Given the subject matter of my blog, I assume many or most of my readers know what a BDSM checklist is. But I didn’t, when I first started seeing Boy Toy.

For those of you who might not know, a BDSM checklist is a list of sexual activities related to sadism and masochism, power play, fetishes, kink… There are different lists out there (for instance, here, here and here), but the bottom line is that for each activity, one must indicate their level of experience and their willingness to explore it – or not.

These checklists are usually filled out by submissives and given to potential Doms. I believe the idea is to help along with pre-play negotiations. From what I’ve read online, it is suggested for the Dom to fill one out as well, and then compare lists to see if both players are compatible.

That’s not really how it happened with Boy Toy and I. He’s the one who mentioned the thing to me in the first place, since I didn’t know about it. I wanted to know what he liked, kinky sex wise, and he’s not one to just enumerate his kinks in a casual conversation. I’ve bothered him with this many times, and the best he can come up with is: “It’s no fun if I just tell you, better if you find out.” Humph.

All well and good, but… I’m new at this. Remember? Oh and I’m insecure, too (someday I’ll stop using this as an excuse/crutch, I swear). He tells me I should do whatever I feel like, but I’m not that imaginative, and I don’t really feel like doing anything he’d hate. I’m a junkie for his reactions, I love, love, love seeing him gasp, blush, get wet, hard… But the opposite is also true and any negative reaction just kills me. 

So somewhere in our conversations, the BDSM checklist came up. He had filled one out for a previous partner, it turns out, and I think he still had it. But that was a long time ago and things change, so I decided he should fill it out again, for me. As an assignment.

A few days later, he shyly presented me with a bundle of pages. Ten pages. This particular checklist comes in five columns. The first one lists the activities, naturally. In the second column, Boy Toy had to indicate with a yes if he’d ever done the activity, and for each of the activities he had done, in the next column he had to mark how he felt about said activity (0 means did not like at all, 5 means a wild turn-on). That’s three columns. In column number four, for each activity he’d never tried before, he had to write if he wants to explore it, the choices of answers being yes, no, maybe, as punishment and not yet. Finally, in the last column, for each yes, maybe and not yet, he had to indicate how he felt about exploring the activity in question, with the same scale from 0 to 5.

Ten pages means a LOT of activities. Some of them, I must admit, have me raising an eyebrow. Cold room? What, does that mean I’d lock him up in a cold room? Or delibaretly keep the heat low, in winter, and force him to strip? I also admit I don’t know what’s the difference between “Daddy/boy” and “Daddy/boi”. Dilation. Injections. Gun play?! I guess I’ll be Googling these eventually…

Nonetheless, this is a great, great tool to have. This list is a complete, in-depth tour of Boy Toy’s kinky side. For instance, thanks to the checklist, I know that he’s already been given away temporarily (he liked that) but never tried gun play (phew!). He likes house rules, but house work not so much. Humiliation is ok in private, but not in public. I know that he’s never tried harness-suspension play but would very much like to. This is  where I got the idea of trying hypnosis play (he’d never tried it before, but was pretty turned on by the idea).

I haven’t used Boy Toy’s checklist to negotiate anything with him. I use it to know how to get to him. So a tool of power, not one of negotiation. I haven’t filled it out in return, either. It’s my opinion that I totally won on this one, and if I ever lost the list, I’d definitely have him fill out a new one.