M/s

What is M/s?

M/s, short for Master/slave, is the ongoing relationship where one person holds the authority and the other has entrusted themselves to it, with ownership as the starting point. Unlike D/s, the arrangement does not stop at the scene: it runs on through the household, the calendar and the money. Service is the core, not the pain.

What an M/s relationship looks like in practice

So ordinary that an outsider would notice nothing.

Peter Dancer, Peggy Kleinplatz and Charles Moser put a questionnaire to 146 people who call themselves slaves for the Journal of Homosexuality, roughly half women and half men, from eighteen into their seventies. What they found goes against the expectation of almost everyone who looks at it from the outside. The inequality does not stop when the sex or the scene stops, and at the same time it is held up by the dullest parts of a shared life: who does the laundry, who pays the bills, how the day begins and ends. Their participants described such relationships as lasting and satisfying.

Two examples of how differently that can play out. In the first form it is about the day: one person decides when the other gets up, what goes on the table and how the money is divided, and that is not up for negotiation. Weeks can go by without anything happening that looks like BDSM. In the second form it is about the form: a fixed protocol for how you address each other, how you hold yourself and how you ask permission, in force at some moments and not at others. Yes when you come home, no at the in-laws.

How M/s differs from D/s

In how far the arrangement reaches, and in what lies at its core.

The encyclopedic description puts the difference in the values the relationship turns on: serving and obeying in M/s, affection in Dominant/submissive. From that same entry come two more things you will not find on any checklist. The collar is one you earn, not one you are fitted with. And the service has an agreed term; once that is full, the serving party is released, unless both agree to a new period.

That second point escapes almost everyone. Even where the word “always” comes up, an M/s relationship turns out in practice to run almost always in periods.

How that division of roles works through into how people talk has been measured. Phoenix Crane and Molly Ireland had 261 participants write erotic and relational stories for The Journal of Sex Research and analyzed the language. People who described themselves as dominant used more words around possession, responsibility and focus on the other; people who described themselves as submissive referred more often to the power relationship itself and to themselves. So ownership is not only an arrangement, it is also how someone tells their own story.

Why people choose M/s

To know where you stand, every day again.

For many people the pull is not in the weight but in the calm underneath it. In an M/s relationship it is settled who is in charge of what, and that saves a hundred small negotiations a week. For the serving side there is something extra that is hard to explain to anyone who does not know it: service that is valued gives a place no job description offers.

What an M/s relationship can give differs per person involved:

• For the one who serves, M/s gives clarity and recognition: one relationship where you know what is expected of you, and where doing it well is seen too.
• For the one who holds the authority, M/s gives say, but above all the confirmation that someone entrusts them with it. Something you cannot force.
• For both, M/s gives less hassle over who decides what, and a shared language for something most couples have no words for.

The downsides are not small. M/s does not take the friction out of a relationship; it only makes the friction formal. The tiredness sits more often on the leading side than the serving side, because deciding every day is work. And anyone hoping the relationship itself solves something will be disappointed: what is left unspoken does not get any smaller because a title is added to it.

How people set up an M/s relationship

Almost always in the same order: talk, record, mark, review.

1. Negotiate, and then not about the sex but about the ordinary things. Who manages the money, who sets the calendar, what happens with illness or a lost job.
2. Record it in a contract. What usually goes in runs from permitted acts to dress rules, eating rules, who speaks when, the division of tasks at home and whether anyone else may join.
3. Mark it with a collaring, the day the arrangement takes effect. For one person that is a celebration with witnesses, for another an evening for two where no one else notices anything.
4. Live with a protocol that fits how visible you want to be. Low protocol out of the house, higher protocol at home, is the most common split.
5. Review on a set date. A period that ends and only carries on when both say so again is what keeps such a relationship honest.

The variation is mostly in reach. There are relationships where only the household falls under the authority, and relationships where the clothing, the body weight and the contact with friends belong to it too. That last one is called total power exchange, and it is the form where the difference between careful and reckless shows sharpest. The distinction rarely lies in how much is handed over, and almost always in whether there is still a way out.

How often this happens, nobody knows exactly, but the ratio between the roles has been counted. Fay and colleagues analyzed 504,416 European FetLife profiles and found that the dominant role labels, Dom, Domme, Mistress and Master, make up 23.39 percent of the roles, against 25.15 percent for the submissive labels Sub and Slave. Strikingly balanced, they write.

Misconceptions about M/s

“A slave contract is binding.” No, and the opposite is settled. Article 40 of Book 3 of the Dutch Civil Code holds that a legal act which by its content or purport conflicts with public morals or public order is void. On top of that, Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights holds without exception: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.” So an M/s contract is a conversation document, and that is exactly where its value sits.

“In an M/s relationship the slave no longer has a will of their own.” That turns out not to hold as soon as you ask. Dancer and colleagues’ participants did step in when their own interest called for it. The picture of complete submission does not survive what people report themselves.

“M/s is just D/s with harder words.” The difference is in the reach and in the core value. D/s can last one evening; M/s is about the household, the money and the morning routine, and has service at its core instead of love.

“M/s means something happens all day long.” Almost always the opposite. The relationships studied run on everyday routines, not on scenes, and from the outside there is usually nothing to see.

“Anyone who lives this way has been through something.” There is no evidence for that. Andreas Wismeijer and Marcel van Assen laid 902 Dutch practitioners next to 434 others for The Journal of Sexual Medicine; on nearly every measured trait the first group came out more favorably, and their conclusion is that BDSM is a leisure pursuit rather than a disorder. About M/s in particular that says nothing, about the prejudice everything.

What I see myself

My name is Victor. I am a gigolo, have done this for more than twenty-five years, and trained as a psychotherapist. I do not live in an M/s relationship myself, and I do not use the title Master. Even so the subject comes up with some regularity, usually from someone who is thinking it over and has no one at home to talk to about it.

Three things strike me every time.

The first is the order. Anyone who brings this up talks about intensity, about how far it goes, about what happens then. The bank account and the weekly calendar come up much later. While that is where it is decided whether this works. A conversation about the whip is easier than a conversation about the mortgage.

The second is where it goes wrong. Not with the one who serves, but with the one who leads. Deciding day after day drags more than people think beforehand, and there is barely any language for that kind of tiredness: it does not fit the picture.

The third is what beginners expect from the paper. A contract does not make authority. Authority sits in a hundred small moments where someone makes a decision and acts on it; the contract writes down afterward what has already grown there.

What you do if you are thinking about this

• Have the first conversation about the weekly calendar, the groceries and the bank account. That is where an M/s relationship plays out; the playroom is only a small part of it.
• Put an end date on it. Three months or a year, with a review after: a period like that you can judge honestly, “always” you can only break.
• Name the areas that fall outside the arrangement. Job, health, family contact and your own money are the four that rarely come up and do the most damage when it only happens after the fact.
• Build a way out that the serving party can use alone. A relationship where you can only leave with permission is missing the most important safety arrangement there is; sort this on day one.
• Agree how the leading party signals that it is becoming too much. That side rarely says anything unprompted, so make it a set moment rather than an expectation.
• Treat the contract as a record, not as proof. It has no legal force, so do not refer back to it but have the conversation again.

More reading on M/s

Anyone who wants to understand the leading side reads Master here; anyone who wants to know where this relationship comes from, D/s. 24/7 describes what it means when an arrangement never switches off, and contract shows how that ends up on paper. For the feeling underneath it, the power of discipline and positions on the blog is the best way in.

Beyond this site, two articles take you further. Dancer, Kleinplatz and Moser show what such relationships run on in daily life, and Wismeijer and van Assen make clear how little the prejudice about practitioners holds up once you measure it.

Where this fits on this site

What is on this page is about people who share a life, and that is not what I offer: with me it is about an evening or a day. If you do want to feel, within that time, what it is like to hand something over, with rules you set beforehand, then the page on the BDSM date shows how that is prepared. How I handle power myself is in my house rules.

Sources

• 24/7 SM slavery. Peter L. Dancer, Peggy J. Kleinplatz & Charles Moser, Journal of Homosexuality 50(2–3), 81–101, 2006. Questionnaire study among people who live full-time as owner and slave. As far as is known the only one of its kind. The full text sits behind the publisher’s paywall; only the freely available abstract was used. From it come: the number of participants (146), their age range (18 to 72) and the male-female split (47 against 53 percent); the finding that the inequality continues outside sexual and SM moments; the role of everyday routines, household tasks, handling of money, the start and end of the day, in keeping up the two positions; the fact that participants did use their own will as soon as their interest was at stake; and their judgment that the relationships were lasting and satisfying.
• Dominants, Submissives, and Bottom-up Text Analysis: Exploring BDSM Roles Through Romantic and Erotic Narratives. Phoenix R. Crane & Molly E. Ireland, The Journal of Sex Research 60(4), 452–462, 2023 (DOI 10.1080/00224499.2022.2111400). Linguistic analysis of 261 participants who wrote erotic and relational stories, processed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Yields that the language reflects the role traits: dominants with more words around possession, responsibility and focus on the other, submissives with more references to the power relationship and to themselves.
• Psychological Characteristics of BDSM Practitioners. Andreas A.J. Wismeijer & Marcel A.L.M. van Assen, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 10(8), 1943–1952, 2013 (DOI 10.1111/jsm.12192). Dutch questionnaire study among 902 BDSM practitioners and 434 control participants. The core of the outcome is used: on nearly every measured personality trait the BDSM group came out more favorably than the control group, with agreeableness as the only exception, and the authors conclude that BDSM reads better as a leisure pursuit than as an expression of psychopathology.
• European Convention on Human Rights, Article 4. Treaty text via wetten.overheid.nl. Yields the provision “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude,” placed under the heading Prohibition of slavery and forced labour.
• Dutch Civil Code, Book 3, Article 40. Dutch legislation via wetten.overheid.nl. Yields the provision that a legal act which by its content or purport conflicts with public morals or public order is void. The ground on which a slave contract has no legal force in the Netherlands.
• An exploration of fetish social networks and communities. Damien Fay, Hamed Haddadi, Michael C. Seto, Han Wang & Christoph Kling, arXiv:1511.01436, 2015. Network analysis of 504,416 European FetLife profiles from early 2014. Yields that the dominant role labels Dom, Domme, Mistress and Master together make up 23.39 percent of the roles and the submissive labels Sub and Slave 25.15 percent, described by the authors as a striking balance.
• Master/slave (BDSM). Wikipedia. The only summarizing reference article that treats this relationship form as a whole. At the top of the entry stands a warning that too few sources underpin it; it is kept here only for what is common in practice, and not for claims about origin or history. Kept are: the distinction in core values between M/s and Dominant/submissive; the status of the collar as something earned; the festive moment the arrangement takes effect, with or without guests; the common content of a written arrangement; and the running out of the agreed service period, after which there is release or renewal.

Related terms

M/s is the form in which power exchange reaches furthest, and at the same time the form that stands out least from the outside.

• D/s. The broader form of power exchange this relationship is the extreme of.
• Master. The title on the leading side, and why it is given rather than taken. In Dutch meester, used more widely than within M/s alone.
• 24/7. The time form in which most M/s relationships are lived.
• Contract. The document the arrangements land in, with the reason it means nothing in law.
• Slave contract. That same document in its heaviest form, with the oldest known text and the clause that must never be missing from it.
• Collaring. The moment the relationship takes effect, and what is said then.
• Collar. The object that counts as earned in this relationship.
• High protocol. The manner of interaction most often paired with M/s, with low protocol for out of the house.
• Domestic service. The part of the arrangement that comes back most often in the research.
• Lifestyle. The broader word for BDSM that continues outside the session.
• Submissive. The broader role the serving half of M/s is a heavy variant of.
• Position training. The postures that apply in such an ongoing relationship even outside a scene.
• Owner. The word people choose when the relationship is about possession rather than service.
• Slave. The word for the serving half, with its history and the reason it is dropped outside the scene.
• Slave girl. The feminine form of the same role, with the ambiguity of the suffix.
• Total power exchange. The form in which money, calendar and clothing fall under the authority too, with the legal floor underneath it.
• TPE. The same form in three letters, and why those letters mean something very different outside the scene.