As I’ve always agreed, he can stop the scene at any time. But since he decided to do it in a way that is not part of the agreement, she has the right to stop their business relationship. If he wanted the business relationship to continue, then it was incumbent upon him to follow the rules.
Any interaction between a customer and service provider is, in essence, a contract. In this case, they had an actual contract, but in most instances they’re more informal. In all instances, if the customer violates the boundaries the service provider has decided on, it’s perfectly reasonable for the service provider to refuse service. If you’re instructed to wear a tie when you go to a particular restaurant, the business owner is perfectly within his rights to refuse service if you fail to follow those instructions. The time to take umbrage with such instructions is before violating them. You don’t go to a fancy restaurant and rip off your jacket and tie and then get pissed off when you’re told to leave unless there’s something wrong with you.
In addition to this, considering that the guy’s letter is only telling his side of the story and was written for the express purpose of trying to publicly shame the woman, I’m inclined to think that his version of events might be biased. I’d lean more towards events going down as A Priori Tea suggested. If there was specific language in their contract forbidding the customer from trying to control the scene during play, then that implies to me that this was a problem between them before. This was most likely the straw that broke the camel’s back, rather than a split second decision by the dom.
But, regardless, even if things happened just how the letter writer wrote, even assuming that this woman was some crazy and unprofessional weirdo who wanted to shove a feces encrusted used dildo up her poor, poor paying customer’s ass, ending the session and terminating their relationship was exactly the right thing to do. Whether they were both assholes, or only one of them was, or you can squint your eyes just right to say neither was an asshole, ending the business relationship was absolutely what the dom should have done.
Wow, do you not get what this is about.
You know, I can think of any number of instances where paying customers have to follow instructions. From riding on a roller coaster, to attending a play, to posting on this very board. Come to think of it, I don’t know that I can think of any instances where giving someone money entitles you to do whatever the fuck you like, even within the confines of the specific activity for which you’re paying. In this particular case, the guy was paying the women for the privilege (for lack of a better term) of doing exactly what she told him to do. If he didn’t want to do exactly what she told him to do, then he was trying to spend his money in the wrong place. That’s the deal he entered into when he hired this woman. If that’s not the deal he wanted, he shouldn’t have hired her. And since that’s not the deal he was honoring, the woman’s completely in her rights to decide she doesn’t want his custom anymore.
I never said she couldn’t stop services. I said she was rude.
At some point I think those of us who understand BDSM have to recognize that certain others won’t (willful blindness is an ugly thing). It looks like you and the three posters below you came to that realization at more or less the same time :).
By the time we’re judging something as subjective as rudeness i’m not inclined to make an assessment based solely on one party’s account.
Whatever their retarded pre-agreement was, it was all for his benefit not hers. He can break it whenever he wants.It doesn’t sound like he really even broke the agreement anyway. He just wanted to clarify the terms of something new she was trying to introduce.
And for the last time, I never suggested that he should be able to “do whatever he wants,” only that he doesn’t have to do what he DOESN’T want.
Pretty much. As I said earlier, my sadism is recreational so I can’t claim a broad understanding of the professional market.
I was surprised by Savage’s response, because it didn’t even mention that STDs can be spread through shared sex toys. He may have figured that his regular readers would know this and that it went without saying. In any event, Savage didn’t say the questioner (SHEESH) was out of line for being concerned about his health. He didn’t really say anything about the “contract” or sub/dom protocol either. Instead he questions SHEESH’s motivations for writing to him:
Savage says that if the dominatrix was really the type who was unwilling to stop and discuss his health concerns, then SHEESH was better off without her. But he says it’s also possible that SHEESH didn’t behave as reasonably as he says he did, and that he had been obnoxious enough for long enough that the dominatrix decided that she was better off without him as a client. Savage thinks the latter is more likely because of the way SHEESH mentioned that the dominatrix read Savage’s column:
Without that last sentence, Savage’s reply might have been different. But as things were, it looked like SHEESH didn’t just want to be reassured that his request was reasonable, he wanted to use Savage’s column to send a message to a woman who’d made it clear she didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. In other words, SHEESH wasn’t really asking Savage to say that he (SHEESH) was right, he was asking Savage to tell the dominatrix that SHEESH was right. That is obnoxious, and a bit creepy.
That said, I think Savage would have done better to include in his response some reference to the fact that it IS important to clean any shared sex toys carefully. This is important information that could benefit Savage’s readers, and its inclusion also would have helped to make it clear that Savage’s problem with SHEESH wasn’t the request itself but the way Savage suspected it had been made.
Luckily, judging by the responses, I seem to be posting in a foreign language, so I can say more or less what I want to without any kickback, but there also comes a time when some of us who do understand BDSM are allowed to sit back and laugh at someone who doesn’t seem to realise that Dom is the first three letters of ‘Dominant’, and that we don’t care if their feelings are hurt the first time they encounter a Smart Assed Masochist.
Eh. Doms don’t have any special obligation to put up with smart asses. Some people are more trouble than they’re worth, best to send them away. Not every power struggle is worth having.
Do child care workers run away crying, or insist on the child’s expulsion, when there’s a ‘difficult’ child who won’t put away his toys?
It must be a shock for some of these ‘pro-doms’ when they realise they’re dealing with complicated adults who need to be put in line, rather than slaves who only need to sign a contract to ensure they behave themselves.
There’s a shortage of good dominants, especially female ones. For a sub to be accepted to the client list is like getting accepted to Harvard. They get to decide whether you’re their material or not.
Well then, it must be really crap to be a submissive male. It doesn’t mean those of us looking on from the sidelines have to show any respect to the phonies.
Who exactly are you finding to be phony in this? The guy paid a dominatrix to abuse him as she will, and then got hesitant when she did exactly that. It’s like the police say, you don’t want to do the time, don’t do the crime.
All he did was ask for clean equipment. He has a right to be selective anyway. It’s like going to restaurant and then being told you have to eat everything on your plate because, hey, you ordered it. He can accept or refuse exactly as much as he feels like.
He broke her rules in a way that led her to not want to play with him anymore. Done and done. I get the strong impression that you don’t know much about BDSM, so I don’t really expect you to be able to get why those rules are important or what other means were at his disposal to protect himself within those rules, but you might want to just accept that they are important and that other means did exist; people have tried to explain both in painstaking detail. If you accept those points, your argument becomes “the customer is always right.” If you really want to argue that resolution I’d say take it to GDs.
But the “rules” are just fake rules being roled played for his gratification. He should be able to pick and choose what he wants to play along with. I think it’s ridiculous to say the made up “rules” are “important.” No they aren’t. They’re just make believe.
Oh, he knows aaalllllllll about BDSM. He knows that the people who are into it are evil and they should have their children taken away. What else does he need to know?