Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook (14 page)

In short, BDSM play in these virtual worlds leaves a
lot
to be desired.  The product designers typically have little or
no experience or knowledge about the lifestyle or its practices and so what you
end up with, more often than not, is a ridiculous caricature of what some nerdy
developer in Taiwan
imagines
happens during BDSM sex.  What is
typically your first clue that the animator is
vanilla?
  Apparently
their view of BDSM sex involves
lots of crying, and no orgasms.
 Go
figure. 

It also seems to consist almost exclusively of tying
people to beds and/or giving spankings.  Beyond those two activities, it’s
a virtual
fetish wasteland.
  Suspensions?  Nope.  Edge
play?  Nope.  Fire play?  Nope.  Violet wands, breath play,
anal play, breast flogging, or pussy spankings?  No, no, no, no, and
not
even anything close
.  Those poor Taiwanese animators
really
need to get out more.

One of the unique features of the online BDSM
culture that you’ll encounter in many virtual worlds is the
slave market
. 
Slave markets exist almost exclusively in BDSM chat rooms for the simple reason
that they would be impractical or illegal
anywhere else
.  They typically
consist of chat rooms with kneeling-pillows, upon which hopeful, unowned slaves
kneel and wait to be interviewed by Dominants who imperiously sit on nearby
thrones.  The rooms are called
markets
, even though no one buys –
or even rents – anything, or anyone.  Many of these so-called slave
markets require visitors to announce their
“status”
to the existing
occupants of the room and to request permission to enter.  This status
theoretically consists of whether you’re a Dominant, submissive or switch, whether
you are owned or unowned, and what –
if anything
- you happen to be
seeking.  An example might sound something like this: “I am an unowned
submissive seeking a Mistress.  May I enter?”  Not all slave markets
require such formality, but when in doubt, it is usually best to err on the
side of high protocol.

Upon being granted permission to enter, Dominants
should inquire as to which seats or thrones are appropriate to sit on. 
Submissives should assume that kneeling-pillows are their only seating option,
though there may be certain pillows that are reserved for moderators or chat
room regulars.  If the seating arrangement consists of something
other
than thrones and pillows, it’s probably a good idea to ask the current
occupants of the room where you should sit. 

You may be asked to tell the other people in the
room a little about yourself; actually knowing how to respond to this question
can go a long way towards establishing your credibility and making new
friends.  The absolute
worst
thing you can do is attempt to bluff
your way through an initial conversation of this sort.  There’s no shame
in admitting you don’t know much about the lifestyle, as long as you are open
and honest about it.  Misrepresenting your experience and knowledge is considered
not only
extremely bad form
, but can be emotionally devastating to your
potential partners and potentially
dangerous
to everyone involved.

One of the most useful skills that can be developed
and honed by members of the online BDSM community is
the ability to spot a
phony
.  When the online environment allows virtually
anyone
to
pretend to be
anything,
a person’s credibility becomes his or her only
currency.  We should take a moment to clarify what we mean when we use the
word
phony
in this particular context.  If we assume that the
online
BDSM culture is
“real” in its own unique way
(at least to the
people who are a
part
of it) then obviously
the people who are a part
of it
should be considered real, as well
.
  In other words, the
mere fact that a person has no
real-life
BDSM experience does not mean
he or she is a phony.  Sometimes, real-life circumstances prevent people
from acting on their wants and needs.  Even so, it may be entirely
possible that the person has
many years
of experience in online BDSM
relationships and has much to offer someone who may be new and desirous of a
mentor. 

So, what constitutes an online BDSM
phony,
then? 
For
our
purposes, we’ll define an online BDSM phony as a person who
knows little or nothing at all about the BDSM lifestyle –
online or
real-life
– yet attempts to present himself as experienced and
knowledgeable.  The most common example of this kind of behavior is what
happens when a young, sexually frustrated person stumbles upon the existence of
the online BDSM culture and naturally assumes that simply
calling
himself a
“Master”
(or “
Mistress”
) will result in a treasure
trove of slaves offering sexual favors and unconditional adoration. 

It never seems to occur to these individuals that
there may be more to being a Dominant than
simply
calling yourself
one
.  The clueless would-be Dominant
immediately launches
himself into slave markets and other BDSM-related chat rooms to proudly
announce,
“I am a Master!  Who wants to be my slave?”
 To fully
understand the sheer, unthinking vacuity of such behavior, try to imagine a
person walking into a popular real-world nightclub, standing just inside the
entrance, and calling out loudly to everyone within,
“I am a
studmuffin!  Who wants to be my love-bunny?” 

The first few words out of a person’s mouth are
usually all one needs to hear in order to know just how much credibility he or
she deserves in the online BDSM culture.  There are, however, some people
who are quite skilled at the art of online
duplicity
.  They can
mimic the customs and protocols that are common in the online BDSM lifestyle,
but they can’t discuss knowledge of the lifestyle
that they don’t have.
 
Their ignorance of the lifestyle very quickly becomes apparent to anyone who is
paying attention
.  A skilled interviewer, whether Dominant or
submissive, can usually expose the
phonies
by asking simple,
polite questions in a
particular way.
 The questions should be
carefully worded to be
innocuously inoffensive
to authentic members of
the online BDSM lifestyle, yet exceedingly difficult for anyone
pretending
to be something that he is not. 

Here are just a few examples:

·
        
Never ask, “Are you a Dom or a
sub?”  This allows a clueless imposter to simply
pick one of the above
. 
Instead, ask, “Are you a switch?”  A knowledgeable person will typically
respond with one of the following: 
No, I am a Dominant.  No, I am
a submissive.
 Or,
Yes, I am!
  A phony will invariably be
dumbfounded for a moment and ask,
“What’s a switch?”

·
        
Always ask, “How long have you been
in the lifestyle?”  Don’t refer to it as the
BDSM lifestyle.
Anyone
who is actually in the lifestyle will
naturally assume
you mean the
BDSM
lifestyle.  A phony, even as he or she sits in a
slave market,
will
often inanely respond with,
“What lifestyle?”
 While you’re at it,
check his answer against his supposed age.  A twenty-year-old who claims
to have been in the lifestyle for fifteen years is not only
a liar,
he’s
also a math-challenged
moron
.

·
        
Try asking a
philosophical
question - perhaps something like, “Do you think D/s is a matter of
who you
are, or what you do?
”  A knowledgeable person will enjoy a chance to
give his opinion on the subject, and you
may
even gain some insight from
his response.  A phony will ask,
“What’s D/s?”

·
        
Ask questions of
preference
: 
“What’s your favorite kind of scene?”  It’s a simple question for someone
in the lifestyle – even for those who may be very new, or may be limited
exclusively to the online lifestyle.  A phony, however, will often be
completely unfamiliar with the way the word is used in this culture, and will
typically respond with, “What do you mean by
scene?
”

·
        
Consider asking a
trivia
type
of question:  “We’re having a disagreement about what the
D
in BDSM
stands for.  What do
you
think?”  Feel free to consider
any
response that actually involves a word that starts with the letter
D
as
acceptable.

Sometimes, it is the perplexing and often amusing
questions that someone
asks
in these online chat rooms that expose him
as a phony.  The following is a list of
actual questions
that have
been posed to me by allegedly
“highly experienced”
online Masters and
Mistresses who claimed to have
years and years of BDSM experience
.   
Seriously,  I couldn’t
make this stuff up
:

·
        
Do
your
slaves let you have
sex with them?  I was just wondering.

·
        
How do you keep your slaves from
running away?  I’m having a bit of a
problem
with that.

·
        
Would it be easier to get more slaves
if I created second account as a sub and collared myself?

·
        
How many slaves do
you
have? 
I have 23. 
More
, if you count the ones whose names I don’t
remember.

·
        
All my slaves turn out to be, like,
thirteen years old
.  What am I doing wrong?

·
        
I really want to be a
real-life
Master.  Real-life Masters have lots and lots of sex,
right?
 How
much sex,
exactly
, are we talking about, here?

·
        
How do you get your submissives to
respect you?  This is way harder than I
thought
it would be.

·
        
Do you practice forced
collaring? 

Obviously, it’s not particularly difficult to
separate the wheat from the chaff in these kinds of conversations.  The
only
real
issue becomes, how do you
handle
a phony once he or she
is exposed?  Do you tell the person how you tripped him up?  If you
do
,
then the imposter simply chalks it up as a
lesson learned
, and tweaks
his performance to better deceive the
next
person who comes along. 
If you
don’t,
you are often left with the irksome feeling that you’ve
allowed someone to think he has gotten away with deceiving you. 

Sometimes, the best solution is to simply inform the
individual that you weren’t fooled.  Then, if you have the power to do so,
boot and ban
.

Despite all of the apparent pessimism you’ve thus
far been bombarded with in this chapter, online BDSM relationships actually
do
happen
, and sometimes, even
flourish
.  The keys to having a
successful online BDSM relationship generally come down to the following three
factors:  Determining
beforehand
where the line is that separates
your
virtual BDSM life
from your
real-world
life, deciding for
yourself the importance of the
reality behind the avatars
, and asking
yourself, “Why am I doing this, and where is it going?”  The answers to
these three questions
aren’t easy
, nor
should
they be.  In
fact, if one or more of the questions
seems
easy for
you,
then I
would suggest that you’ve probably seriously underestimated the complexity and
gravity of the issues involved.

The wildcard that is often overlooked when it comes
to online relationships in general, and online BDSM relationships in
particular, is the role that our
emotions
play in our perceptions and
decision-making.  We often go into these things with
one
set of
expectations, only to discover -
after we have fallen in love
- that a
completely
different
set of expectations has suddenly appeared out of
nowhere and taken precedence
.
 If either partner is unprepared for
it when that happens, it can not only be potentially devastating to the online
relationship, but it can lead to significant problems in their
real-lives
,
as well.

There are many who will probably disagree with me on
this, but I believe that there are
three kinds of people
who seek out
the online BDSM culture. 

The Reality Geek.
 
This first category consists of those who live a BDSM lifestyle in real-life
and simply want a convenient and entertaining way to connect online with
like-minded friends, or make new ones.  For those people, the line that
separates their virtual lives from their real ones may be flexible, fuzzy or
may not exist
at all
.  There is little or no
cognitive
dissonance
between the two environments.  In fact, for many of the
people in this category, the internet is not considered a virtual world or as a
completely different environment
at all
.  It is viewed simply as
one more facet of their
real-world environment
; another mode of
communication that is not unlike
talking on the telephone or texting
. 
Just as most people would never characterize a telephone conversation as an
alternate
life
, the people in this group typically don’t think of a graphic internet
chat room as one, either. 

The Toe-Dipper.
 
This second group consists of people who wish to explore the lifestyle
virtually before making the plunge into the real-life culture.   For
these people, it may be necessary due to their present circumstances, or simply
preferable, to learn as much as they can
virtually
before considering a
decision to adopt the lifestyle in reality.  The individuals in this group
must, out of necessity, consider the internet and their real-lives as
two
separate realities
with no significant overlap.  For them, the
separating line is usually quite distinct, even though it may move or get
fuzzier over time as they grow more confident and become more willing to cross
the line.  In short, the separating line is there, but it is often moving
or
temporary.

The Fantasizer.
 
Third and finally, there are those who, for whatever reason,
cannot or have
no desire to
live a BDSM lifestyle in reality, and so they do it
virtually
. 
There are many good and valid reasons why this may be so, and it isn’t our
place to judge another person’s reasons for doing so.  Long ago, I had a
friend in the online BDSM lifestyle who, I learned
years later
, was a
paraplegic, and had been confined to a wheelchair since his childhood. 
Another acquaintance was afflicted with agoraphobia, and hadn’t left her
apartment in almost a decade.  There may also be family or career
considerations which make the pursuit of BDSM in reality an impractical
lifestyle choice for some.  It should suffice to know that if these
individuals believe there are good reasons to keep their two lives separate,
then there is an equally good reason to establish a firm separating line
between them.  For these individuals, that line is usually non-negotiable
and impermeable.   

The online
environment
may be
virtual
,
and the emotions experienced there are
real,
but what about everything
in-between?
 What should be allowed to cross over from the virtual world to the
real one, or vice-versa, and what shouldn’t?  Where do you draw that
line?  Should you give out your real name or telephone number to a
stranger in a chat room, reserve them for the people you trust, or not give
them out at all?  Do you tell your online friends what you do for a living
in real-life?   Do you allow your online Master or Mistress to tell
you what color you should dye your hair?  Should that cross-over influence
extend to controlling your real-life finances, or disciplining your children?

Cross-over influences happen all of the time -
sometimes in dribs and drabs and others times in a flood - yet we very rarely
consider the potential consequences.  It is easy to believe, while basking
in the aura of NRE
(New Relationship Energy)
that the person with whom
you’ve just become involved is practically perfect in every conceivable way,
and would
never
do anything to hurt you, but let’s take a look at the
actual
odds
. 

The overwhelming majority of
all
relationships
–
online or in real-life
- will fail for one reason or another, and many
of those will
end badly.
  There is very little hard data available
on the success rates specifically for online BDSM relationships, but the
phenomenon of online relationships in
general
have been studied
extensively.  A 2005 study of online relationships by Dr. Jeff Gavin, of
the University of Bath in the U.K. revealed some fascinating data on
relationships that began online and then made the transition to
real life:

·
        
When a couple met first online, and
went on to meet in real-life, there was a 94% chance that they would meet
a
second time
in real-life.

·
        
Within that group (that met at least
twice
in real-life), 18% of the relationships lasted over one year, with
the average relationship lasting seven months.

·
        
Of the relationships that were no
longer together at the end of the study, only 4%, or roughly
one in
twenty-five
,
had lasted two years or more.

·
        
Surprisingly, men were significantly
more likely to stay committed to an online relationship than women.

·
        
Not
surprisingly, the more a couple engaged in online
chat or telephone calls, the better they were able to understand and depend
upon one another emotionally.

A study by the Oxford Internet Institute surveyed a
random sample of 24,000 men and women in 2011 and found that the odds for a
successful relationship that begins online were
significantly higher
for
middle-aged people
(aged 40 to 69)
than they are for younger
adults.  This was somewhat counter-intuitive to the prevailing notion that
younger people would be more likely to start a relationship online and would be
better
at it.  Of the 24,000 respondents to the survey:

·
        
30% of the respondents had tried
online dating or online relationships.

·
        
15% had met their current partners
online.

·
        
Of the middle-aged group
(age
40-69)
36% had met their current partner online.

·
        
Of the younger adults
(age 18-39)
only 23% had met their current partners online.

Finally, a 2010 study entitled “Strategic
Misrepresentation in Online Dating” by Jeffrey A. Hall and others examined and attempted
to validate the online profiles of over 5,000 people who were registered on
online dating sites.  They found that among that group of people, people
who were required to post
actual
photographs of themselves and allegedly
had
every intention
of taking their new relationships real-life, the
percentage of profiles containing
“strategic misrepresentations of the
truth”
(otherwise known as
bald-faced lies
) was an
astonishing
81%.  The inevitable question that naturally comes to mind as a result of
a study like this is a frightening one:  If 81% of
those
people are
lying
on their online profiles, imagine what the percentage must be for
individuals who
do not
have to post a photograph, and have
no
intention whatsoever
of ever meeting you in real life.  It’s a scary
thought,
indeed.
 

If we assume that online BDSM relationships are,
by
their very nature
, more difficult and significantly more likely to fail
than a typical
vanilla
online relationship, then we’re left with some
pretty depressing prospects.  Just in case you weren’t taking notes, let’s
recap:

·
        
The percentage of
vanilla
online dating profiles with a significant number of
lies
in them was
81%.  This suggests that the number for
anonymous
BDSM
chat room
profiles is likely even
higher
.

·
        
Just 4% of
vanilla
relationships that start online last two years or more, which suggests that for
BDSM relationships, that number is probably closer to 2%.

·
        
If you are age 40-69, you are 56%
more
likely
to be in that
semi-successful
2% .

Depressed yet?  If you
aren’t
, you
haven’t been paying attention.  If these statistics and our estimates are
accurate, then the odds of your online BDSM relationship lasting over two years
are roughly
50 to 1
.  On the
bright side
, your odds of being
killed by lightning
are encouraging, at 2.3 million to 1.  This
brings us back to the question we posed earlier, which is:  What kinds of
things should be allowed to leak from one world to the other, and where should
we draw the line?   If your online BDSM relationship has a very high
probability of
failing
in the not-too-distant future (and it
does
)
then it may not be wise to hand that person the potential ability to wreak
havoc in your real-life circumstances, relationships or career. 

You may
think
you’re giving away meaningless
snippets of personal information that can’t be assembled into anything that can
be used against you once the relationship sours, but
think again
. 
One online submissive thought she was being clever and careful by giving her
online Master just her
first name
and the state she lived in.  She
didn’t realize that a simple public records database search would reveal that
there were just three people in the
entire state
with the same unique
first name, and
two
of them were over
seventy years old.
 
After their angry break-up, her spiteful former online Master needed just five
minutes to find her full name, home phone number, and her home address, where
she lived with her unsuspecting vanilla husband and three elementary school-aged
children.  What followed was a month of harassing phone calls and even a
clumsy
blackmail attempt
, which finally led the beleaguered couple to
seek a restraining order.

There are
lots
of different ways that your
expectations of anonymity can be
demolished
in a heartbeat.  If
you’re one of those people who has nothing to lose, or you simply aren’t
worried about keeping your virtual life separate from your real one, then that
may not be a problem.  On the other hand, if you’re the sort of person who
likes to keep your former
virtual
lovers away from your
real-life
front door, the following tips can save you a
lot
of future
headaches. 

·
        
If you give someone your phone
number, a reverse telephone number search may reveal your real name, address,
and even the names of the other people living at that address
with you
,
including possibly your
children
.  That information isn’t always
available for free, but you should never assume that a determined individual
wouldn’t be willing to spend the required $3 to purchase the information. 

·
        
If you send someone your photograph,
a reverse photo search can be done on websites like Google or Tineye. 
These reverse photo searches could lead someone to your Facebook, Twitter,
Myspace, Tumblr, or other social media websites that contain sensitive personal
information about you. It can sometimes even send a snoop directly to your
employer’s
website
if your photo appears anywhere on the website.

·
        
Practically every photograph contains
embedded, hidden
meta
information called EXIF data.  Using an EXIF
data reader can reveal this information.  EXIF data can include not only
information about the camera used to take the photo, but sometimes, even the
exact
latitude and longitude
where the photo was taken.  In other
words, if the photo was taken at your home, you may have just unknowingly
handed someone your
home address
.

·
        
Giving someone your
email
address
may seem like a
perfectly safe thing to do
, until you realize that
Googling
an email address can reveal a wealth of information about you that you never
even knew existed.  Think of all the times you’ve been asked to leave your
name and email address in order to purchase something, leave a comment, post on
social media, generate forum messages, ask questions online, or submit
technical support trouble tickets.  Eventually, a determined snoop will
find
something
that has
both
your email address
and
your
real full name on it, and the
rest is easy.

·
        
Every internet connection you make
originates from a unique internet protocol (IP) address.  Most of the
websites and online applications that you use will automatically record your IP
address when you connect to them.  An IP address usually looks something
like this:  12.345.678.910.  The final few digits of your IP address
may change each time you connect to the internet, but the
first
three
groups of numbers
never do
.  That’s because they are
unique
to the servers used by your hometown Internet Service Provider (ISP), and can
be readily identified by anyone who knows how.  The internet has
scores
of free and easy-to-use IP tracing websites and utilities.