First, a little background. I ran a State of the BDSM Community survey back in January (you can see the results here), asking mainly about personal BDSM habits and participation in Community events and education. Here is a clip from my analysis of trends among the 700+ BDSMers who took the survey.
The survey shows that 95% of voters overall believe the collective kink communities’ existence is under threat, with only 5% not worried about its stability. That is a shocking trend, showing a huge amount of anxiety around the viability of the BDSM/fetish communities over the long-term. There were two chief concerns, both of which got 26% of the vote: first, that the rapidly changing political environment presents us with new threats from outside; and second that the proliferation of scum seeping into the Community brings new threats from inside. Declining educational opportunities are worrying people too: 14% of voters think we don’t have enough solid mentors/educators to push ethical BDM forward, while 7% are concerned about a dwindling interest in BDSM education. Meanwhile, 12% of voters said that the explosive rate of growth we’ve seen in the size of the communities is diluting the meaning of BDSM and thus altering Community ethos for the worse. Finally, 10% of people said “something else” is threatening us. – link
There was a lot of great feedback on the Survey, with many people pointing out specific conflicts and dysfunctions they wished I’d addressed. With so many people worried about the politics and divisiveness undermining our Community’s spirit, I began wondering if it would be germane to run a second and supplemental survey, this time with a focus on the internecine conflicts. I threw it out to my circle of friends.
Read their comments for yourself. I agree with some, disagree with others, and am still pondering yet others.
It’s a big complex mess of very human problems, isn’t it? If there are answers to these problems, we haven’t come close to discovering them yet. If anything, it leaves me with more questions. Should we be more inclusive or more exclusive — and who gets to decide that? The same cliques that created some of the problems? Apparently, as a Community in 2018, we can’t even all agree that including minority voices is a good thing, while including homophobes and sex predators is a bad thing. Should we police malefactors — or is politically correct policing going to piss even more people off?
What gives me hope for positive change though is how passionate people were in their replies. We may not agree but we all really care about the BDSM Community, and that right there is the seed for positive change.
Now, just to mess it up even more, I will add some issues that I think have placed our Community under intense stress from the outside in. And, no, I’m not even going to talk about the 2018 elections right now…
- Cultural Entropy. In simple terms, it’s what happens where cultures get so big and so complicated they fall apart. It is one of the essential lessons in human history: nothing lasts. If an institution succeeds too well, its original purposes get lost in the increasing chaos. Like empires and dynasties of yore. Like organized religions. Like systems of government. Like the Internet, come to think of it. And like the BDSM community. We are too big, too dispersed, and too impersonal now to govern ourselves or even to establish common ethos within our multiplicity of internal communities.
- The 50 Shades Fiasco. It may be popular among the masses, but its net effect on the BDSM communities has been an unmitigated disaster. Now that more people are so excited about doing BDSM than previously imaginable, they show blind disinterest in getting educated about it or following moral or ethical guidelines about conduct, being honorable, and being tolerant. Even if we had the educational resources to do handle them, which we don’t, they wouldn’t take advantage of them. We can’t stop this flow of people who think 50 Shades represents BDSM life and scorn Community education. They are fiction-based BDSMers, not unlike the GOR fans who once permeated the BDSM world. They are a destabilizing agent and a symptom of the entropy.
- The Internet. It is the greatest thing on earth to happen to sexual minorities and the worst thing to happen to the BDSM corner of the sexual alphabet-soup. It is a breeding ground for predators, phonies, stalkers, liars, and self-appointed gurus with good social media skills. It hosts more distorted images of BDSM (thanks to shoddy porn and profiteers) than honest ones. Internet BDSM sexually objectifies women. Instead of being a bastion of freedom, BDSMers have to sneak around on social media platforms for fear that a photo of loving, consensual bondage will get them banned. Fuck the Internet. Oh, how I love it though.
So, should I do a second survey?
