BDSM Microcultures

Having an old fear that I do a botched job of it, the complications of communicating often haunt me.

What work is required to diminish the confusions - large and small - stemming from different:

• Levels and kinds of cultural literacy
• Life experiences

Books I’ve read, jobs I’ve held, when and where I was born, my friendships; they all make me at least a mite unlike you. Take the last: we’ve all been around two old friends whose sentences rich in shared history and common interests render much of their conversation unintelligible.

Within the realm of BDSM, kink, fetish, WIITWD - whatever - we are members of different small nations, tribes: microcultures. Really there is no such realm with the possible exception of when we confront the conventional majority who if they don’t despise us cringe when they contemplate our pleasures. We form transitory alliances for purposes of self-defense.

One of the most conspicuous divides is what is obscurely referred to as The Scene. The scene we’ll casually - if only for my purposes here - describe as the sum of all the people who attend munch group meetings, fetish parties and fairs.

The scene is the tip of our iceberg. And like that tip - while visible - it hides a vast hidden body. Callously I’ll ignore the subdivisions within it.

That doesn’t stop people from railing against the visible folks. Otherwise smart people lay at their door the popularity of leather. Blame them for all manner of presumed forms of expected behavior. Sort of as if they are a fraternity that we are all presumed to be wishing to join.

You might even imagine the members a cabal shaping our own fetish nature. Really we see little of them and what we know even less. In seeking erotic self-realization their role in our lives is zilch.

The closest I came to interacting with the local scene here in central North Carolina was once being very active in a local online discussion group. I met a few of them in person. One gave me my first experience of being dominated. They were an amiable, largely colorless group of people. Though I’d have been welcome I never went to a much or a fetish party. Atypical sexuality is often only a bond if you are engaged in it.

My own BDSM education was mostly through usenet in the days before and just after the arrival of the web. People active in their local kink communities participated there back then. So I encountered the debates that seek truths that don’t exist - the only truth being variousness - debates that will continue forever. The quest for certainty, the desire to be right nothing will ever quench.

In talking with kinky people whose primary reference is fetish parties and the many tops and bottoms they know those of us who know only those with whom we with should remember their experience of fetish is unlike ours. And they should be mindful we aren’t part of the groups to which they belong.

No matter our referents we are all establishing our own microcultures within D/s and S&M. Maybe a tiny, tiny subsubculture of two. Some of our friends may join or at least visit us. And our virtual visas give us passage to the places inhabited by others. Even if we don’t get together over coffee or share a bottle of wine we talk. And it there are moments when we need to pause and consult a dictionary to decipher the others’ patois that is always a worthwhile exercise.

From the time when everyone browsed the web using Mosaic the internet’s ability to enable the prospering of microcultures has been thought a godsend. And it is. We can sample the experiences of people we’ll never meet, select what they have that will help us. Establish our true way without needing to fret about anything as unworthy as one true way.

Nota Bene:

This is a sort of an addition to Online Conversations about BDSM and related reasonably closely to to some of what I was trying to say in My Personal D/s Idiolect . My own lapse was noted in A Lifestyle Created By Us.