Into the Flashback Machine!
I’m 30. I’ve got about a year of experience in this wonderful weird world of ours. I’ve been trying but can’t find any good books or classes to teach me how to be a dominant. Luckily, I know experienced kinksters who are eager to fill me on the mysteries.
They taught me that Mistresses were supposed to wear fetish clothes and high heels but were never to be seen with a collar around their neck. I learned that it was important, at all costs, to always appear dominant with a sub and to disguise any weaknesses.
I learned about protocols, including — but not limited to — subs walking behind doms, subs not talking to anyone at a club without permission, flagging your orientation with a folded hankie in a back pocket, that doms wore keys and toys on the left side only, while subs wore them to the right. One elder told me I should start drinking my coffee black because that was an established tradition. Another told me that masters and mistresses must never fall in love with subs or slaves because it would make the top soft and destroy the dynamic.
It was challenging to make sense of all the new rules — some of which immediately set me on edge, like not falling in love with a sub. That was the opposite of my dream of finding a romantic connection with the submissive yin to my dom yang. Black coffee was definitely a hard limit. I am nothing without some cream in my coffee.
But there was also a lot I did buy into, and maintaining top space was at the top of that list. I was still the insecure girl who had denied her own sexuality until her late 20s, who was still lost in her own anxieties about relationships and whether I would ever find a job I liked or a career that inspired me. Like many newbies, I still carried a lot of insecurity, self-doubt, shame, and other vanilla baggage in those years.
Maintaining top space was the first mountain I climbed. It felt safe and powerful. I avoided emotional attachments and threw myself into play. It worked great — until human realities started popping up faster than whack-a-moles.
The Mistress and the Mouse
It was during this awakening phase that I started a relationship with “Tom”.
We were playing in my West Village Apartment. I led him on a leash while he was handcuffed and blindfolded. Things were proceeding sweetly as I encouraged him along, turned to flick him with a whip occasionally, and teasing him with playful Mistressly mockery.
And then I saw it: an exterminator had left out some traps. Somehow, I led my blindfolded slave right to one holding a very dead New York City mouse.
Every molecule of my being wanted to shriek and flee!
But I was a dominatrix. I couldn’t go running to my bedroom and hide until I was calm enough to call the super to remove the trap. So I pretended as hard as I could that the trap wasn’t there, led my unknowing sub back to the bedroom, and called the super after he left. Tom never knew about the mouse. I had a role to stay in.
Things were different back then.
The Good Old Days Weren’t All Good
You’ve probably heard some elders who believe, and want others to believe, that the old days of BDSM (by which they mean from the 1970s through 1990s) were idyllic times, a golden age of incredible freedom – when we were a smaller, tighter community (true) where everyone knew everyone and things were safer (not true).
Many clubs found kinship within their tribe and with fellow tribes, and created many positive rules and codes that still work today. Yet, there was an important reason the term “Safe Sane Consensual” was invented in the 1980s.
Things were not safer back then. There were horrifying consent violations and there was domestic violence masquerading as “S&M.” There was blatant racism and misogyny that went unquestioned. There were hateful divides between gay kink and heterosexual kink. Lots of transphobia.
The good old days may have felt special if you were there and felt included, but a lot of shit really needed to change.
The Evolving BDSM Community
Since the 1990s, we’ve made a phenomenal journey. We’ve gone from being underground sex radicals inventing codes that worked for small groups to a vast global community attempting to constantly improve on those codes.
Today’s community isn’t the same as the one I joined. It’s better.
Three Big Changes
Dress for your pleasure
Today, I’ve heard even members of the so-called Old Guard lightly refer to the leather dress code as “leather drag.” The pressure to stick to code has subsided significantly, even though plenty of us love any excuse to get into fetish and leatherwear. But in the old days, if you didn’t dress the part you weren’t given the same respect.
In retrospect, it’s ironic that we all had to dress the same to prove that we were nonconformists.
Be your whole self, whoever that is
Today, the pressure to pick a role and stick to it has diminished. There are still clubs or events for those with more traditional Leather values. However, the younger generations have brought with them bigger, broader ideas about what kink is and can be. That includes much wider diversity in the types of power relationships we form, a wider range of fetishes, and the freedom to express a multiplicity of erotic kink/fetish identities, including other-gendered roles.
This also means people no longer have to maintain top space at all times to be taken seriously and subs can express their power in their relationships. What touches me most, though, is how many of us now realize tops and bottoms can, do, and should love each other – whether for an hour or a lifetime – and treat each other with human kindness.
BDSM is a Consent-Based Culture
I absolutely love how many new dialogues and acronyms younger people are creating about consent issues. Sure, we talked a lot about it in the 80s and 90s. We argued over the definitions on chat boards and in live classes. (Sane was always a tough one to pull apart)
But anyone who was in the Scene back then also saw chronic abuse and misuse of the term by unethical doms, even as they claimed to be SSC. This was particularly true of the generation who preceded the invention of “SSC.” They started playing before there were such ethical groundings, and they didn’t change their style when my generation appeared.
While I’m not saying the new generation has won the battle against clueless doms or criminals who pretend to be doms, consent-consciousness has become a golden standard to distinguish BDSM from domestic violence. It’s not perfect, but it’s been improving. Consent-consciousness has literally been a life-saving evolution in our world.
Today’s Mouse
35 years later, I’m still thinking about that dead-rodent dilemma. The woman who almost screamed like a little girl while pretending to be All-Powerful Mistress cracks me up. Today I would shriek “holy fuck!” and probably make him clean it up. Because today we can be real people with different dimensions to our identities.
This new BDSM world delights me. I love the young people who are evolving us in intelligent, more humanistic directions. I love their commitment to consent and their wide-open embrace of sex and gender diversity.
Are there still old-timers out there kvetching about “the good old days”? Sure. But I know there are people my age and older who welcome the new blood coursing through our communal veins.
