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Are We a Community, or Just a Bunch
of Kinksters Doing Our Thing? -
Commentary from BDSM Thinkers and Leaders
By Sensuous Sadie
SensuousSadie@aol.com
www.sensuoussadie.com
Ever notice how close the words
"community" and "communicate" are? We come together.
We encounter ourselves and each other. We transform our fear into joy
and acceptance and we leave, feeling better than we ever could have had
we remained alone and isolated with that which sets us apart. We feel
far better than if we had kept our choice in our bedroom.
~ Rob
In Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, "It Takes a Village,"
she writes that a community is necessary to raise a child. That
community is made up of families, schools, churches, businesses, civic
organizations, even cyberspace. We in the BDSM world often refer to
ourselves as a community as well, but I can't help but wonder if it
really is one, or if perhaps it's just a construct to make us feel like
we belong to something bigger than just ourselves.
What Is a Community?
We usually think of a community as people in geographical proximity,
with common interests or both. The geographical part fits my local
Vermont community, of course, while the second part is relevant
particularly to the online, national, or even international BDSM
communities which are linked primarily by our common interests.
The BDSM community is not just like any community however. Cecilia Tan,
owner of Circlet Press, says, "Where we differ most greatly from
the norms of human communities is in our status as an underground
subculture and the way in which we control and create our own social
structures. Being underground, there is no mass culture to look to, to
inculcate us. If a person from New York meets someone from California,
each has a reasonable expectation of saying 'Hi, how are you?' and
receiving the answer 'I'm fine, and you?' But they may not have a common
basis for how they interact in the leather realm."
The BDSM community may not offer a specific common
base of interaction, unless you think of protocol this way, but it does
offer support, education, and shared goals to its members. There is, of
course, a great deal of debate about what kind of support, education and
goals we should have, but there is a clear need to offer these things.
The experience of our community has also changed a great deal over the
last few decades. While thirty-five years ago a person had to be
"vetted" into what many refer to as the Old Guard SM
Community, today anyone can join pretty much just by suiting up and
showing up. Author Master Alan adds, "In the old days, the
community was very small and insular. Once you were inside, you were
among people who understood you, and you could speak freely. Outside you
pretended and put on a mask." He adds that, "Today the
community is much larger and is far more institutionalized. We have
magazines, newspapers, munches, even beds and breakfasts. It's a vast
expansion, and these institutions define the community much more than in
the old days." Even with things being so much more casual, I
believe we must continue to offer an accessible community, meaning
everyone is welcome and there are few barriers to entry.
How Is a Local Community Different?
A local community provides for the needs of the people who live
there, in particular the education and networking systems. Master Dex of
House Mermaid describes it this way, "In the local communities you
have people who fit into three categories: people who have nothing to
lose, people who have a lot to lose but have SM needs, and people who
are new (within their first three years). People who are newbies are
just discovering their needs, who they are and what they want from the
lifestyle. This changes over time but one thing doesn't: in the
beginning they need a network of friends who they can interact with
socially while they are learning, a community."
Because I am from Vermont, I will speak intimately of this state only.
For a relatively novice community itself, Vermont has developed into a
vibrant area since Rose & Thorn's start in 1999. Jonathan, a former
director of Rose & Thorn, says, "Vermont clearly has a strong
community. First, there are three well established, overlapping
organizations that sponsor regular monthly events that are well
attended. Second, there are leaders. Third, there are a set of shared
values. It's a community in the same sense that anyone who owns a
sailboat could be said to be in the sailing community. There are no
membership requirements, but there are both structure and values."
Although unfortunately Vermont has just as much politicking as any
larger city, I might argue that a struggle for power in some ways makes
an argument for community rather than against it. After all, there must
be something very real to bicker over. What I do wonder about is whether
our community is the type that would rally to someone's aid if they were
in trouble. For me personally, it's not the BDSM community that helps
out when things go south, rather it is my family and friends, some
vanilla, some not, who show up to help.
I wonder what would happen if somehow the local paper decided to do an
expose of me and my writing. Would the Vermont/New England community
come to my defense? I sure hope so, but I think it's just as likely not.
Not because they don't care about me or believe in what I am doing, but
because they are organizations that have a primary commitment to their
members privacy, privacy which could be compromised by getting involved
in a testy situation. Master Dex has run into some of these testy
situations and can speak from the heart on this one, "This past
year has been both full of growth and tremendous disappointment. I no
longer look at the lifestyle to include the community you speak of.
Within the House Mermaid family we would come to each other's aid, and
have done so over illness, fixing each other's homes, and over politics.
That being said, the heroics of giving of one's self to the point of
giving one's life to aid another SM brother would not be there."
The National Community
Getting a handle on what the national community is a bit more
slippery. Author and photographer David Steinberg says that, "In
the last two months, I did much traveling, promoting Photo Sex in
Portland, Philadelphia, and Vancouver. I was struck by the strength and
vibrancy of these communities who give their members a sense of place
and perspective, support and encouragement for who they (we) are, and
practical help in developing and fulfilling those parts of
ourselves." In contrast, my friend and fellow writer Stacey says,
"I think there's a strong national community, but the leadership is
very leather and shock oriented, much the way the gay community was in
the beginning of coming out. (That is, ' I'm here, I'm queer, get used
to it.') That said, a new movement always needs that out-front
leadership just as the wobblies* made it easier for the AFL to organize
and the black panthers made it easier for Martin Luther King."
While there is sometimes a feeling that groups come together only during
a crisis such as Paddleboro, others believe that it's less about crisis
and more about a foundation of beliefs. Ed, leader of White Mountains
Different Strokes, says that he "feels there is some semblance of a
national community – one that focuses on principles such as Safe, Sane
and Consensual (SSC), Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK), and other
generally accepted ideas of BDSM." They key thing here is that in
some ways the national community is not so much defined by social groups
as it is by commonly agreed upon codes such as SSC.
To a certain extent it's also defined by national
organizations like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) who
shows up not just for individuals like me who might get in hot water
because of their sexual orientation, but for all of us through their
educational and legal work. Here in the Northeast we also have the New
England Leather Alliance and the dormant but still incorporated
Paddleboro Defense League. All these groups have spokespeople who can
deal with the media, and since the are not member-based, there are no
privacy issues. Master Dex disagrees however, "I see the national
community as solely comprised of activists. There are no national
communities, and that would be a misuse of the word. There are only
activists, writers, educators, and vendors."
Are We Just a Bunch of Kinksters Doing Our
Thing, Then?
One common misconception is that fetish groups
constitute a community in themselves. Master Dex would agree with this,
saying, "People join groups to belong, but a group is not the
community; certainly not any one group. There are a few groups large
enough to have an influence beyond a regional level such as The Society
of JANUS, The Eulenspiegel Society (TES), and Black Rose for example.
But even TES is not 'The SM Community' even on the New York City
level." Lord Battista of the Erotic Power Exchange Dominion feels
the same way, "For me I would be hard pressed to even use that word
to describe the social interactions of the BDSM Lifestyle. I think the
problem is with the use of the word community. Too many people
use that word to nonconsensually include others in their idea of
what the community is to them."
Stacey takes a more personal approach, saying that community is based,
at least in part, on a cohesiveness that may or may not be present in
any particular area. She says, "I don't think there's a BDSM
community in Vermont. There are friends and cliques, but i don't have a
sense of a community like exists in other areas. There's very little
acceptance of diversity, so people wander off into their own little
worlds. She adds that, "i feel more attachment to you as part of a
'community of women who are trying to figure out and run their lives by
their own rules - and dammit they're making it happen - than as sister
submissives being as our submissive natures are so different."
On the national level, there is some debate on whether the BDSM
community has that same cohesion that Stacey talks about. Gary Switch,
contributing editor to Prometheus magazine says, "The common
interest part would require a common style or common goals, such as the
spanking community, the Japanese bondage community, the
writers-of-really-bad-BDSM-poetry community, the leather activist
community. It's obvious that there isn't a single BDSM community,
because everybody never hangs out with everybody else in any sense. Do
we all have common interests, styles, or goals? Nope. I'd say it's more
like special interest groups, leather families, the New York gay male
scene, the San Francisco leatherdyke scene, and like that. We're far too
diverse to form a single community."
Do You Have to Be "Involved?"
Let's say for the sake of argument that you agree that there is some
kind of BDSM community happening, both locally and nationally. Are all
of us members of the BDSM community then, just because we have this
common practice, broad as that may be? Master Alan says yes, telling the
story of one of his submissives: "My kitten lives in a small town
outside Savannah. She had never been to a club, conference or munch, but
she is as much a part of our community as your lifestylers with their
big bucks dungeons." Cecilia Tan would agree, adding,
"Certainly a person can be kinky without feeling like they are part
of this community, in the same way a person can be born to a place but
never involve themselves in its governance or participate in communal
activity. And certainly the community 'at large' (nationally,
internationally) contains within it many communities of its own, whether
divided by type of sexuality or by other cultural means (gay/straight,
male/female, suburban/urban, white/non-white, etc...) just as any human
community like a city, town, or state may have its subdivisions."
Master Alan also points out that there is another, more spiritual
definition to community, saying, "One year I was in Munich in a
leather bar and met Luis, a Mayan Indian from Peru whose village had
been exterminated by a death squad. He and I stared into each other's
eyes and realized we were part of a community of survivors. What makes
for community is that recognition when our eyes met and I saw the child
whose eyes watched as a death squad destroyed his world and left him a
stranger in a foreign land." Meeting at a leather bar may or may
not have constituted a leather community, but clearly the geographical
circumstances of that connection were tangential to the spiritual ones.
The Future of the BDSM Community
While researching this article, Jonathan said to me that in a sense
he felt that a discussion of what the BDSM community "is or
isn't" is pretty much a tempest in a teapot, chit chat to banter
about in a chatroom. He's right in a way; there is no bottom line to
defining something as wooly as community. Still, there is a lot to be
said for mucking around for a definition, however loose, of who we are
and what we are doing. The key thing is in part what we are doing today,
but also equally important where it will take us tomorrow. Cecilia Tan
says it better, "Our community is young and equally fluid right
now, but we are still building institutions. Check back again in a few
generations to see if they are still standing.
Whether you define your community as traditionally as Hillary Clinton's,
or as flexibly as some of the thinkers and leaders quoted here, it is
more than just a construct. Flirticia, current Director of Rose &
Thorn gives us the final word: "I believe we have a community both
locally and nationally. Of course, communities are more or less
self-absorbed, involved, intricate, considerate, structured, cohesive,
and no two are ever totally alike. Like anything else created by
groups, the community will be what we make of it."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
REFERENCES
*The Wobblies was a nickname for Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an
international union movement which believes that all workers should be
united within a single union as a class and the profit system abolished.
The Wobblies emphasized rank-and-file organization as opposed to
empowering leaders who would bargain with employers on behalf of
workers. They were one of the few unions to welcome all workers
including women, foreigners and black workers. (from Word IQ Search http://www.wordiq.com/index.html
)
National Coalition for Sexual Freedom
http://ncsfreedom.org/
New England
Leather Association
http://www.nla-newengland.org/NELA.html
Paddleboro Defense League
http://www.paddleboro.com/
(still under construction)
Cecilia Tan, Circlet Press
www.circlet.com
Flirticia, Rose & Thorn
www.roseandthorn.org
Ed,
White Mountains
Different Strokes
http://wmdifferentstrokes.com
Lord Battista, Erotic Power Exchange Dominion
http://www.epedominion.com/
Master Dex of House Mermaid
www.housemermaid.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sensuous Sadie is the author of It's Not About the Whip: Love, Sex,
and Spirituality in the BDSM Scene ( http://www.trafford.com/robots/03-0551.html
). She is the founder and leader (1999 - 2001) of Rose & Thorn,
Vermont's first BDSM group. Comments, compliments and complaints, as
well as requests for reprinting can be addressed to her at SensuousSadie@aol.com
or visit her website at www.sensuoussadie.com
. Sadie believes the universe is abundant, and that sharing information
freely is part of this abundance, so she allows reprints of her writing
in most venues.
Copyright 2003 Sadie Sez Publications
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