The Control Book (Peter Masters)

Chapter 1
Introduction

Mastery isn't just telling someone what to do. It's also creating the environment in which your submissive will do what you want even without being told. It is creating an environment in which they only have one choice, and that is of doing what you want.
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I want to come right out and say that this isn't a definitive textbook. That's not why I wrote it. I'm a sadist at heart and I have learned that one if the cruelest things you can do to someone is to teach teach them something and thereby cause them to question their ignorance and long-held beliefs. Seeing as you're actually looking at this voluntarily then it's likely that you're not the sort who's going to be particularly traumatized by being made to think. That's a shame, but on the off chance that you're looking at these pages by mistake I'm going to attempt, in the following pages and chapters, to stir up some new thoughts and cause you to reflect on many things that you've probably just taken for granted. I hope that by the end of the book you'll have a new understanding and appreciation for what control actually is -particularly in the context of BDSM- and how to use it.

In all sincerity I don't expect you to agree with everything I have to say in this book. Your experience and your preferences might cause you to look at what I say and decide it's the biggest load of rubbish that modern waste-management techniques have ever had to deal with. No matter. If it succeeds in at least making you reflect on your own views about the things I talk about -even if you just end up confirming your earlier views- then I'll be able to go to the great writers' home in the sky happy.

At various times in the production of this epic tome I have had different ideas about what to call it. At one stage I was feeling a bit disconcerted over the number of examples and jokingly thought about calling it The Book Of Lists. Unfortunately that title was used years ago and it really doesn't give a real idea of what I talk about.
Probably the title I most preferred the most often was Awareness Of Control. What I really believe is that a very large part of the activities that we include under the umbrella of BDSM rely explicitly or implicitly on control being
asserted over one person by another. These people are variously called tops, bottoms, dominants, submissives, masters, mistresses, slaves and so on. What they’re called isn’t really that important. What is important is how they use control. My goal in this book is to talk about control, explain what it is, demonstrate it, show how to take it, how to give it, how to manage it and more. I want you, the reader, to be aware of the ebb and flow of control around you and through you.

Control is something that is present in many or most BDSM activities. It’s explicit in many or most dominance & submission activities and lifestyles, and is typically obvious-to-a-blind-man in many bondage scenes, floggings, pain-play, piercings and similar activities where part of the thrill for one person is placing themselves in the hands (or control) of the other and just letting go.

For many people control is like a tool or a catalyst. These people might be into the sexual thrills that they can get via their scenes, or the endorphin rush from heavy pain-play, or the sub-space, and they use control as part of how they achieve this. Control, for these people, is secondary. They might not even realise the part control plays in what they do.

Then there are people for whom control is primary. Dominants and submissives, as well as some masters and slaves, are usually good examples of these. Their main interest is in explicitly controlling or being controlled by their partner. Pain, bondage and so on become tools used to impose or demonstrate or manipulate control. These are the people I’m interested in and I refer to them or the relationships where the element of control is primary as control-sensitive. Here control is not a want but a need.

As I’m going to be spending a lot of time talking about control I’d like to make it clear exactly what it is that I’m talking about. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines control (the verb) as: To exercise restraint or direction upon the free action of; to hold sway over, exercise power or authority over; to dominate, command. I am interested in all of this mainly in the context of one person controlling another. I won’t be talking about things like blackmail or threats as a way of achieving control, nor will I be talking about using physical force to control
someone. This challengingly leaves rather a lot of ground to cover.

The book is divided into five sections. The first section—this present one—is called Introduction. This is where I’ll be doing the groundwork, defining terms and providing background, which will hopefully make the rest of the book easier to digest. It is also where I explain a quaint relationship between evolution and dominance & submission.

The following section, Transfer Of Control, is a fairly meaty section where I’ll be talking about what’s involved in taking control, giving up control, losing control, maintaining control, giving back control, delegating control, what can go wrong as control is being transferred, etc. It’s the raw mechanics.

After that is a section on Communication. I know that every man and his dog has written something on communication, but there are some aspects unique to dominance and submission which are very important but also rarely considered. I’ll be looking at some of them here, including control of communication, plus communication and the impact on it of different headspaces or states of mind that can occur, such as subspace.

The last main section of the book is about Management. People involved in isolated scenes at play-parties don’t face the same issues which far-reaching and long-term dominant/submissive relationships have to deal with. In this section I look at things like maintaining the feeling of control in the absence of the dominant, long-term service issues, and family and career maintenance.

I end the book with a small(?) section of Discussion topics. In the sections up to here I have attempted to answer the questions I pose, and to properly explore the areas in which I trespass. In this section I am much more interested in posing questions without providing answers. I hope that this section will provide you with material that you can use as a springboard for further exploration with friends, colleagues and, of course, eager submissives.

Using control is often a case of combining experience, talent, skill, understanding and instinct. When you lack understanding then adapting your skills to new situations and partners is a hit-and-miss affair simply because you don’t know what is going on and hence have no idea what to do to fix it. In fact, much of life can become very interesting indeed if you don’t really know what you’re doing, and are just relying on things that have worked before and then something changes. To my mind part of the challenge in life comes from understanding and dealing with demanding and unusual situations. Regardless of whether you are looking for challenges or not it’s certain that the less understanding you have the more you are confined to standard solutions and the less you are able to deal
with non-standard problems. This book is about teaching you awareness and understanding so that you can see more solutions and are confined less to standard problems.

I end this introduction noting that this book is mainly written for dominants. As they are the ones in control they are the ones best placed to effect change. . . one would expect, anyway.

-ΣΥΝΕΧΙΖΕΤΑΙ-