When i was growing up and coming to terms with stuff i remember thinking that i had found myself not in one but 2 very unlikely and undesirable situations, kind of like being locked outside your home AND having nothing to eat, or being stranded on an island AND having one leg only. First of all i had to come to terms with being gay, "why me?", "what are the odds?", "that kind of sucks" and all that. At the same time i had to come to terms with the fact that it wasn't just that i was attracted to boys rather than girls but that what got me excited was the idea of being a slave. Working past the first issue is relatively easy, it's the second that's a bitch, it's one more thing you have to learn to deal with. If we consider the human population on earth, you start thinking: ok, i'm in this minority group that's, say, 10% of the whole. Within this group you actually have to understand you belong to an even smaller minority: the kinky people, that might be even less than 10%, i don't know, i've never seen any statistics on that published anywhere. You start by thinking you might be the only one on earth who could be into all this, then, thanks also to the beauty of the internet and sites such as recon, you realise there are many more people who are into the same things. However, there's no denying that you're still in a very small minority.
Even in a city like London the kinky people, doms and subs, are a very small group, you always meet someone who knows someone you know. I know a guy, we'll call him sub1, he's met dom1. Well, i've also met dom1. Dom1 knows dom2 who also knows sub1. I've spoken to dom2 several times. I also know dom3 and dom4 who know each other. dom3 has also met sub1 and dom4 has shared sub2 with dom1. Now, i'm not just saying numbers, these are actual people. It's just like living in the tiniest of villages.
1 comment:
how do you think the internet affects that?
seems to me that there's a percentage of the gay bdsm community that only ever go out (never online) and another percentage who only ever go online and never go out and yet another percentage that do both.
I used to think the ratios were about 10/10/80 but lately I'm not so sure.
A long long time ago (before AIDS and the Internet) this kinky village of ours (and maybe not in London - my experience is from SF) used to take better care of itself. It used to have rituals and ways to do things. It used to be that if you wanted to be a Master, you had to serve one as a slave first. It makes perfect sense - how are you going to know what 10 lashes on your back feels like - unless you've experienced it before. If you know what 10 feels like, then when you pick 50, you know what you're doing, rather than t(h)rashing a new slave out of ignorance. Makes for a safer village... more happy people.
It used to be that, like any village, there were people with village roles - a town council, a policeman, a doctor, a dentist, teachers, who helped make the village a better place. I don't see that so much any more. Once most of the villagers died out, so did these concepts.
It's always been assumed that new villagers who repopulated the village were anti-roles.. because there were some downsides to the old way it was done - for example, not all Masters liked to be slaves before being Masters, no matter what they learned or didn't learn as a result - but it just might be now that there's more of a community spirit (and the disadvantages of not having the community may outweigh the advantages) that the problem now is just a lack of knowledge of how to make a village into a community.
Dunno... what do you think?
-JB
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