Total power exchange

What is total power exchange?

Total power exchange (totale machtsuitwisseling in Dutch) is the form of D/s in which the agreement covers every area of life, money, calendar, clothing, and work included. The word total refers to the scope and not to the severity. In the academic literature, total power exchange is the name for the full-time variant of an M/s relationship.

What total power exchange looks like in practice

So dull that an outsider notices nothing, and at the same time so all-encompassing that little falls outside it. It almost always goes like this. Two people have lived 24/7 for years with a handful of agreements that run on, and at some point the household budget gets added, then the calendar, then the wardrobe. There is no day on which someone says “now we’re doing total power exchange”; it is the sum total that gets the name.

That makes it possible to name the difference from the neighbors. 24/7 says how long the agreement holds. M/s says what the relationship is, namely ownership. Total power exchange says how much of your life falls under it. A couple can live 24/7 with exactly three agreements, and that is not total power exchange.

Why this form is kept outside the door

Because the acceptance of BDSM has a price, and total power exchange is what pays it.

Sociologist Ofer Parchev devoted a whole article to it in Sexualities, and his claim is not a kind one for the scene itself. BDSM has gained partial recognition in the public domain over the past decades, he writes, and “the inclusive process comes with the price of excluding concrete behaviors and thought patterns that are considered dangerous and pathological”. What falls outside is precisely this form: “the total power exchange master/slave relationship, which is realized through a full-time power exchange encounter, suffers from the exclusion mechanism, as it is incompatible with the inclusive reason.”

In terms of what you’d notice: the rules the scene defends itself with, negotiation up front, a safeword, a scene with a beginning and an end, fit badly onto an agreement with no edges. Someone who lives this way gets headwind from both sides, and that is why so little has been written about it.

Why people choose it, and what it gives them

The appeal is in the disappearance of switching.

• For the one who holds the lead, the payoff is coherence. There is not one evening where you pay attention, but a relationship that asks the same thing every day.
• For the one who hands over control, the gain is that a large part of daily decisions sits with someone else. That frees up the head, and it is what people say about it most often themselves.
• For the couple together, the dividing line between “us as a couple” and “us while we play” disappears, and with it the hassle of switching back and forth.

This is the form with the fewest safety nets. No end of the scene where you come out of role on your own, no outsider watching along, and according to Parchev hardly any support from your own community either. Anything already off-kilter in a relationship gets magnified by this rather than straightened out.

What the law makes of it

Nothing, and that is not a detail but the heart of the word total.

Bringing money under the agreement means, in legal terms, granting a power of attorney. Article 3:60 of the Dutch Civil Code defines it as “the authority that a principal grants to another person, the authorized agent, to perform juridical acts in his name”. Then comes Article 3:72, which lists what ends a power of attorney. Under (c) it states plainly: “by revocation by the principal”.

There is no condition attached. No term, no formal requirement, no way to contract that right away. Someone who has given away control over her money can take it back tomorrow, and any agreement that claims otherwise has no effect at all. That makes total power exchange in practice something other than what the name promises: an agreement that exists only for as long as both keep making it. The same floor sits under a contract and under a slave contract.

What it is not

“Total power exchange means consent lapses.” The opposite. There is no longer a start and end point, so there is no single moment where consent gets settled once; it has to be given continuously. How that works is on 24/7.

“It is the most intense form of BDSM.” It is the broadest, and that is something else. There are couples who live this way and for whom nothing painful ever happens, while a single evening of edgeplay goes much further.

“Total power exchange is the same as 24/7.” No. 24/7 is about duration, total power exchange about scope. All total power exchange is 24/7; the reverse does not hold.

What I make of it myself

I’m Victor, gigolo and psychotherapist, and I don’t do this myself. I work by the booking, with a beginning and an end, and that is exactly the form that is missing here.

The fantasy of it I do run into a lot, and it has a fixed pattern. It is worked out down to the detail of the wardrobe and never as far as the Tuesday she has the flu. The question that opens the conversation is not “what do you want to give up” but “what happens when you can’t carry it for a while”.

And the mistake I see most often is haste. People want to widen the scope before they have practiced taking something back. Taking back is a skill, and you don’t learn it in the week you need it.

What you can do yourself

• Expand one area at a time and leave months between them. From clothing to calendar to money is an order, not a package.
• Keep money out of the agreement the longest. That is the area where an off-kilter relationship turns irreparable fastest.
• Put a fixed hour in the calendar when the agreement does not apply. Not as an emergency brake, but as an ordinary habit, so you don’t have to invoke it when something comes up.
• Say out loud that every power of attorney is revocable and agree on how you do that without it feeling like a breakup.
• Make sure there is one person outside the relationship who knows how you live. With an agreement that has no edges, that is the only oversight left.

Further reading on total power exchange

Within this glossary, the abbreviation is at TPE, the duration side at 24/7, and the relationship form at M/s, with the study of 146 people who live this way. What gets put on paper and what it is worth is at slave contract.

Beyond it, the article by Ofer Parchev is the only piece that takes this form as its main subject rather than as a footnote to 24/7.

Where this fits on this site

I work by the booking and not in a continuing relationship, so in this I’m not a counterpart. What is possible is to try out how it feels to hand over control within a single evening; the page about the BDSM date lays out how we bound that.

Sources

• BDSM and total power exchange: Between inclusion and exclusion. Ofer Parchev, Sexualities 28(1–2), 155–179 (DOI 10.1177/13634607231170320; first published online April 28, 2023, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref). Only the abstract is freely accessible, and nothing here goes beyond it. Provides the claim that BDSM has gained partial recognition and social inclusion over the past decades, with the finding “The inclusive process comes with the price of excluding concrete behaviors and thought patterns that are considered dangerous and pathological”, and the core point that “the total power exchange master/slave relationship, which is realized through a full-time power exchange encounter, suffers from the exclusion mechanism, as it is incompatible with the inclusive reason”. The distinction between a time-bound session and a full-time power exchange as an entire relationship basis is drawn on this site earlier from the same article, on 24/7.
• Dutch Civil Code Book 3, Title 3 (Power of Attorney), Articles 60 and 72. Dutch legislation via wetten.overheid.nl, version in force from January 1, 2020. The retrieved text was read word for word. Provides the definition in Article 60(1), “the authority that a principal grants to another person, the authorized agent, to perform juridical acts in his name”, and the list in Article 72 of the ways a power of attorney ends, including under (c) “by revocation by the principal”, without any limiting condition. That is the provision on which control over money within a total power exchange in the Netherlands always remains revocable.
• Master/slave (BDSM). Wikipedia. The Total power exchange section of this entry is where the search term points, and provides here only the placement of total power exchange as the full-time variant within the master-slave relationship. The entry carries a warning at the top of the page that too few sources underlie it, and is otherwise used on this site only on M/s, for what is common in practice. As a supplement, the negative Dutch control: the newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek returns zero articles with the phrase total power exchange.

Related terms

Total power exchange is the broadest form of power exchange, and the only one that meets resistance both inside and outside the scene.

• TPE. The abbreviation, and the five other things those same three letters mean.
• 24/7. The broader form, which is about duration rather than scope.
• M/s. The relationship this form is usually lived within, with ownership as the starting point.
• Slave contract. What gets put on paper, and why it is void under Dutch law.
• D/s. The relationship this is the most all-encompassing expression of.
• Lifestyle. The other axis, not how much falls under the agreement but what place BDSM takes in your life.