Earlier this year a dom contacted me and we have a brief conversation. Brief, because pretty much all he said was "hi, give me your email address, I will send you a BDSM checklist, return it to me". His profile wasn't too bad, and I suppose I was desperate/horny as I usually don't respond to messages that already have a tone of superiority towards me from the get-go.
I tried to do the checklist - it was a long and detailed one - but ultimately I gave up. I noticed that I wrote a whole lot in the "extra comments" part, and realised that the things I wrote there were infinitely more valuable to a dom than all the yes/no and 0-10 things I had to complete. All that was filler, clutter, stuff that got in the way of me telling what exactly attracted me to bondage and BDSM, and who -I- was and what I wanted.
Besides, if that particular dom can't even trouble himself to have a decent conversation with me, what's my guarantee that a session with him wouldn't be a quick and lazy job on his part? It certainly doesn't inspire much confidence that he has a list do all the preparation work for him.
There also the fact that BDSM, in my humble opinion, isn't digital. It's not just 0 or 1. Black or white. Even if you go from 1 to 10 for let's say, pain, my 5 isn't your 5. I'm not saying numbers are completely meaningless... but they're pretty meaningless overall. Especially compared to using, you know, words.
Checklists have their uses, inexperienced people can look at it as a list of possibilities, and for some people it might be interesting to fill in the same list every year and compare it to the previous years to see what has changed. Even then, the best thing you can do is compare checklists and then make your own personalised one.
I had a sub send me a checklist, but I already knew everything I had to know through chatting with him. It was a nice extra I suppose but superfluous as far as I was concerned.
As an alternative to a checklist, I had someone ask me to simply send him a mail with my likes, dislikes and limits. I like that approach, it allowed me to go into detail on why I like certain things, while mentioning previous experiences. It allows a lot more freedom and creativity compared to having just a list to follow. Of course a lazy sub could just send a mail containing a list of things with no further explanation...
Another alternative is having the sub write a few fantasies, or stories about things that excite him and that he wants to do. It requires some creativity but something like that gives (or should give) a good insight to the sub's headspace and his personalised view on BDSM. At the very least it should show how 'grounded' he is, if his main fantasy is about being fucked by 50 guys in public... well, at least it's a fantasy the dom can use during play I suppose.
Anyway, as always this is just my personal opinion, checklists can be good I suppose but I personally prefer the alternatives I talked about here. Also, none of my UK friends/masters had me fill in a checklist, and look how awful that turned out! So much miscommunication, so many thing that went wrong...tsk tsk. It's obvious that having actual conversations amounts to nothing!
But yeah, everyone does what he/she wants of course. Actually I read an interesting article... but that will have to wait for another day :)
