“I want to watch you make my wife your slave!”

Well, sure, I thought. An ad in iambic pentameter, no less. I’ll be right over.

Personals can be fascinating. After scanning them for a while, a reasonably knowledgeable reader develops a keenly-honed sense of whether an ad was posted by a clueless wannabe, pathetically exercising fantasy dreams behind the anonymity of a keyboard, or a sincere, often lonely, occasionally desperate individual. Some personals are transparent frauds, like those put up by men masquerading as women in an attempt to attract wank-off email; others don’t ring quite true in a more subtle fashion. This isn’t cynicism; it’s discernment.

Nevertheless, I’m always looking for people who share, or think they might like to share, my particular kink. Sometimes I find people with compatible interests who just want to correspond, and that’s fine. A much smaller number are willing to at least consider the possibility of a real-time meeting. It’s a much more complex winnowing process than merely finding a needle in a haystack, which is the metaphoric equivalent of an initial cyber-contact; that’s often the easy part. The hard part is matching up well with another person’s likes and dislikes, tastes and preferences, levels and limits, yin and yang.

In the kinky world of erotic power exchange, slavery is not, repeat not, what vanilla people conjure up as a vision of the ante bellum South. For those who enjoy erotic dominance and submission in an adult, responsible way, slavery is a voluntary condition, often limited in time and space, within the carefully bounded realm of fantasy-brought-to-life.

Beyond its provocative headline, this personal’s content conveyed statistics but no substantive insights. It read more like a swinger ad than anything else, listing ages (early forties), heights, weights, and hair and eye colors. There was no hard information regarding what the poster really had in mind, but as one of my favorite fairy-tale characters might have said, “Before you meet the handsome prince you’ve got to kiss a lot of toads.” After mulling it over for a couple of days I decided I was willing to invest some time in trying to find out who and what was lurking behind this intriguing ad.

I wrote an honest response and sent it off to the poster, who called himself Sam. While I’m cautious enough to not give my last name when writing to a total stranger, I always, to the extent that I reveal myself, tell the truth. My ultimate goal is to eventually meet compatible kindred spirits in the flesh, so to speak, so there’s no point in wasting time, mine or anyone else’s, by hiding behind an electronic facade. I told him my age, some other physical parameters, and a bit about my scene experience, which was pretty extensive for a guy in his late thirties, and I made it clear that I was happy in my long-term relationship and was corresponding with my submissive’s knowledge.

In the days when personal ads appeared in magazines and snail-mail was the only way to communicate the pace was much slower. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet I got a reply to my message after just a few hours, and Sam’s response was a mixed bag of good and not-so-good news. My age was no problem, he said. They had, he admitted, some limited swinging experience, and this was a yellow flag to me. To a swinger, the phrase head game means a blow-job contest, and sex is the cake, the reason for people getting together. Dominance and submission is a head game of a different sort, and the play is psychological at least as much as physical; it’s a game in which the mind, the most powerful sex organ, is the most significant factor. For most of the D/s people I knew, sex was the frosting on the cake, not the cake itself, and quite often sex, depending on one’s definition of it, wasn’t even part of the game.

But, Sam’s message continued, they wanted to explore his wife’s submissiveness and didn’t know how to go about it. They’d experimented a couple of times with spanking, and she’d liked being on the receiving end. What he said he wanted was to watch another man take control of his wife and have her serve that man sexually.

Well, that’s what he wants, I mused. I wonder what she wants? Men often confuse sexual willingness with submissiveness, especially when it’s a willingness to take on sexual partners outside of a committed relationship, and a few mild swats on the ass are a lot different from serious BDSM play. Her purported willingness to spread her legs might be nothing more than a desire for variety or an indication that he wasn’t paying her enough of the right kind of attention. I also got the distinct impression, both from what he wrote and the way he phrased it, that he was more interested in indulging his own voyeuristic streak than in learning anything about the dynamics of erotic power exchange.