Robert J. Rubel, born Robert Jack Rubel II on 5 October 1944, is called Dr. Bob in leather and power-exchange circles. He is an American author and an educational sociologist. He brought a research habit into BDSM writing, especially Master/slave (M/s) relationships, total power exchange (TPE), and dungeon protocol. For adults who want a system rather than a one-night scene, his books treat a power exchange as something you can name, record, evaluate, and repair.
School research: behavior as data
The academic base is education and criminology. He finished an undergraduate degree at Colorado State University in 1966, then taught English in the Los Angeles public schools, which sent him back to university. In 1970 he took a master’s at Boston University and completed a Ford Foundation program at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, set up to train urban school superintendents. In 1977 he received a doctorate in education with a minor in criminology.
While that degree was still underway he was a visiting fellow at the National Institute of Justice, compiling the literature on school-based crime and violence. The job was a compiler’s job: surveys, bibliographies, process guides, federal policy briefs, not a memoir. He helped found the National Alliance for Safe Schools (NASS), which worked with districts to spot patterns of unwanted behavior and to change policy. From the 1983 handbook on program-level impact evaluation of school security to the 1985 compendium of survey instruments for student, teacher, and school victimization, he treated behavior as data instead of a moral fog. That habit later moved, whole, into how he wrote about power exchange.
Authority transfer as a teachable structure
From 2001 he researched alternative sexuality in a systematic way and used the phrase “authority transfer.” He meant something sharper than a loose “kink.” Adults, by agreement, hand over decision rights as a relationship structure. The handoff is not limited to a single scene. It can be studied, taught, and practiced. The people in the books are adults who have already talked it through.
The educator shows up in the titles. In the Nazca Plains years he numbered books like a university catalog: Master/slave Relations: Communications 401 and Solutions 402. The numbers say the books are homework, not a memoir you finish in one sitting. He wanted Dominants and slaves to have language for how they actually live, so the exchange can be named, written down, and fixed.
Early handbooks: scene skills and the safety spine
In the mid-2000s Nazca Plains issued his trade handbooks. Flames of Passion: Handbook of Erotic Fire Play, with David Walker (2006), treats fire as a skill with a safety spine. The point is burn risk and how not to get hurt, not a music-video flourish, and the book is not a substitute for in-person teaching. In 2012 Nazca Plains issued two different packages, video plus print, under other titles: Fire Play: A Safety Training Course (a 70-minute DVD and a 64-page book) and Impact Play 101: Building Your Skills (a 70-minute DVD and a 48-page book). Those packages are not a substitute for mentoring in the room either. Fire and impact still injure people when the skill is missing.
On sex technique, Squirms, Screams, and Squirts was Playboy Online’s number-one Valentine gift-book pick, and Penthouse Forum flagged it in the 2009 Valentine issue, for practical instruction that moves sex from “great” to “extraordinary.” Screams of Pleasure takes up extraordinary sex for people with erectile dysfunction, a subject this shelf often skips. That run of books fixed his name in leather education, and in 2008 he received the Pantheon of Leather Community Choice – Man award.
Editing, not one guru voice
He was an editor as well as an author. From 2007 to 2008 he was managing editor of Power Exchange Magazine and edited the Power Exchange Books Resource Series. The series brought in guest writers on disability play, disagreements about protocol, slavery as an art, age play — adults acting, not minors — and rope and power. Leather teaching, in that model, is a guest faculty, not one person’s voice. The special issues also logged the micro-identities the leather market was already selling: bootblacking, pony play, pup play, Daddy/boy. Those labels are adult roles.
Later books: talk, and keeping the relationship
From 2014 he published on communication and total power exchange, mostly with M. Fairfield, from Red Eight Ball Press. The sequence is the syllabus. BDSM Mastery – Basics is party etiquette. BDSM Mastery – Relationships is how to build a mindful D/s relationship. Master/slave Mastery updates the M/s concepts. Master/slave Mastery – Protocols treats protocol as the intent of the relationship. In 2020, Safe, Sexy and Consensual, with Indigo the Goddess, puts SSC — safe, sane, and consensual — inside a “dungeon magic” frame. In One Ear and Out the Other, with Veronica Petterson, is about talk itself: a power exchange fails more often because people do not hear each other than because a flogger hits the floor.
Photographs, video, and the class that outlasted the hotel
He also used pictures. The 2006 photographic trio Parts, Wholes, and Holes is studio composition: an M/s educator is allowed to look at a body as a picture, which is a different job from treating it as a protocol object. The 2012 DVDs show fire play and impact. The pictures sit beside the prose as another way to teach the same material.
He has taught across the North American leather circuit, including Leather in the Pines and Great Lakes Leather. After the hotel ballroom empties, a monthly Zoom on M/s theory and practice is still the classroom. For adults studying structured power exchange, Dr. Bob’s shelf is definitions, process, evaluation, and repair. The dungeon is not a school. The writer still thinks like someone who once audited one. His claim is narrow: if you use power exchange as a relationship technology, you can study it. He does not replace other teachers on risk, on the inner life of leather, or on rope.
