Thursday, May 8, 2008

Dog Days


So, a while back, maybe three weeks or even more, I posted a craigslist ad looking for a submissive, and I don't remember which encounter(s), if any, resulted from that ad, but just last week, I got another response:
Me: A dog. You MASTER> All the toys. Tail, doggie dish,done,(dildo), leash. collar, whip,Commands. Piss rim all for my MASTER. $$$

And because I'm some combination of clueless and weird, some thoughts ran through my head, in this order:
  • Can that ad still be up? Why are you answering now?
  • Dude. Non-standard English much?
  • You want me to pay you to treat you like a dog? You'd probably have better luck with that by placing your own ad.
So I wrote a very brief reply: "Thanks, but I wasn't looking to pay." Which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the exact reply I give on gay.com when some well-built twink asks me if I want to help with his college tuition in exchange for a game of bury the condom.



But the guy wrote back: "I pay you. Sorry I didn't make that clear."

And then I was flummoxed. Obviously, I couldn't take this guy's money: I'm not a certified dog trainer. Hell, I've never even seen Best in Show. And while I'm definitely in favor of legalized prostitution, I think it's a career path that I don't want to follow. It's a little bit like catering. Back when YFU was born, I was a stay-at-home dad for a couple of years, and the ex wanted me to make some money by taking catering jobs and maybe start a new career. I had a reputation at church for being a very good large-scale cook, and I had occasional offers from my fellow congregants to cater parties or dinners. I did end up catering my sister's second wedding, but it was a relatively small affair (dinner for 40), and I only let my parents reimburse me for direct costs. I also did a birthday party for thirty people for a friend from church. I made a little money from it, and I used it to buy some cooking equipment, so I could legitimately not declare any net business income on my tax return. But as much as I enjoyed doing the cooking and feeding the guests, I knew that to be successful there were large administrative and marketing aspects that were beyond me. I'm pretty sure the same would be true if I decided to become a professional dominator.


It might have been amusing to take this one guy up on his offer and use the proceeds to buy some nice sex toys, but I couldn't help remembering my last pseudo-canine experience. It must have been five years ago. I'd met and chatted with this guy on gay.com, and he wanted to be taken to a semi-sleazy motel room and spend the night being treated like a dog and/or tied to the bed and used. He was cute, and he offered to split the room cost with me, so I thought, "Why not?" I went to the local PetSmart and picked up some supplies. (This was before I owned any bondage supplies, but the sub offered to bring restraints.) I got a dog bowl, a collar, and a leash, and everything was fine until I saw a rubber squeaky chew toy in the shape of a t-bone steak, and I just couldn't resist it. Squeaky chew toy! So cute! And it squeaks!


The guy turned out to be something of a pain. It was very early on in my dalliance with domination, and I didn't realize just how firm a hand he wanted. I didn't get, for a couple hours anyway, that when he said "no" he meant "do it anyway and be pissed off about it." He finally got me sufficiently fed up to get rough (verbally, at first: he was tied down) with him, and after that we got along better. The canine aspect, though, was a bust. I put the collar on him and poured a beer into his bowl and made him drink it, but when I pulled out the squeaky chew toy and squeezed it, I couldn't stop laughing (and saying, "Look! Squeaky chew toy!"), and he thought that I wasn't taking the whole thing seriously enough. I happen to think I was taking it exactly as seriously as was warranted, but I can see his perspective. We spent the night in the motel, and there was some acceptable sex, but then on the way back to DC, he insisted on talking, and I found out that he was a) not so bright, and b) kind of a racist. (Why is it always the most inferior white men who think they're better than everyone else?) I dropped him off at the curb, and that was pretty much the end of canine play for me.


So I didn't want to let this guy hire me to make him fetch, but I couldn't help thinking that there's a better opportunity. Guys who like to be treated like dogs (in a literal fashion, that is) are not that uncommon. Most of them only do it on weekends or the occasional bank holiday, but some of them are full-time, collar-wearing, cage-dwelling property. These guys probably don't have a lot of cash lying around, but I bet their owners do, and surely, every once in a while, the masters want some time off alone, maybe to attend the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show or MAL or something. If they don't want to take the pets along (maybe it's too expensive to take the whole litter to MAL), then they must need to kennel the subs for the occasional weekend. I mean, it's a big enough pain to get someone to look after real dogs for a few days: it's gotta be harder to find a friend to come around to feed your man-dog. (I bet TJ would do it, but he'd spend the whole time rubbing the sub's belly, and then you'd have a spoiled pet. They don't want to be your friends, TJ: they want you to take the place of the alpha top dog, and, well: as if.)


Surely there's a workable business model here. You get a few cages, some rawhide bones, a couple of cases of Alpo, and you're set, right? A few Internet ads, maybe a quarter-page in the International Mr. Leather, some networking among the local doms (where I'm sure I'd pick up some pointers that would be useful in other fun ways), and a whole lot of word of mouth. How could it fail?


But then I remembered the downsides. Getting b&c to go along with it might be difficult. Sure, he's traveling half the time anyway, but if I had to clear enough room in the basement for five or six large cages, I'd have to get rid of his train set (that no one has used in fifteen years), and I'm thinking he'd notice sooner or later. And our location's not ideal. It's too far from the city, but not far enough out in the country to have privacy. The neighbors are not overly nosy, but the neighbor kid comes over with his friends sometimes to play basketball with the hoop on our patio, and I'm thinking that if I was walking one of the mutts and had the plastic grocery bag inside out over my hand to collect his poop, the kids might notice. They're teenagers, so they probably don't ever talk to their parents, but the parents listen in on their phone calls and read their text messages, so there's probably an unacceptable risk of detection.


It's a shame, really. Not so much for me -- even though I was kind of looking forward to Saturday afternoons, when I'd have all the man-dogs lined up and wash them off with the garden hose. But I'm used to sacrifice. It hurts me, though, to know that because suburban parents can't respect their children's fundamental right to privacy, there are Doms all over the DC metro area who won't be able to attend Folsom Street Fair.

Will no one think of the leather daddies?

1 comment:

tornwordo said...

It's funny you talk about this. Whenever I see someone who looks like they try too hard in the gym, it's a turn-off, and I'm now realizing it's the same turn-off if I hear someone spouting off about Jesus. I think, "What is so hard to face about yourself that you've got to hide out there?"