High protocol

What is high protocol?

High protocol is a distinctly formal code of conduct within a D/s relationship, with fixed forms of address, prescribed postures and rituals that aren’t reinvented each time. High protocol usually applies only during agreed windows, and everyone knows beforehand which behavior is expected. Its loose counterpart is low protocol.

What high protocol looks like in practice

High protocol starts and ends at an agreed moment, and in between the behavior is fixed.

A common picture of an evening at home. From the moment the door closes she addresses him as “sir” and doesn’t take the floor first. She waits to sit until it’s said. She fills his glass before she touches her own. At the table the talk is about work as always, because a protocol doesn’t govern the conversation but the form around it. At eleven he says one agreed sentence, and then they’re two people on the couch again.

That the parts are so ordinary is no accident. Dancer, Kleinplatz and Moser surveyed a hundred and forty-six people who called themselves slaves in 2006: owners and slaves use precisely everyday situations to mark and keep up their roles. The household, the money, the morning and evening routine. Not the whip, then, but the dishes.

Where high protocol comes from

From a story about the early leather scene that’s probably only half true.

The encyclopedia entry on leather culture describes how the period from 1945 to the mid-1960s, the “Old Guard”, has been romanticized so heavily that some call it the origin myth of the leather scene. In that picture a closed community of men, often in the shape of motorcycle clubs, developed a uniform hierarchical set of BDSM practices with high protocol on a military model, with initiation, brotherhood, discipline and a drive for excellence.

Except: Gayle Rubin, Jack Rinella and Joseph Bean have pointed out that loose and strict, informal and formal existed side by side within that subculture from the start. The “Old Guard versus New Guard” opposition was drawn up after the fact. And when John Weal presented a single protocol in 2010 with The Leatherman’s Protocol Handbook that all traditional leathermen supposedly followed, the book drew criticism that it’s historically wrong and borrows postures from heterosexual Gorean.

What high protocol delivers

It takes the improvisation out, and that turns out to do something psychologically.

Protocol in BDSM has never been measured; rituals outside BDSM have. Hobson, Schroeder, Risen, Xygalatas and Inzlicht summarized that field in 2018: a ritual is a prescribed sequence marked by rigidity, formality and repetition, embedded in meaning, with elements that serve no direct practical purpose. It regulates emotion, performance and social bonding. In the experiment by Brooks and colleagues that they cite, people were assigned a ritual just before a nerve-racking task. They had a lower heart rate, reported less anxiety and performed better.

That leap to a protocol evening is mine. But it does explain what people report themselves.

• Whoever holds the submissive role no longer has to choose anything: the form carries the evening.
• Whoever leads doesn’t have to improvise, and knows every gesture gets noticed.
• For a couple a visible line appears between “we’re doing this” and “we’re not doing this right now”.

Casey and Sagarin name exhaustion as one of the five costs of an authority-transfer relationship. Staying strictly in a role takes energy, on the leading side too, where decision fatigue is waiting.

How people do high protocol

In three forms, and the difference is mostly in how long it stays on.

1. Event protocol. Only during a party or an evening in a club, from arrival to departure. This is the form most people see first.
2. Evening protocol. At home, between an agreed start and end, like in the example above.
3. Continuous protocol, within a 24/7 relationship. Rare, and the only type where the protocol also holds on a Tuesday morning.

What’s set beforehand is almost always the same list: the form of address, the postures, who speaks when, what happens after a mistake, and the signal that ends the protocol. Casey and Sagarin describe how such agreements in authority-transfer relationships often end up in writing, sometimes as a short statement of intent and sometimes as a worked-out document.

What high protocol is not

“High protocol means you can’t say no to anything anymore.” The research doesn’t bear that out. Dancer and colleagues put it plainly: contrary to the image of total submission, slaves used their free will when it was in their own interest. No matter how formal the form is, it doesn’t replace the boundary.

“High protocol is the old, real way of doing things.” Also no. The formal school and the loose school existed side by side from the start, and the handbook that laid down the “traditional” protocol in 2010 has been criticized precisely because it’s historically wrong.

“High protocol is a heavier kind of play.” No, because it isn’t play. A protocol evening can run fully clothed and without a single blow. What’s heavier about it is the attention. You watch yourself all evening, and for many people that’s more tiring than an hour of discipline.

What I see of it myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, more than twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. I’m glad to agree rules for behavior, exactly as many as someone wants, and being addressed as “sir” is something I honestly enjoy. “Master” not so much; it sounds too hard to me.

Women who ask for protocol almost always come up with too many rules at once. Seven agreements on the first evening, and by number three the attention is already gone.

The second thing: the hardest moment isn’t the kneeling, but the standing up. Going back to ordinary talk feels more awkward on a first time than the whole formal evening before it. That’s why I agree the ending just as precisely as the beginning.

What to watch for

• Agree both a start and an end, and a sentence or gesture that ends the protocol, separate from the safeword for a scene.
• Start with three rules, not thirty. You won’t remember more anyway, and a rule you forget undermines the rest.
• Before the first evening, set what happens after a mistake, because inventing something on the spot turns a slip of the tongue into a punishment no one signed up for.
• Pick a form of address you can both say without laughing, and feel free to try two.
• Put a review moment in the calendar. Casey and Sagarin suspect an unrevised agreement calcifies, and see around two years as the point where such relationships change or end.
• Watch the tiredness of whoever leads too, because decision fatigue sits in that same overview as a cost alongside the exhaustion on the other side.

More reading on high protocol

On this site, D/s lays out the relationship high protocol exists within, service-oriented submission covers the acts that often sit inside such a protocol, and the power of discipline and positions shows how a correction works within an agreed form.

Beyond that, the review article by Hobson and colleagues, free to read, explains why a fixed form does anything at all, and the entry on leather culture gives the historical context that protocol manuals leave out.

Where this fits on my site

Do you want to experience once how an evening feels when the code of conduct is fixed beforehand? Then that’s something we write out in advance instead of making up on the spot. The page on the BDSM date explains how that conversation goes.

Sources

• Authority Transfer Relationships: Illuminating a Consensual Inegalitarian Relationship Form. Kevin G. Casey & Brad J. Sagarin, Archives of Sexual Behavior, published online October 29, 2025. Full text read via the publication list of the Science of BDSM Research Team. Supplies the description of rituals and protocols as negotiated process agreements, the point that such negotiations often end in a written contract ranging from a short statement of intent to a worked-out document, the nine possible benefits and the five costs, among them calcification and exhaustion with decision fatigue on the leading side, and the authors’ observation that a breaking point lies around two years. The benefits and costs are reasoned by the authors, not measured.
• 24/7 SM Slavery. Peter L. Dancer, Peggy J. Kleinplatz & Charles Moser, Journal of Homosexuality 50(2–3), 81–101, 2006. Only the abstract was readable; no claims from the full text were used. Supplies the sample of 146 people between 18 and 72, the finding that owners and slaves use ordinary everyday situations such as the household, the money and the morning and evening routine to mark and keep up their roles, and the finding that slaves, unlike the image of total submission suggests, use their free will when it’s in their interest.
• The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework. Nicholas M. Hobson, Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Dimitris Xygalatas & Michael Inzlicht, Personality and Social Psychology Review 22(3), 260–284, 2018. Author version read in full via PsyArXiv. Supplies the definition of a ritual as a prescribed sequence marked by rigidity, formality and repetition, embedded in meaning and with elements that serve no direct practical purpose, the three regulating functions (emotion, performance, social bonding), and the cited 2016 experiment by Brooks and colleagues in which people who performed a ritual just before a nerve-racking task had a lower heart rate, reported less anxiety and performed better, with a stronger effect the higher the anxiety. This is general ritual research and is not about BDSM.
• Leather subculture. English-language Wikipedia, chapter “The myth of the Old Guard”. Supplies the dating of the Old Guard between 1945 and the mid-to-late 1960s, the description of the romanticized picture as a closed community of men with a uniform hierarchical set of BDSM practices with high protocol on a military model, with initiation, brotherhood, discipline and a drive for excellence, the point that some call this the origin myth of the leather scene, the argument by Gayle Rubin, Jack Rinella and Joseph Bean that loose and strict existed side by side from the start, and the criticism of John Weal’s The Leatherman’s Protocol Handbook (2010) that it’s historically wrong and borrows submissive postures from the Gorean milieu.

Related terms

• D/s. The relationship high protocol is a code of conduct within.
• Service-oriented submission. The acts most often set down in a protocol.
• Collar. The object that in many protocols marks the start of the formal form.
• Collaring. The ceremony that is itself one of the most heavily protocolled moments.
• Discipline. The rules and corrections a protocol supplies the form for.
• Corner time. A classic protocol punishment, and an example of what can happen after a mistake.
• 24/7. The only form where a protocol also holds on a weekday morning.
• Inspection. The ritual a protocol evening most often begins with.
• Low protocol. The loose setting on the same scale, and the one that fills the most hours.
• Position training. The part of protocol you can’t just agree but have to practice, with the physical side to it.
• Protocol. The overarching term, with what a protocol governs and why high and low are two settings of the same list.
• Service. The acts a high-protocol arrangement prescribes down to the gesture.
• Speech ban. One of the rules such a protocol can contain, worked out separately here.
• Duty of silence. The same rule as a standing habit rather than a time block, with the professional meaning the word has outside this.