Push Button Behavior Modification

What does a rope top do with a bottom who presents as a blood/collar/throat/electrical stim fetishist? Tell a story about this bad boy I know…

Ben presents as nothing out of the ordinary really, not in New England at least. One sees his kind all over, especially during hunting season, which begins soon. Ben happens to be a pretty fine specimen, however – strong, lean, blond, “nicely made” as any Yankee might observe. Not a bad recovery from his early life, during which he likely fell out of a pickup and wandered the landscape in search of food for a year and some.

Whether it was barbed wire, an unfortunate meeting with a farm implement, or perhaps with a coyote, Ben ended up under a surgeon's knife getting an 8 inch gash in his leg muscles fixed one day in his early teenage, having been found lame by the side of a farm road and ferried in yet another pickup to the only medico available at 2am in rural southern Vermont - a horse vet. Of course he spent that whole episode anesthetized, and just as he woke (in a cast hiding 40 sutures) to begin his convalescence, over him were hovering the solicitous faces of two elderly women. One of them was my mother. The other was the kennel owner.

The county doesn’t maintain a pound, so what few strays there are that survive the coyotes, the bears, now the gray wolves, and finally the Vermont winter are sent to the kennel on the north side of the Waloomsac Bridge. Ben had done alright, apparently. His coat was shiny, he was strong, his eyes bright despite his obvious pain, and he had offered his rescuers no resistance to their bundling him off to the vet. He was a little light in weight perhaps, and his movements even in the cast were clearly feral, but he was used to people, and he was beautiful and my mother fell in love with him immediately.

Ben immediately established himself as the alpha character among the others of the menagerie occupying mother’s farm. Once the cast was off he gleefully strutted his dominance and abilities in the fields, racing full out in any direction, flushing game, putting down challenges to his authority – even to mother.

Like boys will do, he wandered. Like feral animals do, he killed. It was unclear to mother what he was killing, but over 300-odd acres of range it’s easy to loose sight of a fast-moving yellow lab. Ben would frequently emerge over some rise with blood on his maul, looking quite pleased with himself. Mother didn’t mind the thought of her young man enjoying an occasional woodchuck, mole or vole tartar, but now and again there was more blood on Ben than could possible fit in the average vole.

The story got much more interesting one fine spring evening when out for a romp on Pointer’s Run. 50 yards across the new alfalfa planting three dear broke from the wood and foolishly gamboled along the margin. Ben broke into a streak, flattened out like a catamount and caught up with the smallest of the white tails in seconds. Mother stood rooted to the spot Ben had just vacated and watched in horror as he tackled this yearling and promptly tore open its gullet, laying his full fighting weight of 90 pounds across the poor deer’s forequarters as it spasmed and sprayed life out on the alfalfa. Ben was stripping the skin from his kill’s neck when mother, now shouting, attempted to pull him off, getting herself covered in gore and recoiling at Ben’s sharp and aggressive rebuke.

Mother retreated with her other dog and let Ben find his own way home. Over an hour later he came prancing up the drive, caked with blood, lymph and bits of the downy undercoat his prey had just begun to shed before going down to his blood lust. She banished him to the tool shed and went to see to the cadaver lying up on the edge of her top field. When she got to the bottom of the fields she could see the coyotes were already finishing the job, so she let the whole matter be, apart from washing Ben of his victory as he panted happily.

Clearly there was some training needed.

The solution was surprisingly elegant. Instead of the leather field collar Ben had discolored with his vampyrine mayhem, he was fitted with a new little box and nylon strap - a shock collar. The regime was simple: whenever Ben ignored a command he got an audible signal, triggered from a cell phone-sized sending unit; further recalcitrance would receive a fixed nine volts at various levels of amperage up to the full measure, which is more than enough power to take-down an obese Newfie, much less a 90 pound gazelle of a retriever.

Ben responded very well to the training and before long he was hanging much closer on walks. I learned how to use the system but had needed it much, other than to “chirp” my charge, for over a year. I was, admittedly, more inclined to indulge Ben’s blood lust than my mother, finding it altogether fitting to his general deportment and mien. He is, after all, a dog, an exemplar of his breed at that, and not so removed from his lupine brethren all over the woods. It had not escaped my notice, either, that since Ben’s arrival the coyotes no longer ventured anywhere near the house.

On a wet and windy evening we were at the entrance to the Mile-Around Wood when Ben stopped and pointed into the bramble off to one side. As I uttered “Ben…” he bolted into the cover and I fished the sender out to signal his return along with the full-voiced “Ben!” to go with it. Before I could organize myself a six-point buck broke no more than 5 feet in front of me, a huge deer, leaping the ten foot wide path in nearly a single bound, with Ben not more than a few feet behind it and gaining as they charged out into the open field on the other side.

I amped the sender up to 3 and hit the key. From 25 – 30 yards away Ben shook his head slightly, lost a little ground, and then pressed his pursuit, giving the buck time enough to turn and confront his assailant with his rack at ground level. Ben, mad with the chase, tore forward playing chicken with the lowered rack and without thinking I dialed all the way to the last stop and keyed. About five or so yards from the buck Ben’s head suddenly dropped and he went tumbling ass over tea kettle in a spectacular jumble. The deer immediately seized its good fortune and flew out of the field onto higher ground.

Just as I began to wonder if I’d seriously injured my mother’s feral founding his head popped dazedly up from the grass, he shook, and then made his way with his tail down toward me, shaking his head periodically. Finally he came up close at sat next to me somewhat stoop-shouldered, looking genuinely contrite. No small feat for such a proud creature.

For myself, I considered it a win-win. Ben was in one piece (as was the buck) and my pervy wheels were spinning.

Back in the present tense my fetishist friend had said nothing during the entire story, simply sat rapt and somewhat dreamy (especially during the throat-ripping bits). After a pause and a wondering stare, she turned to me and asked sotto voce “So, these collars… where do you find them?”

With thanks to Graydancer for the inspiration.

Ring Around the Collar

The cards and letters keep coming...

I am having trouble figuring out BDSM culture... I'm very interested in collaring and wonder if you've ever collared a partner or participated in the ceremony, or can tell me more about the symbolism and so forth. I don't even know what I would wear with a collar! How for example did collaring become special in BDSM? Also, do you have anything you can say about wearing a collar in mainstream society? Obviously I know you don't wear one, but maybe you know people who do.

This from someone who stumbled into kink through association with an artist friend we have in common. I've not heard of what progress she's made in her experiments, but elaborating on my reply to her for posting here has been interesting.

I understand that as a novice the norms and mores of the "culture" should be of exceptional interest, but what I think I know on this front is likely of very small value to someone for whom the interest is keen. Many years of exposure to and participation in (to varying degrees) the club, porn, house, Internet, fine art and political BDSM scene has lead me to surmise the following with respect to norms in BDSM and that which, within the framework of an interpretive apparatus, would identify it as a distinct culture: they are the very norms that identify the larger culture from which they emerge, merely amplified.

Let's consider the example of collaring. When two people avow to one another that between them a commitment to one another obtains, it is customary in the West for this oath to be materially symbolized somehow. In my business I use contracts - legally defensible though they may be, they are in fact merely betokenings of a common understanding. In trade, value is expressed via money, which, like a spoken word, has no intrinsic value other than that ascribed to it by the receiving party; even gold fluctuates daily with respect to the perception of its worth.

In marriage, we use rings, a convention which, as I understand it, emerged from Egypt and is symbolically derivative of the Uroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail and symbolizing the pelastrational nature of integration and assimilation (see Mysterium Coniunctionis by C.G. Jung). Moving forward a couple of millennia, the Romans had culturally calibrated the ring symbol as representative of value, and employed expensively tooled rings of precious metals as trade goods in marriage - the wedding band was regarded as a legal agreement expressing ownership of its wearer, i.e., the woman. Arguably, we preserve more of our current cultural, civic, intellectual and social cues from the Greco-Roman tradition than have persisted from the high era of the Pharaohs.

Even in our modern age we speak of "taking" a mate, and wedding bands are looked to as symbols of "goods" that are "spoken for". I never remove my band, and it is frequently a topic of conversation with partners who are eager to plumb the meaning of the ring as I've perverted it. Even among long-time kinky people there is often the residuum of cultural conditioning regarding possession and its symbols. One learns about one's kink on the tricky terrain of intimacy - through vulnerability, openness and the making of mistakes, false assumptions, or sometimes going 'round in circles (or, if you're lucky, in the making of circles, such as dear A. below - ed.).

In that accelerated world, the lessons come more quickly, more clearly and often more extensibly. This is how it is, I think, that kinky folk tend toward the somewhat more polite and decorous end of the spectrum in the broader cross-section of society. Again, not different so much as simply amplified.


A collar is, to my thinking, merely a variation on the same theme, albeit amplified to an unambiguous degree, whereas the ancient meaning of the wedding band has been diluted by years and the general principle of democratization. Collaring is something we do with our pets, a factor in our lives our laws tell us we "own" and for which we are responsible. I expect the pervy world to keep pace with whatever most clearly and most subversively represents unambiguous commitments (which, of course, are every bit as fragile over the long haul as any commitment expressed elsewhere in society), be it collars or something else. That it be openly defiant or contrary to convention is definitionally its perversity.

Personally, I find collaring symbolically facile. In far more recent times metal collars and chains were expressive of ownership and were also punitive instruments, as they are still. Yet, today, the wearing of metal chains about the neck is not merely fashionable, it's practically uniform. The more bombastic and aware of the Gangsta community here in Brooklyn openly declare the wearing of heavy metal chains about their necks as the subversion and appropriation of a potent symbol from the habit of their historic white oppressors. It is apt, therefore, that proper white society should look upon black "bling" with distaste and discomfort, for it is emblematic of pain white visited upon the body of black on these shores. In much the same spirit the word "nigga" is now exclusively the dominion of black-on-black communication. There is no white person still standing who does not appear a knuckle-dragging cracker should the word escape his lips with any sense of conviction.

Given that most kinky folk come from solidly middle class circumstances and would not be thought "oppressed" in any conventional sense of the term, one wonders about the subversive value of the collar, or what exactly is being defused through reappropriation. This is true for all symbolic expression in kink. The psycho-historical aspect to kinky expression may not be as labyrinthine as Gangsta culture, but then again, perhaps it is. Another way of looking at the issue may be to follow the path backward to what the dominant culture identifies and endorses as normal, and see how behaviors someone such as myself (a scion of middle class comfort if ever there was one) practice (and even call sacred) emerge from that so-called normalcy. In the end, all subcultures end up being commentaries on that of which they are derivative.