A personal view of Master/slave relationships

Introduction

The word "slave" is sometimes used quite loosely in BDSM to refer to any submissive, or even to the paying customer of a dominatrix: "Mistress Stryct seeks slaves" as the phonebox cards say.

However, "slave" and the phrase "Master / slave relationhip" is usually used in the narrower sense of a committed Dominance / submission relationship. Furthermore, there is often agreement that the slave has entered into a relationship in which obedience is not just given, but in which the Master acquires the authority to obtain obedience.

Master / slave relationships have a distinct subculture within BDSM, with their own customs, such as the collar, permanent markings, forms of address and other rituals. Often these were adapted from historical, aconsensual slavery, and many have subsequently been adopted by people following other styles of D/s relationship.

Master / slave relationships are probably over represented in BDSM fiction: "Story of O", the Gor, Marketplace and Sleeping Beauty series all focus on relationships of ownership, not just of power.

Everywhere ...

Slavery is everywhere, if you know where to look: it's in films, television, books and all over the web. One hundred and sixty six years after it was abolished in the British Empire, a sizeable number of people are still fascinated by it. The same people who arrive at a castle and immediately ask "So where is the dungeon?" can be seen peering at rusting ironwork in the London Dungeon and the Liverpool Maritime Museum, labelled "slave shackles."

Slavery is the most extreme form of power transfer: in its aconsensual, historical and immoral form it involves the total, legally enforced right to use or the abuse the slave. With all the attention that slavery still gets in modern culture, and given its extreme nature, it's not suprising that budding perves very often gravitate towards slavery as a model for D/s fantasies and aspirations. Even if they later discard the mechanics of Ownership, there are many Master / slave practices which have been carried over into the rest of D/s.

My own interest in the Master/slave relationship began in childhood. (I knew a girl who's favourite "Let's Pretend" game was masters and servants and it all followed from there ...) Once the subject had become "interesting" I became aware of all the material about slavery around me.

The first source I came across was Orientalism in its various forms: sultans, harems, genies and of course slaves all jostle for attention in everything from pantomines to Sinbad films. Have you ever noticed how much they dwell on imbalances of power, and not just that, on people who are clearly getting a lot of pleasure from them?

A few years later I found out that these modern examples of Orientalism - of very western visions of the East - were remnants of an even more intense 19th century obsession with the subject. If anything, they had had more freedom to portray subjects with D/s overtones than mainstream artists now. It was acceptable for highly respectable painters like Gerome to paint a slave market, complete with naked slave gazing up rather ambiguously into the eyes of her fully clothed prospective buyer.

Writers travelling to "the Orient" (which usually meant the Ottoman Empire or Egypt) wrote popular books describing what they saw (and sometimes what they imagined.) Some of these books read like pornography, with lurid descriptions of Oriental sexuality, including a disproportionate fascination with the institution of slavery. Very much of Orientalism was inaccurate, as a description of the East, but very informative since it reveals what Westeners wanted to see, and very often they wanted to see "slaves".

As well as "the Orient", other slave owning societies are still getting the attention of modern culture. American plantation slavery is usually portrayed in a negative light (and rightly so) with politically motivated works from "Roots" to "Amistad" aiming to set the record straight. Nevertheless, there is a whole subculture of plantation novels aimed at women, alternately featuring the Southern Belle throwing herself at the feet of a proud field hand, and Rhett Butler clones who "don't give a damn" about Scarlett because they spend their time chasing their black maids.

Because of the great distance in time, Roman slavery can be portrayed more openly in an ambivalent light in film. It's even possible to suggest that some slaves weren't unhappy with their lot, and (horrors!) may even have been attracted to their Master: there's a very clear example of this in Ben-Hur, where Charlton Heston's character hovers, indecisively, over freeing a slave girl who he's only just noticed is now a grown woman and seems quite amenable to staying, rather than being freed and married off.

Of course, none of this is part of the acknowleged "BDSM Scene" as such, but it all helps keep slavery "in the air" for those people who are attuned to pick up the signals, and it probably represents a large body of people who would be interested in knowing more about BDSM Master/slave relationships if they knew they existed.

Those Gor books!

There is one series of Master/slave books which stradle this divide between popular culture (in the form of pulp science fiction) and the BDSM scene. This is John Norman's notorious "Gor" series and I really must mention them because of the influence they had on me, and on a large number of other people interested in Maledom/femsub relationships. Set on the planet Gor, a preindustrial world with widespread and well developed slavery, the books have been a magnet for those interested in Master / slave relationships for thirty years (and like a magnet, sometimes they attract and sometimes they repel ...)

Twenty five Gor books were published between the late 1960's and 1980's, before they were banned from normal distribution by the book trade. Up until about 1991 they had very wide circulation, and I remember buying Gor books even in small town branches of W.H. Smith's (a business founded by stalwart Quakers who had participated in the campaign to abolish slavery, ironically enough.)

The Gor books get attacked from both sides: vanilla critics merely had to say "they're sadomasochistic fantasies" to get their politically correct friends into book-burning mode. Criticism from within the BDSM scene usually centres on the later books' repeated advocacy of the naturalness of Maledom / femsub and Master / slave relationships in particular (but as Pat Califia has suggested, finding sticks with which to beat heterosexual Maledoms and femsubs is a favourite sport among some sections of the wider BDSM scene, and yes, that was Pat Califia the leatherdyke icon speaking.)

It's true to say that the Gor books are flawed - if nothing else, the later ones contain page after page of verbose attacks on feminism, and excessive repetition is a flaw whatever you think of the material being repeated. Personally, I have developed more and more "problems" with them over time, and the casual way Norman tosses the word "rape" around has finally ruined them for me.

Worse still, they have become the focus for an online fantasy style of M/s which claims its superifical approach to slavery is a model for real world relationships.

Nevertheless, many of the ideas Norman presents are worth discussing; a few are even well worth adopting (he even advocates the keeping of a slave diary to improve communication between Master and slave.)

Collars and symbols

In particular, one of Norman's central themes is the slave collar, and the widespread distribution of his books has helped popularise it as a symbol in consensual Master / slave relationships outside the gay SM scene where it was originally "reused."

I say "reused" because the slave collar has a long and real history. There are surving examples of Roman slave collars for long term use, complete with inscriptions to aid in the recovery of runaways: "I am Asellus, a slave of Praeiectus an official of the prefect of the grain harvest. I have gone outdoors, beyond the walls. Hold me fast, because I have run away. Return me to the barber's shop near the Temple of Flora."

I feel that the collar has a unique place among restraints, both for these historical associations with slavery and for practical reasons: it's more difficult for a slave to cut a collar off than a wrist or ankle restraint, since they're worried about cutting their throat, it's harder to see, and they can't just scrape off some skin or flesh from the thumb or heel and squeeze it off if they're really desperate.

The neck is the best attachment "narrowing" for these reasons, and so a collar is more "charged" (including "erotically charged" if you're wired that way) since it's the hardest to remove.

It's not suprising that the collar, with all these powerful associations, has been adopted by many people not pursuing Master/slave relationships, both within the wider D/s scene, in BDSM in general and even in mainstream culture judging by pet shops sales of dog collars to teenagers looking for a striking, even shocking, image.

But what is a slave?

Within the BDSM scene, the word "slave" is sometimes used quite loosely to refer to any submissive, or even to the paying customer of a dominatrix. However, "slave" and the phrase "Master/slave relationhip" are usually used in the narrower sense of a committed Dominance/submission relationship. Furthermore, there is often agreement that the slave has entered into a relationship in which obedience is not just given, but in which the Master acquires the authority to demand obedience.

This was my first attempt at an all-inclusive definition of Master/slave in the context of the alt.lifestyle.master-slave newsgroup and its Frequently Asked Questions list:
"Master/slave: a consensual relationship in which authority has been transferred from the slave to the Master, and is retained constantly, with no more than limited and clearly stated exceptions."

Beyond this there is much disagreement about what "really" constitutes a Master/slave relationship: from the broad church approach that people can call any D/s relatioship Master/slave if that's the name they prefer, to the other extreme that insists it's only "real" slavery if the Master's authority extends to a life and death power over the slave.

Over time I've come to believe that it would be best to stick to common usage: ie to use dictionaries to define "slave" and this leads us to define slavery purely in terms of Ownership. After all, slavery is fundamentally a property relation. According to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, a slave is "One who is the property of, and entirely subject to another person, whether by capture, purchase or birth; a servant completely divested of freedom and personal rights."

The labels Total Power Exchange (TPE) and 24/7 should really be mentioned at this point.

Sometimes 24/7 is used as a shorthand for TPE, although really 24/7 refers to any relationship which has the same broad features all the time: for example, that the Dom is always the Dom, and not just for a few hours a week during scenes.

The label "Total Power Exchange" (or "Absolute Power Exchange") became widely publicised on the Internet due to lengthy battles in the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage (ASB), between Jon Jacobs and Polly Peachum (who prefer to call it Absolute Power Exchange), and other newsgroup regulars. The debate became polarised between people running their whole relationship as Master / slave, and between people who's interest was in sensation play, S&M, bondage etc for their own sake. Both sides accused each other of trying to invalidate perfectly reasonable life choices, and the mob-like tendencies of the ASB regulars (which we can still in its successor soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm) and Jacobs abrasive style combined to associate TPE and M/s with dogmaticism and flamewars in many people's mind.

The debate about whether an absolute or total exchange of power is possible in real life, and whether a slave can lose all rights with respect to their Master, both from a moral point of view (as outsiders watching), and from a psychological point of view, still goes on, on mailing lists, websites and other newsgroups. There are many people who claim that this is the reality of their lives, and my personal view is that if the slave has grown to fully accept the authority of her Master over time, then his power becomes total, and in this condition, it can certainly be said that she is owned, and therefore literally a slave.

Further information

There are a huge number of websites with Master or slave in the title, but almost all of them are pay sites of the "teen babes in bondage" variety, with no real Master/slave content at all.

However, some of the more realistic descriptions are list in the Open Directory Project's Consensual Slavery section

My own views on what is usually called "slave training" are set out in the Internal Enslavement pages.