Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook (40 page)

Finding and contacting a local group of like-minded
kinksters can have its own peculiar challenges, particularly if you aren’t
already a part of those social circles.  Chances are pretty good that you
may already know someone in the D/s lifestyle, but just don’t know it
yet.  As we explained earlier, most of the people in the lifestyle try to
stay under the radar, and rarely go around wearing t-shirts that read “Pervy
and Proud!”  Even so, you probably have a good idea which of your friends
and acquaintances is most likely to be connected to, or at least knowledgeable,
about the lifestyle.  Diplomatically asking them about whether they know
of any local fetish groups may just pay off.  Who knows, it could even
turn into a kinky date for the weekend.  The recommendation or invitation
of a friend is by far the easiest and most reliable way to find and connect to
a local BDSM group.

Another way to learn whether there is a group in
your area is through
(duh!)
the internet.  While this may seem like
the easiest and most obvious method to those who are already in the lifestyle,
it can be incredibly confusing and frustrating to someone who doesn’t even know
where to start.  Googling “BDSM” and the name of your town will usually
give you about a million results, some nine hundred thousand of which will turn
out to be porn sites.  Most of the rest will consist of classified personal
ads, merchants of kinky toys, and web cam sites.  The sad fact is, only a
handful of websites out there will turn out to be useful to you in your quest
to find a local BDSM group. 

One type of web site which you will find extremely
useful is the sort that caters specifically to the BDSM fetish
community
. 
Surprisingly, while there are a lot of web sites that make the attempt, only a
few seem to be any good at it, and even that is debatable.  Some of the
most popular BDSM community web sites include FetLife.com, Bondage.com,
Alt.com, and CollarMe.com.  Each has its own unique strengths and
weaknesses, and boasts a large number of devotees.  The utility of any of
these sites will depend a great deal upon your preferences and habits, and your
ability to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to finding useful
information and making worthwhile friends.   Always remember that
there are plenty of people in the BDSM lifestyle who cannot be a part of the
online community for a variety of reasons, including career and professional
factors, family concerns, or even technical reasons.  Conversely, many
people are members of multiple web sites and online communities. 

You should also keep in mind the fact that
whatever
online forum you use, it is simply a
communications
medium.  It is
does not necessarily equate to the
real-life group
of people you may
encounter.  Just because
Joe-Bob
has started a local
FetLife
group related to your home town on the
website
doesn’t mean he is the
leader of any
actual community group
. 

The second internet resource that you may find
useful is
social media
.  Doing key word searches on social media
sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Google + can sometimes give you surprisingly
good results.  The best way to do it, however, is to know exactly who and
what you are looking for.  Many BDSM groups have their own social media
pages, which are used to keep their members informed about events and other
news.  Lifestyle-friendly businesses, such as sex toy shops, leather goods
merchants, piercing or tattoo parlors, and adult bookstores also are likely to
have social media accounts.  Following or friending them can often lead
you to discover what you’re looking for
on their friends list.
  
You can ask them about their social media sites whenever you visit, or you can
make a phone call to the establishment, or you can simply search for the names
of the businesses on the web site in question.  Many of the individual
BDSM group members will have social media accounts which are specifically used
to connect with their kinky friends, and may welcome new friends.  Don’t
be surprised, however, if they expect to have actually met you in real life
first.  On that same note, if you also plan to use your social media to
stay connected with vanilla family, friends and coworkers, it might be a good
idea to create a new account specifically for your BDSM lifestyle connections.

Another great place to make progress is with
blogs
. 
A search of a popular blog portal may lead you to a group right in your own back
yard.  Since blogs can be a relatively easy way to create a web site,
allow for collaborative authorship, and automate the process of registering
followers, many lifestyle groups find them to be extremely useful.  To see
if any of your local BDSM groups have a blog-type website, check out
Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, Tumblr.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog.com, Xanga.com,
Weebly.com, or Posterous.com.   A simple search of the terms “BDSM”
and the name of your state or home town should reveal whether or not these
blogs will be useful to you. 

One online resource that I do
not
recommend,
if you’re serious about connecting with others in the BDSM lifestyle, is
internet chat rooms.  Generally speaking, internet chat rooms – while they
can certainly be
entertaining
– can be incredibly frustrating and a
huge
waste of your valuable time.  A significant number of the people you meet
in them will turn out to be clueless, deceitful or both, and even their
locations will quite often be deliberately misleading, which makes searching
for new friends and groups in your geographical area somewhat
problematic.  On the other hand, once you connect in real life and make
friends with other folks in the BDSM lifestyle, chat rooms can be a great way
to
stay
in touch.  

Another method that is
not recommended
would
be to confuse anything having to do with the
“swinging”
lifestyle with
the fetish or BDSM community.  Most major metropolitan areas have
swingers’ clubs, swingers’ publications, and swingers’ web sites which are,
more often than not, completely useless
even to swingers
, much less to
those in the BDSM community.  While
vanilla
folk may have a hard
time telling a
swinger
from someone in the BDSM lifestyle, the
differences can be
quite stark
, and are usually painfully obvious to the
individuals in the two lifestyles.

The bottom line is, the best way to locate and
connect with a local BDSM group is to use pretty much the same methods you
might use to find and join any
other
kind of group.  While it’s true
that you won’t be able to just look up “BDSM groups” in the yellow pages, you
probably wouldn’t find the local model train club there, either.  In the
end, you will likely get the best results from networking with friends, using
social media and blogs, and visiting with the people at lifestyle-friendly
businesses.

If done right, being a part of your local BDSM group
can be an incredibly rewarding adventure.  Not only is it good to know
that you are not alone, but some of the friendships you make there will be
unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before.  Regardless of your age,
experience or expertise in the lifestyle, there will almost always be something
fascinating to learn from your fellow
fetishistas. 

The aroma of sizzling fajitas filled the air as
twenty members of our local BDSM group were gathered together, as was our usual
custom, at a trendy Mexican restaurant for our monthly social.  We chatted
amiably over our beverages as we sat clustered around a very long table at the
center of the restaurant, and waited for our server to take our dinner
orders.  To the other patrons of the restaurant, we could easily have been
mistaken for members of the local Rotary Club, or a group of co-workers or
friends celebrating a promotion or birthday.

As the waitress completed her order-taking, other
members of the group would occasionally wander around the table to introduce
themselves to first-time visitors, or to give others directions to the
after-munch party, which we euphemistically referred to as
“movie night,”
on
the off-chance that we were overheard by the other restaurant patrons or staff.

Suddenly, to the surprise of everyone at the table
and practically everyone in the restaurant, one of the young women in the group
let out a
shrill scream
, burst into uncontrollable sobbing, and ran
through the restaurant in a bee-line for the ladies’ restroom.  One of her
friends was quickly dispatched to check on her, while the rest of us were left
confused and wondering,
what the hell just happened?
 

A worried restaurant manager rushed to our table to
inquire about the incident, and we quickly concocted a semi-plausible story
about the poor girl and the awful panic attacks that she sometimes suffers in
public places.  He left, not entirely convinced of the explanation, but
thoroughly satisfied that the scream wasn’t the result of something important,
like a fat, hairy
roach
crawling out of someone’s taco salad.

It wasn’t until hours later that some of us learned
what had upset the young lady.  She had recently met, and gotten to know
the young man who had escorted her into the restaurant that evening. 
During the process of getting to know one another, the young woman revealed to
him a very private and, for her, somewhat embarrassing kink.  She liked to
be choked, and when she is, the effect is almost always an immediate and
orgasmic experience for her.

She revealed this to her new friend in the
expectation that perhaps he might put it to use in the
bedroom
, not in
the middle of a crowded restaurant which is, in fact,
exactly
what he
did. 

In a pathetic attempt to bolster his own inflated
ego, and to demonstrate to others that he knew something about this girl that
they didn’t, this young man had stepped behind her as she sat at the dinner
table talking with her friends, and
choked her.
  Needless to say,
she was not amused.

Don’t
be that guy.

“The
difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes
it.”

-
- Woody Allen

People mistake sex for love (and vice-versa)
all
the time
, and that misperception isn’t just limited to the
vanilla folk.
 
This should come as no surprise to
anyone.
  Yet, as complicated as
that
can be, try to imagine what happens when you toss
D/s and BDSM
into
the mix.  It can be enough to make your head spin, even if you’ve spent
your
entire life
navigating those treacherous waters.  There are
many, many ways that a D/s relationship can be lost on dangerous shoals, but
for our purposes, we’ll focus here on three of the most common and frustrating:
mistaking BDSM for sex, mistaking love for BDSM, and mistaking BDSM for
D/s.  The following three real-life case studies nicely illustrate not
only
what
can go wrong, but
how
it can go wrong
.
 
Naturally, names and locales have been changed to protect the privacy of the
individuals concerned. 

Robert D., a twenty-six-year-old restaurant manager
in Kansas had always been curious about the BDSM lifestyle, but had never made
much of an effort to seek out like-minded individuals or a fetish group in his
home town – that is, until
now.
  Robert had recently created an
account at one of the major online BDSM portals, learned about a local group
having a get-together, and decided to attend.  The munch was being held at
a nearby Pizza Hut, which regularly reserved a semi-private party-room for the
large group.  Robert was familiar with the place, which helped him to get
past his nervousness about going. 

Robert arrived at the appointed hour and introduced
himself to those who were already in attendance.  He enjoyed his pizza and
listened to the conversations that seemed to swirl around and across the
table.  The  two-hour social passed quickly and enjoyably, and at the
end of it, one of the group leaders approached him discreetly and invited him
to the
after-munch play party
.  Robert hadn’t really been
expecting
that, but was flattered and excited at the prospect.  Without hesitation,
he agreed to follow his new friend to the home of the member hosting the
event.  During the ensuing twenty minute drive, visions of decadent,
nubile sex-slaves danced in his head. 
Alas,
it was not to be.

Robert spent close to three hours at the play party
and then returned home feeling deflated and disappointed.  Before crawling
into bed, Robert took a few moments to journal his reactions to his first-ever
BDSM play party, and post them online for his friends to peruse and perhaps
comment upon.  His personal reflections, which have been redacted here for
content and to protect his privacy, reflect what could have been the thoughts
of
any
person new to the lifestyle, attending an event like this one for
the first time:

“I was excited and nervous about
attending a BDSM play party for the first time, and wasn’t sure what I was
going to be expected to know or do, so I decided to just watch and see what
would happen... which turned out to be -  practically nothing.  One
of the women there stripped down to a thong as soon as she arrived, but
practically everyone else either kept their clothes on, or undressed for
specific activities and got dressed again. This was not at all what I
expected.  I had expected this to be a clothing-free event, and was fully
prepared to get naked myself, but I guess I had the wrong idea about how they
do things.  It’s probably just as well, since a lot of the people there
weren’t the sort you want to see naked, anyway.”

“Apparently, they do this thing at the
start of the play party, where the girls have to identify who is allowed to
touch them or play with them, and when none of them designated me as a
potential play partner, I felt like a total loser and an outcast.  They
described their group as friendly, tolerant and inclusive, but this just made
me feel excluded and embarrassed. If no one was going to play with me, what was
the point of me even being here?”

“People were mostly paired off into
couples already, so I felt incredibly uncomfortable talking to anyone, for fear
of stepping on someone’s toes or intruding.   I don’t know how a
single guy like me is supposed to hook-up with anyone, and even if I did meet
someone interesting, I wasn’t authorized to touch or play with her, so what’s
the point?”

“Basically, all I got to do was watch an
edge play demo and a couple of scenes.  Yeah, I engaged in a few
half-hearted, superficial conversations with people who were obviously not very
interested in me, but after a couple hours of that, I was ready to go
home.  I hope not all BSM groups are like this one.”

Robert had gone to the event looking for
sex
,
but what he found there was –
surprise!
-
BDSM. 
It’s
unfortunate that one of the most commonly held misconceptions about the BDSM
lifestyle is the notion that it is
all about kinky, promiscuous sex. 
The
lifestyle is
kinky
, without a doubt, almost by definition; but how much
promiscuous
sex
is
there, really?  There is
surprisingly little
,
actually - typically
far
less than is typically assumed by the general
public.

That is not to say that promiscuous sex
doesn’t
happen
in this lifestyle. 
Of course it happens.
  But, it
happens in the BDSM lifestyle pretty much the same way it does in every
other
kind of lifestyle,
with the possible exceptions of
the poly
lifestyle
and
the swinging lifestyle. 
In other words, it
happens mostly behind closed doors.  The overwhelming majority of people
in the D/s and BDSM lifestyles are either
monogamous
or
polyfidelous
. 
A relatively small minority of those in the BDSM lifestyle consider themselves
swingers
. 
A good friend of mine likes to explain the difference to his vanilla
acquaintances thusly:  “We’re
beaters
, not
cheaters
.”  

Robert made more than just the simple mistake of
assuming that a BDSM munch group’s play party would be a
sex orgy.
 
He erroneously assumed that these events were all about
nudity
when, in
fact, nudity plays a very small role in most group events.  He was
judgmental
about the appearance of the others in attendance, even though
the BDSM culture is strongly supportive of being
body-positive
.  He
assumed that mostly
single people
would be attending an event of this
type and was
peeved
about all of the couples in attendance, because it
reduced his chances of
hooking-up
with someone.  He was
extremely
superficial
in how he approached and chatted with other attendees, as
evidenced by his remark,
“If I’m not authorized to touch... what’s the
point?” 

Apparently, it never occurred to Robert that if he
had actually been
interested
in anyone as
more than just a sex object
perhaps they, in turn, might have been interested in
him
as more than
just a creepy stranger who ought to be avoided.  Robert ended his
narrative with the thought,
“I hope all BDSM groups are not like this one,”
but fails to comprehend that in BDSM groups across the country, there are a
whole lot of people hoping that not all of their first time visitors are like
him.