Protocol

What is protocol?

BDSM protocol is the form of conduct you agree on in advance within a D/s relationship: how you address each other, who speaks when, what posture you take, and what happens when someone misses an agreement. A protocol fixes the form, not the content. It switches on at an agreed moment and off again at an agreed moment.

How a protocol looks in practice

Like a list that fits on a single card.

A common protocol between two people runs to four or five rules. It starts at eight and ends on an agreed sentence. Until that sentence falls she addresses him as “sir,” waits to sit until she is told to, and takes one fixed posture when she comes in. If something goes wrong, it gets named on the spot.

That is the whole document. A protocol agreement is not a scene and not a game: you can run it fully dressed, at the dinner table, without a whip ever coming near.

What a protocol does outside BDSM

Exactly what it does inside, and that is no coincidence: the word is borrowed from two professions that have worked with it for centuries.

The first is diplomacy. The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations sorts ambassadors into three classes and adds, in article 14: apart from precedence and etiquette, no distinction is made between those classes. The form differs, the status does not. Article 16 settles precedence with a fact no one has to negotiate: the date and time a person took up their post.

The second profession is healthcare. Alex Haynes and colleagues introduced a nineteen-point checklist in eight hospitals for The New England Journal of Medicine. Among 3,733 patients before and 3,955 after it was introduced, the share of patients with complications fell from 11.0 to 7.0 percent, and the other measured outcomes improved as well.

That study is about surgery, not sex; that leap is mine. What it shows is the point of this term: a form written down in advance changes what happens the moment no one has time to think.

Why people work with a protocol

Because it takes the question “what do I do now” off the table.

The pull is in losing the improvisation. As long as nothing is fixed, the first twenty minutes of an evening go to feeling it out: may I sit, what do I call him, has this started yet.

• For you there is no longer a moment where you don’t know what is expected of you. That is why women call a protocol calming more often than exciting.
• For the other person the gain is attention: someone who knows the form reads a single deviation as a sign that something is off.
• For the two of you together a bounded stretch of time appears in which other things apply than outside it.

Jacqueline Gunning and colleagues describe in Sexuality & Culture how the kink community uses preparatory, open communication about limits to rewrite the usual sexual script. A protocol is that rewritten script, on paper.

A protocol turns no one into a different person. It governs behavior, not feeling.

How you build a protocol

In layers, and you stop as soon as you have enough.

1. The form of address. One word, sayable without giggling. This is the layer that settles in fastest.
2. The start and the end. A sentence that opens the form and one that closes it. Without this layer you have no protocol, only a mood.
3. The order and the posture. Who speaks first, waiting to sit, and maybe a posture taken on a single word.
4. The mistake. What happens when a rule is missed, fixed in advance.
5. The outside world. What applies when others are around. This is where low protocol begins, and where most couples think of it too late.

The scale between them is not a choice between two boxes: high protocol and low protocol are two settings of the same list.

Misconceptions about protocol

“Protocol means high protocol.” No. A couple with one standing agreement and a fixed closing sentence has a protocol too; it just sits low. Anyone who equates the two thinks he isn’t doing it while he very much is.

“A protocol is the same as a set of rules.” They govern different things. House rules apply to everyone in a venue and are about safety. Rules apply between two people and run on outside the session. A protocol applies between those same two people but only inside an agreed window, and it is about the form of their conduct. A contract describes the relationship itself.

“Agreeing to a protocol means giving up your voice.” Also no. The treaty that governs diplomatic etiquette says in so many words that the ranking is only about precedence and etiquette. It works the same here: the form says nothing about who is right, and it does not replace the boundary.

“A protocol is supposed to be complicated.” The opposite. The checklist that made the difference in those operating rooms ran to nineteen points for a whole team.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, gigolo, more than twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. I’m glad to make agreements about behavior, as many or as few as you want, but I’d rather work to measure than with a system that is the same for everyone.

People write a protocol for the evening they hope to get. It says something about kneeling on arrival, and nothing about what happens when the train runs an hour late.

The second thing is the one I now ask about first: how does it stop? Anyone can start. Coming back to ordinary talk is the part people get stuck on, and that is why the ending sits in the agreement, for me, just as firmly as the beginning.

What you can do yourself

• Write your protocol in five rules and read them out loud; what you can’t say without stumbling, you won’t keep up either.
• Agree on an opening line and a closing line, separate from your safeword, so there is never any doubt whether the form is on.
• Fix in advance what happens when a rule is missed. Anyone who makes that up in the moment is handing out something no one said yes to beforehand.
• Decide what applies when others are around, and keep that layer small enough that no one notices it.
• Put a date in the calendar to review the protocol, because a rule that hasn’t been spoken for months already doesn’t exist in practice.

More on protocol

On this site high protocol and low protocol work out the two settings, position training shows which part you have to practice, and the article on the power of discipline and positions describes how a correction works inside such a form.

Beyond this site, the Vienna Convention is the best example of a written-out protocol there is, and the checklist study by Haynes and colleagues shows in numbers why a fixed order works under pressure.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to know how such a form feels without building a whole relationship for it, we agree it for one evening. The page on the BDSM date lays out what we go through beforehand.

Sources

• Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. United Nations, concluded at Vienna on 18 April 1961, text edition by the International Law Commission. Primary treaty text, read here in the authentic English version. Provides the division of heads of mission into three classes (article 14, first paragraph), the provision that apart from precedence and etiquette no distinction is made between those classes (article 14, second paragraph), the precedence rule based on the date and time of taking up the post (article 16), and the requirement that the reception procedure per class is uniform within each state (article 18).
• A surgical safety checklist to reduce morbidity and mortality in a global population. Alex B. Haynes, Thomas G. Weiser, William R. Berry, Stuart R. Lipsitz et al. on behalf of the Safe Surgery Saves Lives Study Group, The New England Journal of Medicine 360(5), 491–499, 2009. Abstract read via PubMed; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked. Provides the introduction of a nineteen-point checklist in eight hospitals between October 2007 and September 2008, the 3,733 patients before and 3,955 after introduction, and the fall in the share of patients with in-hospital complications from 11.0 to 7.0 percent (p < 0.001). The study concerns surgery, not BDSM.
• A Preliminary Investigation into Intersections of Sexual Communication in Bondage, Domination, Sadomasochism and Disability. Jacqueline N. Gunning, Valerie Rubinsky, Ashley Aragón, Monica Roldán, Taylor McMahon & Angela Cooke-Jackson, Sexuality & Culture, 2023 (DOI 10.1007/s12119-022-10058-8). Full text read via PubMed Central. Small qualitative exploratory study with a convenience sample recruited through acquaintance networks; the authors name that selection as a limitation themselves. Provides the finding that both the BDSM and the disability community use preparatory, open, limit-setting communication about changing physical, emotional, and relational needs, and the rewriting of the usual sexual script as one of the four intersections found.

Related terms

• High protocol. What happens when you switch on all the layers at once.
• Low protocol. The loose setting, which fills most hours of a week.
• D/s. The relationship a protocol is only ever about within.
• M/s. The form where the protocol applies outside agreed moments too.
• Position training. The one part of a protocol you have to practice rather than agree.
• House rules. The same idea, but for everyone in a venue.
• Contract. The written record of the relationship a protocol sits inside.
• Discipline. What happens to behavior once the form is fixed.
• Inspection. The ritual a protocol evening often opens with.
• 24/7. The one relationship where a protocol is never off.
• Boundary. What a protocol does not replace, however detailed it is.
• Training. The weeks of repetition that make a protocol run on its own.
• Duty of silence. The speech rule that most often sits in a protocol, and the word that outside the scene means professional confidentiality.