensually) bossed around by certain people outside of the bedroom. Weirdly, it’s a way they can show me they care.

My boyfriend, for example, is the type of person who loves making plans and being in charge of things. When he does a good job of this, he feels accomplished and proud. So he’s a good match for someone like me. When he plans a date night for us – makes reservations, gets us there on time, helps me choose what to order – I feel deeply loved and taken care of, while he enjoys the satisfaction of knowing he took care of me in that way.

Compatibility is about more than what you can do for each other; it’s also about what you enjoy doing for each other. If I was dating someone who was willing to make these types of plans but found it tiresome, each outing of this type would just drive us further apart and foster resentment – but because my partner enjoys making the exact kinds of decisions I don’t enjoy making, this interaction just brings us closer every time it happens.

Communication preferences. You’ve probably heard of the love languages. It’s an oversimplification of human psychology, perhaps, but it’s also a useful framework for understanding how to communicate with your partner.

I’ve dated people before whose love language was quality time, or acts of service, or gifts – and while all of those things are lovely, my most significant love languages are words and touch, so if I’m not getting those things in abundance, I don’t feel fully loved. It is possible to adjust your communication style to better suit a partner who differs from you in this way, but not everyone is willing or able to put in the psychological and logistical work required to make that shift.

Along similar lines, I’ve dated people before who didn’t like to text a lot when we were apart, or who answered my carefully-crafted messages with monosyllabic apathy, and that doesn’t work for me either. Communication is a huge part of what allows relationships to function smoothly and healthily, so if you and your partner have incompatible communication styles or preferences, it could become a major sticking point if it hasn’t already.

Coping strategies. What do you do when you’re stressed, sick, or depressed? How do you communicate at those times? What do you tend to want, need, and crave at those times – and what do you absolutely not want? Would your ideal partner give you support, or space? Would they bring you soup and sympathy, or would they back off and let you do your thing in peace?

While it’s useful to ponder these questions before they become relevant in a new relationship, often you won’t know quite how your stressful periods interact with your partners’ until you actually live through one together. It can be helpful to specifically ask for what you want – “Can you come over and cuddle me in silence for a while?” or “Sorry, I just need a few days to sort this out, but can we get dinner on Friday?” – but, depending on your partner’s own stress levels at that time, they may or may not be willing or able to give you what you’re asking for.

I learned this lesson the hard way when I had a boyfriend who suffered from intermittent depression, like me, but who needed altogether different things than I did when he was depressed. At those times, he craved emotional distance, lots of time alone to work through his feelings in private. He didn’t want kisses, or cuddles, or sex. But when I’m depressed, I usually want to be with the person/people I love, and get as close as possible, through both physically and non-physically intimate activities. Obviously, when we were both going through a tough time, we found each other pretty frustrating! Complementary needs in this regard are something I look out for now when assessing my potential compatibility with someone, because they can really make or break a relationship.

Relaxation activities. They say you don’t truly know whether you’re compatible with a partner until the two of you travel together. I think this is a good piece of wisdom, not only because travel can be stressful (see above) but also because vacationing together lets you see how your partner prefers to relax – which may be altogether different from how you prefer to do those things.

If you like to unwind by reading a book on the beach, but your partner wants to do the entire museum circuit, you may not be the best match – unless you’re able to happily go your separate ways and reconvene later on. This principle also applies to relaxation in your day-to-day, not just on vacation. If you need quiet time to recharge after a long day, but your partner needs to verbally unpack everything that happened to them and/or dance the day’s stress out at a club, you may not be the best fit – unless you can find ways to each get what you need, separately or together, without stepping on each other’s toes too much.

I often fondly reminisce on a Montreal trip I took with an adventurous, excitable friend. I expected her to drag me to historic sites and famous bagel shops – and she did, some of the time – but one afternoon, I told her I needed to recharge my introvert batteries and she suggested we go to a café with our books and journals and just sit in silence for a few hours, sipping coffee and chilling out. It was one of the most blissful experiences I’ve ever had on a vacation, and all because we were able to find common ground in how we chose to relax.

Which measures of compatibility do you consider important in a partner or friend?

5 Questions to Ask Your New Kink Partner

Kate Sloan

A vanilla friend once asked me, when I gushed about how well my new dommy beau’s kinks fit with mine, “Isn’t that the point of identifying as dominant or submissive? So you can easily find someone who’s compatible with you?”

Ha. Easily? That’s a laugh. While I am indeed a submissive – and a damn good one, if I may say so – that doesn’t mean I automatically jive with every dominant who crosses my path. Even setting aside more basic factors like attraction and harmonious personalities, we might not work well together kinks-wise because there are so many different ways to be dominant or to be submissive. If I want to be nurtured but you want to degrade me until I cry, maybe we’re not gonna work out. If you get off on heavy sadism and my pain tolerance is only so-so, we might have to part ways. If the names and words that light your fire are ones that squick me out, maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.

While there’s no foolproof and thorough way (in my view) to assess compatibility quickly, there are certainly ways you can help speed it along. With that in mind, here are 5 questions you can ask your new beau (and answer yourself, too) to figure out whether your approaches to kink could work well together – for an evening, a fling, or maybe even for the long haul.

1. What kinds of feelings do you like getting from kink?

When you’re in the midst of a kink scene, do you like feeling adored, appreciated, accomplished? Or do you prefer to feel overwhelmed, overpowered, and owned? How about degraded, dejected, or dismissed? (More great feelings words on Bex’s Yes/No/Maybe list.)

Knowing this about a potential (or current) kink partner can help shape your scenes. I’ll take a very different approach when submitting to a dom who appreciates quiet obedience, for example, versus a dom who likes a little bratty resistance. Likewise, if a dom thinks I want to feel used and put down, they’re not going to be able to give me the type of scene I actually tend to want, which involves me being cherished and coddled. Figure out your desired feelings first, and then you can start to figure out everything else.

2. What does it look like when you’re enjoying yourself? What about when you’re not?

As a sub, I giggle when I’m enjoying myself – but I know other subs whose mid-scene giggles might mean they’re uncomfortable and don’t know how to say so. I know people whose stony silence might mean they hate what’s happening, and people who only go silent when things are feeling really good. I know people who kick and scream when they’re taken past their pain limits, and people for whom that’s just a sign that the scene is going swimmingly. It’s important to know how your particular play partner responds to both good and bad stimuli, so you know when to slow your roll and when to hit the accelerator. Of course, you shouldn’t rely only on these cues – it’s still important to have (and heed) a safeword, and perhaps a green/yellow/red check-in system or something similar – but they’re crucial to know, nonetheless.

That doesn’t only hold true for subs and bottoms, either. Doms and tops also have “tells” for when they’re enjoying a scene and when they’re decidedly not. A bonus of articulating these signs to a partner is that you get clearer on them yourself. I never used to notice, for example, that my ankles would cross together protectively when I was nearing a pain limit, until a partner asked me to list and explain some of my nonverbal signals. Being more aware of your own body and responses is always useful!

3. Has anyone ever safeworded with you before? What happened?

This is one of my favorite screening questions for new doms, because it shows me quickly how they handle consent in scenes and to what extent they respect their partners. A bad or dangerous dom will tend to get defensive when asked this question – “Of course no one has ever needed to safeword with me!” – while a good dom who’s been around the block will likely have at least a few stories to share. (I’m sure you could learn a lot about a sub by asking them this question, too.)

Pay attention to how they talk about the person who safeworded (affectionately? dismissively?) and what they claim to have done after the safeword was said (hopefully they tried to give the person what they needed, instead of reprimanding them or abandoning them). Notice, too, what their general attitude on safewording seems to be. If they view it as a wimpy cop-out that should best be avoided, rather than a vital communication tool in any encounter, maybe you should steer clear.

4. What are some edges you’re interested in pushing?

These malleable edges are also known as “soft limits”: things you aren’t interested in doing, with most people or in most circumstances, but that you might be open to if the right situation and partner came along for that particular thing.

For example, I don’t want to feel like some douchey bro’s blowjob machine, but with a compassionate dom who I trusted and loved to please, having my mouth used in an objectifying or degrading way could be fun. Maybe your partner’s been curious about knife play for ages but has never had a chance to try it out. Maybe they’re a dom who’s curious about subbing, or vice-versa. Whatever it is, you don’t have to push that edge immediately or at all, but it’s good to at least know about it, so you can perhaps start to work toward it together.

5. What kind(s) of aftercare do you need?

If someone is new to kink – or hasn’t done it in a while – they may not know the answer to this. But they probably have at least some idea. Common elements of aftercare are cuddles, compliments, and snacks – but of course, these don’t work for everyone.

I get nervous doing scenes with new partners who I haven’t discussed aftercare with yet. While most kinksters seem to know intuitively that aftercare is important, it’s hard for me to relax and have fun if I don’t know that I’ll be properly taken care of when I’m too subspacey to articulately advocate for myself. So it’s best to have this conversation before it becomes relevant, so both of you know you’ll be able to get what you need.

What questions do you like to ask new kink partners before playing?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all words and opinions are my own.

Love and Lust: The Universal Language?

Kate Sloan
At the top of the Palatino in Rome.

Where did the fantasy first arise in my life of having sex with someone who doesn’t speak English and whose language I do not speak? Was it the Love Actually subplot where a British befuddled Colin Firth has an awkward-yet-romantic dalliance with his Portuguese housekeeper Aurélia? Was it the lesbian erotica story I read in some anthology whose name has been lost to time, where an English-speaking tourist meets and seduces an exclusively Spanish-speaking woman at a nightclub while on vacation? Did I see it in porn somewhere and internalize it? How did this become one of my formative ideas of the magical heights of romance?

Though the lingual disconnect is played for laughs in Love Actually and spun into lusty wonder in the erotica story, it obviously poses many real-life logistical issues that could prove unsurmountable. These romanticizing tales want us to believe love (or lust) is the ultimate human “language,” that it can overcome cultural barriers and connect us even in the face of communication obstacles. This narrative erases and harms asexual and aromantic people, and it isn’t even accurate. Humans developed language for a reason: we need it. Sex and romance are nebulous enough already, even when you do speak the same language, because often these feelings are difficult to put into words, even for yourself. Being reduced to gestures and facial expressions when trying to explain your feelings to someone seems like hell, especially for someone like me who thrives on words of affirmation.

Not to mention: in our recent (and less recent) cultural conversations about consent, it’s become clear that verbal consent is the gold standard for ensuring a sexual encounter is on the up-and-up. There are certainly ways to acquire and give consent non-verbally, and arguably most consent is given and gotten in this way, but I think it only works because it’s usually combined with some verbal element. Sure, you can read someone’s body terrifically, but at some point you’re probably gonna ask, “Is this okay?” or “You like that?” or “You want more?” and it’s hard for me to imagine navigating sex safely and responsibly without the ability to even do that.

That said, I’d be lying if I claimed this fantasy never crosses my mind anymore. Like many fantasies, it’s unfettered by logistical considerations when I ponder it in private moments. I can imagine that me and this other person can read each other’s bodies perfectly, almost like we’re reading each other’s minds, without needing a common language to know each other’s most intimate wishes. Afflicted by anxiety, my brain often floods with worrying words during sex – the very activity that’s said to steal your words away and quiet your mind – so it’s, in some ways, a comfort to consider sex wholly without words. Who would I be, and what would I feel, if I could quiet my mind and focus only on my body and someone else’s?

I think another movie, Before Sunrise, fanned the flames of this fantasy for me. In it, two travelers – who are from different continents but both speak English – have a chance meeting on a train zooming through Europe and embark on an impulsive all-night adventure in Vienna. I’ve longed to go to Vienna since seeing this film; the landscapes and locations strike me as achingly romantic. And because I’m a perv, I imagine that if I met an attractive German-speaking local there, we’d somehow flirt non-verbally, kiss under an Austrian sunset, and wander into a sex shop or Fleshlight store together to look at the “mini vibratoren” that we would then use in a majestically-lit hotel room later on.

Verbal communication is pretty much the only type I’m good at – and sometimes not even that – but somehow, in my fantasy, I get by just fine without it. And there’s a lot of kissing and orgasms and maybe some giggling atop a giant Ferris wheel.

Do you have any fantasies that you know wouldn’t work in reality?

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.