Sub-list

What is a sub-list?

A sub-list is the filled-in questionnaire on which the person who receives marks, act by act, whether it is allowed. It is the Dutch scene form of the kinklist, but not the same paper: the forms that circulate here start with a medical block and let you fill in only yes or no per line.

What a sub-list looks like in practice

More like an intake form at the dentist than a wish list.

Take the form you can download at bdsmforyou.nl, the version most often forwarded in the Dutch-speaking world. Four pages. At the top of the first are your name, your gender, your age, your phone number, and your email address. Below that comes no act at all but a heading, Medical, with fifteen lines: heart conditions, pacemaker, diabetes, allergies, vascular problems, blood thinners, claustrophobia, breathing problems, epilepsy, breast implants, piercings, contagious blood diseases, smoking, drugs, and, right in the middle, “kneeling possible”.

That last line gives away where such a list comes from: a medical question that only gets asked inside a scene.

Only on page two does the play begin: types of play, bondage, masks, gags, clamps, impact play, medical play, and a closing block with everything that fit nowhere else. I counted the boxes. Across four pages there are one hundred and fifty times “O Yes O No” and zero times maybe. You get nuance in three places: the Experience line with the choice of a lot, moderate, little, or first time, and twice the question “mandatory or voluntary?”.

Where the word sub-list comes from

Not from the scene, and originally not from sub the person.

The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, the historical dictionary of Dutch, does not know the word: zero entries for sublijst, with verlanglijst (wish list) as the positive control. In the newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, sublijst turns up five articles across a century and a half, against 11,453 for verlanglijst, and I read the scanned text of all five. None of them is about BDSM.

What they do share: everywhere it means a sub-list under a larger list. Three times it is an electoral list. Soest 1934, The Hague 1953, Curaçao 1994. Once it is Formula 1. And once, in Het vrije volk of October 19, 1951, it is about housing allocation: only those who “appear on the sub-list of the worst cases” still stand a chance of help.

So there sub- is the prefix “under”. In the scene the same letters stand for the person. Two words that look identical and have nothing to do with each other, and that explains why no one outside the scene understands what you mean.

Why people fill in a sub-list

Because ticking boxes goes faster than explaining, and because you can fill it in alone.

That is the honest pull: you don’t have to look anyone in the eye while you admit you are curious about something.

• For you it mostly yields a vocabulary. Most women who fill in such a list come across ten acts they never had a name for.
• For the person building the scene it is a memory aid. You don’t remember fifteen medical lines from a half-hour conversation.
• For the two of you together it is a starting point with a date on it.

An agreement it is not. It shows what you ticked at the kitchen table on a quiet Tuesday evening, and nothing more.

What a sub-list cannot do

“What you tick is what you want.” Those are two different things. In The Journal of Sex Research, Zoe D. Peterson and Charlene L. Muehlenhard showed that the common model, wanting and consenting as a single scale with two settings, conflates the two. Wanting is multidimensional, and you can want something without consenting and consent without wanting it. A box with only yes and no therefore records the consent and not the desire.

“A filled-in list predicts what you’ll want later.” No, and that has been measured. Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein put the same twenty questions to thirty-five male students twice: once at rest, once while they were aroused. On a scale from 0 (“no”) through 50 (“maybe”) to 100 (“yes”), “would it be fun to be tied up by your partner” moved from 63 to 81, “would it be fun to tie up your partner” from 47 to 75, and being spanked from 50 to 68. Sixteen of the twenty answers came out significantly higher. That is one sample, only men, only students, only hypothetical questions, but the question format is exactly that of a sub-list, and there is a second finding with it: people don’t see that shift coming in themselves.

“Whoever has the list knows enough.” The same researchers point to the flip side of it: anyone judging a person at rest underestimates what arousal changes. The person who reads your list reads it in a different state than the one you filled it in. That is why the check-in stays, however complete the paper is.

What I see myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Filled-in sub-lists get sent to me regularly, and there is one constant in them.

The medical block is almost always the most carelessly filled-in part. People race through it to get to the fun section, while that is exactly where the lines sit that really shape an evening. Blood thinners change what is possible with clamps, claustrophobia what is possible with a mask. And “kneeling possible” is so often a no that I ask about it by default when the box is empty.

The second thing I notice: almost nobody asks what happens to the paper. It has your name, your phone number, and your medical history on it, and it goes to someone you don’t know yet.

What you can do yourself

• Fill in the medical block first, and don’t round anything up. This is the only part of the list where a mistake shows up physically.
• Put a number behind every yes. How long, how hard, how many times. “Yes” to spanking covers a tap with the flat hand and half an hour with a cane.
• Write your maybe in the margin if the form has no column for it, with the condition attached. Without that note the other person reads it as a yes or a no, and you don’t get to choose which.
• Never fill it in while you are aroused, and read it back sober a day later. What still stands then is the list.
• Ask what happens to the paper: who keeps it and when it is gone.
• Don’t treat your own ticks as an order to yourself. Having ticked something obligates you to nothing on the night itself; your safeword sits above your list.

More on the sub-list

On this site, kinklist explains the blank, international list; negotiation covers how you then discuss such a filled-in sheet.

Off this site, the study by Ariely and Loewenstein is free to read; the table with the twenty questions says at a glance why a list is a snapshot.

Where this fits on this site

My own version is shorter and sits on the inspiration page: tick what appeals to you, leave the rest. How the conversation goes after that is on the BDSM date page.

Sources

• Sublijst (form, pdf). Bdsmforyou.nl, four pages, accessed August 5, 2026. The circulating Dutch form itself. Provides the structure (personal details, medical block, BDSM experience, types of play, bondage, masks, gags, clamps, impact play, medical play, other options), the fifteen lines of the medical block including “kneeling possible”, the count of 150 times “O Yes O No” against zero times maybe, and the three places with nuance: the Experience field (a lot / moderate / little / first time) and twice “mandatory or voluntary?”.
• The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making. Dan Ariely & George Loewenstein, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 19(2), 87–98, 2006 (DOI 10.1002/bdm.501; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref). Full text read. Thirty-five male students at UC Berkeley answered the same questions at rest and while aroused, on a scale from 0 (“no”) through 50 (“maybe”) to 100 (“yes”). Provides the shifts for being tied up (63 → 81), tying up (47 → 75) and being spanked (50 → 68), the finding that sixteen of the twenty items came out significantly higher, and the conclusion that people have only limited insight into what arousal does to their own judgment. Also when they judge someone else.
• Conceptualizing the “wantedness” of women’s consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences. Zoe D. Peterson & Charlene L. Muehlenhard, The Journal of Sex Research 44(1), 72–88, 2007 (DOI 10.1080/00224490709336794, PMID 17599266; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref). Only the abstract read; the publisher version is behind a paywall. A study of female students who described their experiences. Provides the point this page rests on: that the common model, which treats wanting and consenting as a single two-setting scale, conflates the two, and that the results support a multidimensional model of sexual wanting in which desire and consent stand apart from each other.
• Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal via the Geïntegreerde Taalbank and the newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (SRU service, collection DDD_artikel), both accessed on August 5, 2026. Provide the negative finding with a positive control: zero WNT entries for sublijst against one for verlanglijst, and five newspaper articles with sublijst or sub-lijst against 11,453 for verlanglijst. The scanned text of all five was read: Soest 1934 (a council seat), Het vrije volk October 19, 1951 (housing allocation, “the sub-list of the worst cases”), De Maasbode March 5, 1953 (A.R. and C.H. in The Hague), Algemeen Dagblad March 7, 1981 (the Argentine Grand Prix) and Amigoe June 22, 1994 (elections on Curaçao). None of them is about BDSM; everywhere the word means a sub-list under a larger list.

Related terms

• Kinklist. The blank list that a sub-list is the filled-in half of.
• Dom-list. The same questions from the side that builds the scene.
• Negotiation. The conversation that the filled-in list is the starting point of.
• Boundary. What a sub-list tries to make visible line by line.
• Hard limit. The kind of no that gets one box on this form and no further comment.
• Soft limit. Exactly what this form has no box for.
• Check-in. What remains once the list is put away.
• Safeword. The word that goes above every ticked box.
• Contract. The step after, for those who want to set agreements down for longer.
• Sub. The word the compound refers to in the scene, unlike in the newspaper archive.
• Yes/no/maybe list. The international form with the maybe column that this Dutch form precisely does not have.
• Checklist. The broader word for the blank sheet that comes before this filled-in form.