Sadie Comes Out as a Bawdy Girl, and So Much More! Part 2 of 2

By Sensuous Sadie
SensuousSadie@aol.com 
www.sensuoussadie.com 

Joining A Community

The next step for many people is to join a D/s community like ours. But since I didn’t have one to join, I started one. Of all the things I have done in my life, creating Rose & Thorn has been one of the most fulfilling. It has given people a safe place to explore their sexual selves. At the beginning, I had some fears about meeting people I knew, something which did in fact happen. At our second event someone from my church joined the group. After the initial awkwardness, we both realized we had an equal need for privacy, and I discovered my fears were unfounded. I have seen this same scenario play out with others who have encountered people they know with no ill effects to either party.


Where To Next?

If I were to take the next step in my own “coming out,” it would be to become an activist in the national BDSM community. For role models I have the many leaders who make up the BDSM Group Leaders association I belong to. They are an active force in educating the community at large, and we are all indebted to them and the other leading authors and activists who have given us legal support, safety in numbers, and information that was not easily available even ten short years ago.

If you are considering sharing your “secret life” with someone, think carefully about whether this person is safe to open up to and how you will explain what you are doing. It helps to have some BDSM books on hand which will provide credibility. It can be enormously freeing to break the silence.


Pitfalls And Pratfalls

For many people who have been raised under the conventional sexual mores of American culture, discovering their D/s orientation can let loose a torrent of needs. Having repressed their sexual desires for years, there is an urge to go wild and sleep and/or play with everyone who says yes. Although on the surface it can seem a great way to get experience fast, it is quite often the road to a broken heart, not to mention the risks of sexually transmitted diseases and inexperienced Dominants. D/s is powerful, and if you are new to the heady feeling of the power exchange, it can easily be mixed up with different powerful emotions like love, relationship, and commitment. If you decide to play actively, be aware that many of the new feelings you experience will not fit into your old frame of reference about relationships. For example, many people talk about very intimate details of their sex lives on a first date; intercourse is no longer an assumption of having a relationship with someone; and it is common for people to enter a sexual relationship barely knowing each other.

On the other hand, I know several novices who read so much, and for so long, that they never actually experience anything. The thing is, you can read a hundred books and cruise a thousand websites and chatrooms, but it will not equal one hour of real experience. Education is very, very important, but is only as experiential as “describing” an orange. The live dynamic of interacting with someone is biting into an orange and feeling the juices run down your chin.

The worst pitfall of all is not to come out. When I was leader of Rose & Thorn, nearly every week someone contacted me inquiring about attending events, but who would be cheating on their partner/spouse. Of course we didn’t allow them to attend because we believe in the “Consensual” of Safe, Sane and Consensual. Cheating on someone is clearly not consensual for the person being cheated on. Also, there was a very real risk of the hurt party discovering their partner’s involvement in our group, then either crashing an event or violating the confidentiality of member’s e-mail addresses. There’s nothing like a scorned lover. We wanted guests to feel confident that everyone in our group was above board.

It is quite often these same people who have not yet come out to anyone. They live in ongoing fear of being exposed as well as the pressure of never being able to express their sexual orientation. Although it is undeniably scary to come out to a longtime partner, the alternative is so much worse. There are very serious risks to consider, especially if there are children involved, and those have to be weighed carefully. Still, I believe that repressing a primal force as powerful as one’s sexuality can only, in the long run, hurt everyone.

So yes, I believe exploring that force is central to fulfillment in this life. You can chalk it up to my being a bawdy girl if you want, but if there is one thing I have heard over and over, it is that the gift of community provides safe passage for all of us.

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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