Book Review: Mastering The Art of Dominance: 113 Tips that Turn Amateur into Expert Dom

Rating:

Who is this book for? A Dominant who has been regularly practicing BDSM and has some knowledge of the scene and mechanics of a BDSM relationship. Someone who wishes to further their skills and learn how to navigate more challenging scenarios involving multiple people or difficult submissives.

What will you learn? You will learn the importance of discipline and consistency when working with a submissive and how to build a curriculum for more challenging submissives. The book also covers the etiquette of how to navigate relationships with submissives who have other play partners. You will learn the etiquette at orgies and larger play parties for poly-amorous folks.  The book also includes a short section with good advice on making personal ads and how to slowly introduce kink to a vanilla play partner.

Warnings: This book is highly gendered with the Dom being male and the submissive being female. Sometimes there are broad assumptions about behavior that are based on observations. Occasionally, the sub is mildly degraded by being referred to as a child. The author mentions that falling in love with your submissive might undermine the relationship (it's true, it might, but...so what? Love is its own grand adventure).

My Thoughts:

This book was written to help the struggling Dom to take better charge in the relationship as well as how to navigate having an emotionally complex submissive who may be troubled or manipulative.

The author reinforces the importance of creating discipline for your submissive and consistency within your relationship: be decisive, set rules and stick with them, keep your promises. It is true that a lot of dominants begin to fail in their roles when they don't uphold their own rules or they don't take time to set rules in the first place. Structure is a fundamental component of BDSM relationships afterall. From this book’s perspective training and punishment is specifically for behavior modification only (versus funishment). 

The author then goes deeper into curriculum building designed specifically for when you want your submissive to participate in growth training. Growth training is designing your training regime to teach the submissive about themselves to help the submissive with self acceptance and to push their limits. When pushing limits Larocco touches upon the many aspects that your curriculum will need to include such as fear reduction, exposure, building confidence and punishments/rewards around the submissive’s progress. The curriculum should also include setting a theme for your scenes and participating in strong communication. The author then goes a level deeper and recommends using journaling type exercises that are commonly used in CBT psychotherapy to help the submissive’s personal growth. These journaling recommendations are the most helpful components in the book in my opinion as they give direct actionable advice that you could assign to a submissive today.

Larocco additionally outlines some things to look for when dealing with manipulative submissives such as monitoring their exaggerated emotions, watching out for topping from the bottom, monitoring if they are attention hogs or if they are excessively rude.

The latter third of the book is focused on how to manage situations with multiple players in complex and overlapping dynamics such as multiple dominants sharing a single submissive or many submissives who are shared by one dominant. He is considerate enough to recommend that a dominant with multiple submissives makes sure that they have the proper time to dedicate to each player in their lives. These types of dynamics require extensive cooperation and communication between players. He wisely recommends in these situations that each submissive have a purpose to serve, that they know their role and that they know who they are answering to. That all sounds logical of course but the more players involved the more egos and the more difficult it can be to keep track of who is who. When jealousy becomes involved Larocco recommends that attention and care be redistributed to support the sub in need.

Lastly the book goes into orgy etiquette and public play and touches on some recommendations if you are going to throw a party yourself. Largely, these recommendations focus on being polite, being prepared and respecting consent.

This book had a lot of interesting tidbits to offer. Overall I think its greatest value lies in what it teaches about curriculum building and multiple partner management.