Can We Get Back To Basics?
I’ve written a lot lately about our need to take a second look at BDSM educational efforts. (See links below to my related posts.)
I recently posted some questions to my leather/BDSM kinkster friends on my Facebook wall and it generated a lot of likes (67) and discussion comments (58), including some rather negative reactions to my post. One particular comment to my post from author Janet Hardy (see her latest book, Girlfag: A Life Told In Sex and Musicals
My Original Facebook Post
Fellow leather/BDSM kinksters, are we over-complicating the prerequisites for having fun? Don’t we all just want to socialize, play and have fun with what we do? Is basic play and fun supposed to require a bunch of classes, studying, and learning a complex system of scene behaviors? I am all for deep dive discussions and learning, but is it fair to anyone to require so much to simply have fun with kink?
Janet Hardy’s Reply Comment
I think the idea of “tops whose basic skills are lacking” has a great deal to do with the amount of attention given in the scene these days to ultra-high-end techniques: inflations, fireplay, etc.
I have never met a person who came into the scene because they were being kept awake nights by obsessive fantasies about having their scrotum inflated.
The Big Three of core fantasies are pretty straightforward: bondage, impact and roleplay (in which I include D/s). It is possible to teach the safety basics of any of those in an hour, one can build a perfectly wonderful sex life around any one of them (let alone combining them!), and one can spend one’s life learning to connect and soar using nothing but those.
But as long as we’re putting it out there that “real” players do things like inserting piercing needles and then caning over them and then dripping hot wax over them and then using a knife to remove them and then pissing on the damaged skin… or whatever… then there are going to be tops who try it because they think it’s cool. And there are going to be people who get hurt.
The “merit badge” school of BDSM, in which a top’s competence is judged by how many techniques they know rather than by how much fun their partners have, has done incalculable harm: not just in the number of injuries caused, but in making wonderful tops feel inadequate, wonderful bottoms feel frustrated, and wonderful people feel alienated from the scene because they came looking for love, intensity and connection, and instead they’ve found dehumanization and their erotic life treated as an engineering problem. I count myself among those people – this isn’t the only reason I’m no longer active in the scene, but it’s one of the major ones.
My other related posts:
Patrick Mulcahey’s Important Leather Reign Speech
BDSM Education, Has It Gone Too Far?
Are Our Educational Efforts Backfiring?