Real Service

by Raven Kaldera

  There’s an excellent vignette about this problem in the first season of the British miniseries Downton Abbey, where a middle-class solicitor (lawyer) is made the heir of a rich and aristocratic family, and assigned a valet. He is uncomfortable with being served in this very personal way, and his contempt for the valet and servants in general shows through with comments like, “It seems like a foolish job for a grown man to be doing.” Eventually the lord of the manor takes him to task, pointing out that the valet enjoys his job and is good at it, and part of their job as employers is to give him a place to do his work. This opens the solicitor’s eyes enough so that he is able to accept personal service more gracefully and with more respect.

  Perhaps more difficult to recognize is servants who feel some level of contempt for their masters. In a society uncomfortable with service, it is common for people in a socially-devalued service position to find a sense of pride in feeling somehow superior to the people they serve. You see this in secretaries who enjoy the fact that their boss can’t find anything in the office alone, and in bitter wives who treat their husbands like overgrown children who need to be kept out of the kitchen. A perfect example is, ironically, one of the most iconic fictional representations of service. Jeeves, from the series of novels by P.G. Wodehouse, is portrayed as in every way superior to his master Bertie Wooster, and while Jeeves is clearly devoted to Wooster, he generally treats Wooster like an idiot child under his care. Jeeves routinely goes against his master’s wishes and manipulates him into whatever course of behavior Jeeves has decided upon, and occasionally destroys his master’s possessions if he deems them to be in poor taste.

  There is nothing wrong with the servant honestly believing that the master would find it difficult or impossible to do certain things without the servant’s assistance, provided there is no contempt for the master in this assessment. However, if the servant desperately wants to be indispensible to the master, it can lead to inappropriate behaviors, such as setting things up in an intentionally obscure way or making it needlessly difficult for anyone else to perform the servant’s tasks. Such a servant is generally very jealous of anyone else offering service to their master, and extremely resistant to delegating or accepting assistance from any other servants. While the relationship would certainly benefit from the servant resolving whatever deep emotional issue is involved here, this sort of attitude doesn’t necessarily destroy a relationship. On the other hand, if the servant consistently feels better about themselves when they think about the master’s shortcomings, or finds themselves hoping the master will fail, this attitude will certainly poison the relationship unless it is completely eradicated.

  The Third Rule of Service is: A bad attitude is corrosive to the servant and the relationship.

  We’ve probably all had to deal with the issue of paid service personnel who go about their jobs with a sullen or hostile attitude, clearly hating what they’re doing. While many of them may be forced by economic circumstances into doing service work that they are not suited for, consensual servants don’t have that excuse. That doesn’t always stop them from having a lousy attitude, of course. Servants sometimes use sulking or bitching while they work as a stress outlet and feel somewhat better afterwards, but we believe that it’s more of a problem in the long run than they might believe.

  Some masters don’t care if their servant goes about grumbling, so long as the job gets done and they don’t have to hear it. Some don’t even care about hearing it, so long as there is no actual disobedience. While the master may not mind, the person who is most harmed by serving with a bad attitude is the servant. Eventually, over time, service will become associated in subtle ways with unpleasantness, and they will begin to hate their job, and perhaps the master who is the hub of that job. To keep going day after day in a service relationship, the servant must make an ongoing effort to associate service with happiness and contentment as often as possible, and this means actively working to find ways to have a good attitude.

  One way to find a better attitude is to strive for excellence in service, even when it doesn’t seem like an “important” task. For many servants, the majority of their work is not important tasks, but simple, repetitive, low-priority tasks. Many s-types find it more fulfilling to do a task according to very specific instructions or to a very high standard rather than just grinding through and getting it done. Tackling a precision job with all their energy and getting the master’s well-earned approval can be very satisfying for them. Masters should consider the idea that if the servant doesn’t like a particular task, making it more of a challenge might actually get them to like it more. (And if it turns out that you make it harder and they hate it even more, when you go back to the original way it will seem so much easier in comparison.)

  The Fourth Rule of Service is: A good servant wants their master to be right.

  The rule isn’t “A good servant wishes their master was always right.” Masters are human, and sometimes they are wrong. However, when the master and the servant disagree about what is the right way to do something, a good servant wants their master’s decision to work out well, even if that means the servant was wrong. Servants are human too, and sometimes they are wrong. Most people have no trouble accepting this as true in the abstract. They don’t claim to be perfect or demand absolute infallibility from others.

  And yet, one of the biggest sources of friction in a service relationship is when the servant honestly believes that their master is wrong about an order, or has a wrong perception that is negatively affecting the servant – or perhaps has a wrongheaded idea that has nothing to do with the servant, but simply knowing that the master holds this ridiculous idea damages their trust in their master in general. While there are a lot of ways to respectfully bring a potential error to a master’s notice, and good masters will admit when they have actually been incorrect, sometimes it’s a matter of world view or priorities. (We touch more on this problem in the chapter on Optimizing For Priorities.)

  It’s not uncommon for a servant to be faced with the dilemma of wanting to be right versus wanting to be obedient. However, it is something of an emotional catch-22: If the servant is continually right in a difference of opinion, this means that the master is continually wrong … and this means that the master’s judgment cannot be trusted, which means that the servant is not safe while following it. On the other hand, if the master is right … well, the servant is wrong, and being wrong rankles most people. The choice is either to be unsafe or to be rankled, and the only good options are these:

  1) Make a decision, once and for all, as to whether the master is actually so incompetent that following their orders at all times will cause someone serious harm. If this is really the case, you cannot serve them honorably, because they are not trustworthy.

  2) If your decision is otherwise, focus on ways to relax and let go. One slave that we know has a mantra: “No one is going to die if I do things Master’s way.” Let go of the need to be right – because obedience is more important now. Let go of the worry and the need to be right. Let go of the responsibility. That’s one of the perks of being on the bottom end, anyway – you’re allowed to give it up and relax, and be carried along by the master’s will.

  It isn’t necessary for the master to always be right, or for the servant to pretend the master was right when that is obviously not the case, but conflicts are resolved so much more smoothly if the servant genuinely wants the master’s decision to turn out to be right. For example, it is easy for a servant to get stuck in an attitude of “I think you are wrong and I am right, and I don’t think there is any way for you to convince me otherwise.” It is radically different when the servant can reframe that feeling, and instead say to the master, “I don’t understand how you could possibly be right on this, but maybe I’m missing something. Could you help me understand where you are coming from?”

  Motivations for Service

  Why bother to serve? Why do s-types do it? Besides, of course, “…because it�
��s what subs/slaves do, so I’m doing it.”? In watching and talking to s-types for many years, we’ve discerned that there seem to be three basic types of motivation for service. We’re calling them Transactional, Devotional, and Positional, and we’ll discuss each of them separately.

  However, as you read this, it’s important to keep in mind that each person is a complicated mix of motivations. Even if those motivations might fall into three categories, people don’t. Our motivations may shift from person to situation to activity; we may manifest any of these at various times. These categories are presented so that people can have words for why they do things, and perhaps identify if one of these is more dominant than others in their personality.

  Transactional Service

  In transactional motivations for service, the individual is serving because they are getting a direct benefit from it. Ideally this is an exchange of equal value to them, or they would refuse to do it. The most obvious example of this is paid service – the cleaning lady and the waiter do their jobs because they are getting a paycheck at the end of the day. With unpaid situations, the exchange can be more or less overt or subtle; some people spell it all out in a contract, while for others it’s just “assumed” that “I do this for you now because I know that you’ll do that for me later, so it’s worth it.”

  There are all sorts of reasons why people might consider service worth doing even if it isn’t attractive on its own merits. A live-in houseboy or housemaid might clean the house because they’re getting free rent and a certain amount of dominance from a trustworthy M-type. A part-time sub might fetch their dominant drinks at the bar because they know they’re going to get some kinky action later, or because it adds to the fun of temporarily imagining themselves to be a slave, forced to serve or else something vague and terrible and titillating might happen. Another might serve because it gets them the appreciation of the people that they’re serving, and they like to know that they can make a positive impact on the lives of others.

  Every power dynamic should have at least a small amount of transactional motivation, because it keeps the servant in touch with their needs and whether those needs are actually getting met. If the servant is no longer getting what they need and what they believe that the master is obligated to give them, they’ll become resentful and eventually leave. This is one reason why it’s good to have largely transactional relationships clearly delineated; the master needs to know what the servant believes that they are supposed to be getting from them. Sometimes these relationships are built entirely on assumptions, and if those assumptions are not in line with each other, it will fail very quickly. Of course, this also means that the servant needs to be completely honest – not only with the master but with themselves as well – about what it is that they expect from the bargain. With straightforward honesty, this kind of service can work out very well in a long-distance relationship, or one where both parties can only see each other periodically, where the other motivations would be more painful and difficult.

  One of the drawbacks to transactional service is that while it can work very well for short-term encounters, it’s not so useful for long-term, 24/7, emotionally intimate relationships where boundaries can blur and “rewards” can get put off due to the vagaries of life interfering. The constant “accounting” gets tricky when it’s every minute of every day, and sooner or later someone will start feeling shortchanged. Another drawback is that this motivation can only be pushed so far, as it is easily swayed by personal desires and selfishness. It’s not necessarily the best foundation for a property-ownership situation, for example, or a no-recourse commitment where the slave is expected to be there permanently.

  Devotional Service

  Devotional motivations for service happen when the submissive serves out of love. It doesn’t have to be romantic love – although it often is – but there is usually a feeling of “You are such a wonderful person that I am moved to do things for you, and I want very much to please you and to make you happy.” Deep satisfaction is gained from helping the object of their warm feelings, in a way that wouldn’t happen if they were rendering that service to some random person.

  Love is an amazingly strong motivation, and can carry someone a long way in the face of difficulty. Therefore, this motivation lends itself best to long-term romantic relationships, and secondarily to relationships where the sub looks up to and admires the master as a person. There may also be a desire for the feeling of “belonging” – to a person, to a family, to a cause. Since devotional service is usually very one-pointed – “I serve you and no other!” – the master needs to be very careful about lending their servant to others. Long-distance relationships are the hardest for someone with this motivation, for obvious reasons.

  The drawbacks to devotional service is that inevitably, a day will come when the servant doesn’t feel all that loving, and may decide that service isn’t being rendered on that day. We’re all human, and eventually every couple – especially if they are living together – has a moment of “Damn it, today I just hate you!” Even if they get over it in a matter of hours, during that time their service will often be sabotaged by the lack of positive feelings. This can be particularly problematic with the combination of an emotionally volatile servant and “mission critical” tasks. A servant motivated primarily by devotion would do well to cultivate a little of the other two types of motivation to pull them through the “I hate you today” mornings.

  Positional Service

  Positional motivations for service come from the servant’s strong sense of identity of themselves as a service-oriented person. They serve because it’s part of who they are, and to refuse to serve would be to sabotage their own self-worth, which is often based on how well a job they do. Positionally-motivated servants take pride in serving as perfectly as possible, and they are the ones who get up to help because it needs doing, regardless of who is asking. They are the most likely to attempt to cultivate “pure” service, treating it as an art and requiring little in the way of appreciation. This category is the “ideal” slave in Laura Antoniou’s fictional Marketplace series, where slaves are sold to random wealthy owners who may or may not be even remotely worthy as people, and the slaves are expected to serve their monied masters to the best of their ability anyway. As you might imagine, positionally-motivated servants do “lend out” quite well, should a master want such a thing.

  Putting the chairs away after the BDSM potluck munch for the fiftieth time won’t fly for the transactionally-motivated servant (“What’s in it for me?”) or the devotionally-motivated servant (“I don’t love you; why should I do what you say?”), but the positionally-motivated servant will get up and do it anyway every time, because it’s what they do. It is central to how they see themselves. However, one of the drawbacks to being a positionally-motivated servant is that their need to serve anyone, anything, for their own self-worth, can get them taken advantage of by unscrupulous people who want something for nothing.

  Another drawback to this motivation is that it does tend to objectify dominants and perhaps see them as interchangeable. In contrast to the devotionally-motivated submissive who is fiercely bound to one particular person, the positionally-motivated servant may be happy to serve anyone for the sake of the service. Alongside the potential problems of choosing a less-than-worthy master, they might also irritate some dominants with their seeming lack of caring about whom they serve. Many dominants want to be seen as special, at least by their submissives, and they may be put off by the idea that they might as well be anyone else who would accept the submissive’s service. Adding a bit of devotion to the mix will help in that regard, and cultivating some transactional motivations will help to keep them from being taken advantage of too often.

  Styles of Service

  In this section, we aren’t referring to “service roles”, such as butler or houseboy or secretary or whore. We’re talking about two different methods of giving service, which we refer to as “reactive service”
and “proactive service”.

  Reactive service focuses on immediate obedience. The servant’s job is to do exactly what they are told and no more than that, as quickly as possible. If they have not received a direct order to do it, they should not do it. If they haven’t received any direct orders, they should be waiting patiently in lieu of standing orders. It is not their job to think ahead to the next possible order, or try to guess the master’s bigger goal, or worry about any potential underlying subtle messages. Reactive service, at its plainest, is quite literal, although one of the pitfalls of doing nothing but reactive service for a long time can be the development of over-literality – “Which three eggs should I scramble, Mistress?”

  This kind of service is most likely to be used in the beginning of a service relationship, because it allows the servant to learn the methods and preferences of the master while allowing them the smallest possible leeway to screw up. It’s also good at training the servant’s priorities. All too often, the servant will look at the master’s methods and think to themselves, “I’d do it differently, and my way is better.” We’ll talk more about this pitfall later, but suffice it to say that a period of reactive service, where they are not given the chance – or even the situational temptation – to subtly insert their methods instead of the original orders, can help to break them of that mindset.

  Reactive service is on a continuum with proactive service on the other end. Proactive service can happen once a servant is familiar with the master’s methods, preferences, and general way of moving through the world. Ideally, they would not only have internalized all standing orders, but would have developed a little “master puppet” in their head who would tell them whether a given action would be approved of. They need to have an invisible version of those letter bracelets, one which says WWMW – “What Would Master Want?” They also need to have internalized the reality of their situation to the point where they would not be inserting their own desires and priorities and telling themselves that this is what the master would want … if he/she were sensible, of course.