A friend recently lent me a book titled “How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers”. Amazon trailers it as “One of the funniest and most astutely observed works on the sexes since James Thurber… [It] turns the often-expressed axiom ‘Men are dogs’ into a howling little handbook on men for contemporary women.” And I do tend to agree. Reading it, and showing it to women friends and pro-domme colleagues, we all laughed ruefully at how accurate it was.

My pro-domme colleagues in particular, immediately, almost unconsciously, substituted “slave” for “man” – creating their own book “How to Make Your Slave Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers”. And we all observed, that the lessons described in the book were what we all had been doing for years with our various slaves.

For example, “Doggie Dos and Don'ts: Gentle strokes and playful petting techniques are positive motivational techniques for rewarding good behavior." Contrary to popular perception, we dommes rarely shout at our slaves. We usually “ask” them to do something – although a command that may be couched as a request is still a command, not a request. And we like to reward them for complying with our “requests” with positive, supportive, stroking language. “Good boy” or “good girl” works wonders.

Interestingly, another measure of how to the point this little book is, are the review comments on Amazon. You can’t always tell the gender of the reviewers, but there are quite a lot of outraged and unhappy reviews – claiming that the book perpetuates “outrageous thinking”, that it is “massively sexist”, that it is “despicable”, that it is “demeaning”. I wonder how many of those reviewers are men – feeling uncomfortable about what women really think about them. Perhaps they protest too much?

Ms Emilie