Complete and unedited text of a recent letter….

dear misress

me and my girlfriend are trying to learn about the mistress/master/slave activity but we need some basic tips for me as a slave to become a good slave and tips for her as a mistress so she can become a mistress. please mistress we like to take some of ur time to give us some tips. if you like to help that will be great if not its ok we will respect you no matter what all we need is a few tips thx for ur time mistress.

Good lord, I didn’t think anyone could use the words “tips” this many times in such a short email. Maybe this person is a barista in a low-end coffeehouse. Or a peep-show dancer.

Regular readers will know this hits all of my "intellectual laziness" buttons. (In fact, I'm adding a new tag just for that.) And I could work up to being slightly offended that this writer thinks a few bits of bumper-sticker wisdom will be all he/she and his partner need to have a dominant/submissive relationship. Because, yeah, it’s just that easy, right? Nothing challenging about my sexuality at all, no sirree. A trained monkey could do it.

But let’s look at it positively. Let’s say that this person thinks I am just so incredibly wise that I can, actually, condense all the complexity of BDSM dynamics into a few pithy soundbites. He’d be wrong, of course. If I could do that, why would I continue to blog and write a column and generally talk talk talk about this whole BDSM thing?

So, you want tips? Here’s some tips for you. Buy low, sell high. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Look both ways before you cross the street. Wash your hands after you go to the bathroom. Never play cards with any man named "Doc." Check your flight status before you leave the house. Don’t click on the links in emails from strangers. Don’t stick your dick in crazy.

And last but not least, JFGI.

***

EDIT, next day: All right, I never do this. I never take pity on someone whom I have justifiably spanked here. If you send me badly-spelled, sloppily-written letters, you deserve to get schooled.
However. Just this once, because I am feeling nicer today, here. And read this book by Patrick Califia. And use your damn spellchecker.