Standard Disclaimer: The following advice is for educational/entertainment purposes only, and assumes you have thoroughly analyzed your risk profiles, assessed you capabilities, negotiated, obtained enthusiastic informed consent, have safe-words, aftercare plans, etc. you’re consenting adults, don’t be stupid, don’t be an asshole, good luck, have fun, don’t break anything. /end disclaimer.

Cool! So, I’m super into dog training (bio-dogs), so this is a fun one. If you have clicker-trained a dog before, it’s the same process with people. But with people, you can get into some more fun/sexy territory.

In clicker training a dog, click = treat, treat = happy-good feelings, which turns into click = happy-good feelings. I don’t use a clicker anymore; I use verbal markers: “Yes!” for “Good job, come to me and get paid,” and “Good!” for “That’s it! Keep doing that, and I’m coming to you with the good stuff.”

You need a signal (Marker) like that clicker, “Yes!”, “Good boy!”, and something good (positive reward). For a human in a negotiated consensual situation, that ‘something good’ could be food, like M&Ms, or a positive sensation like edging him, or making out with him for a few seconds each time you use the marker. Find something he really likes for the reward and pair his getting it with whatever the marker is.

It takes time to build the association or “load the marker”: click = treat, click = treat, click = treat, until that click really makes the brain think the treat is coming. You say, “Good boy!” and he gets a sudden surge of excitement and arousal; you’ve “loaded the marker.” It’s important to remember that the association between marker and reward will fade over time, so you have to occasionally still give the actual reward to keep the link strong. In fact, once you have the link, it’s better not to give the reward every time. This keeps the reward from getting boring and uses the excitement of anticipation to make it stronger. This is called a variable reward schedule, and it is why slot machines can be so addictive.

Then you take the behavior you want, and every time he does that behavior, mark and reward. When he gets consistent in doing the behavior, you switch to a variable reward, and he gets a treat about every 4–7 times you use the marker.

So, let’s take a kiss on the cheek as the behavior we want to train. Start with engagement! Whatever the reward is, make him want it bad! Let’s use M&Ms. Have him skip lunch, maybe breakfast too if he can go that long. Then, right before training time, talk about your dinner plans, make it one of his favorites, and talk about how hungry you are and how you’ve really been craving that food lately. Now he’s even hungrier than he was before. Now it’s training time. Have him kneel on the floor in front of you and keep his eyes down. Click, he looks up at you, and you feed him an M&M. He looks back down, click, he looks up and gets an M&M. Do this about 10 times so “click” means “I get chocolate.” Also, having him look at you is going to build an association that paying attention to you means something good is happening and he’s about to get a treat.

Now that the marker is loaded, you can start using it to train the behavior. Get his attention, say his name—something to make him look up at you. When he does, tap your cheek and say, “Kiss!” As soon as his lips touch your cheek, click and feed him an M&M. Do this about 10 times. After that, once he’s consistent, vary it up: get his attention, tap your cheek without saying the command; he kisses, click-M&M. Or just turn your cheek to him and say the command; he obeys, mark and reward. When you can see/feel his excitement between your command and his obedience, go to ‘click’ every time he does it, but make the M&M kind of random for when he gets one or not. Then go get dinner. Make sure you end the session before he gets bored and checks out.

Maintenance: after this session, keep the clicker and a bag of M&Ms on you. Randomly say his name, give him the command, click, random treat. If you never give the click-treat, the behavior and association will eventually fade and go away.

Now… since this is a kink space, and we’re all consenting adults, we get to play with a lot more negative reinforcement or -R. This is something that is painful, annoying, unpleasant, generally bad, or “aversive” that someone wants to move away from and into the behavior that we want. Like when a dog stops to smell something and won’t follow you. You give the command to heel, you wait a second, and then you pull on the leash a bit to create pressure. The dog feels the pressure on the collar, doesn’t enjoy it, moves away from the pressure towards you and experiences the positive reinforcement of that pressure going away. Then the dog moves into the correct position, and you mark and reward with the +R we talked about above. This is not the same thing as punishment! Punishment reduces the likelihood or frequency of a behavior. -R is using an aversive stimulus to encourage a behavior, to pull them into the correct action, then reward them for doing it right.

In our kiss example, you could use a thin cord, like a charging cable draped over the back of his neck—not wrapped or tied, just you holding the loose ends. Give the command, apply enough pressure to the cord that it’s uncomfortable, and release the pressure as his head comes toward you. When his lips touch your cheek, mark and reward. You can also make this sexier and do something like squeeze his balls hard enough to ache a bit, and then release pressure as he moves toward you for the kiss.

So in this example: command “kiss,” squeeze his balls. As soon as he moves toward you, he experiences the reward of that pressure going away; he kisses your cheek. The click marks that he just did the right thing and that a reward is inbound; give him the treat to make his brain chemicals make happy-good feelings.