About Treading On Our Toes

We fight all the time trying to get people to understand why we feel the way we do about weekend players who claim to be sadists and masochists or people who use S&M as a kink. I struggle to find a parallel, a "well, it's like …." to illustate my point and I think the reason I struggle is because our condition is a psychological one, it is not immediately visible. If it was a physical one people would be too polite and too politically correct to lack such understanding of our kind.

Well, it's like …

Imagine, for example, people who are forced to live their lives wheelchair bound because of illness or physical injury. Can you imagine how they would feel if wheelchairs became a popular item amongst the able-bodied, a toy for fun and enjoyment and worst of all a toy they could stand up and walk away from whenever they felt like it.

Imagine also a member of this new wheelchair fad going up to a paraplegic and saying "wheelchairs are fun aren't they?" or "well you must think they are fun or you wouldn't be using one". You would reel at the lack of empathy and the total disregard of the person's condition.

Now I am not saying that I see us as having a disability. As it was pointed out to me, we are happy to be the way we are whereas the wheelchair-bound would no doubt prefer to be able-bodied. But, crudely put, that is how it is with us, the sadists, masochists, transvestites, autoerotics, voyeurs and others of this type. We reel from the lack of understanding offered to us. We can't give this up for a while, we can't put the need on hold because life got too busy, we can't sit quietly and wait for it to just come along one day. We are obsessive. We are driven by a need, an all-absorbing addiction and to repress it or deny it would cause dysfunction and ill health. If the need was to be repressed it would have to be held down with drug taking or alcohol and it would manifest as depression, aggression, self-harming and self destruction. Life would fall apart.

We announce that we are not interested in sex and maybe this is not strictly true, but we put it like that to try to get people to understand that we cannot have the "normal" sexual encounters that regular people have. We can go through the motions of sex but we get little, if anything, from it unless the deviation is involved. So we tend to search for the deviation more than the sexual encounter. The condition is progressive and chronic. The need increases. Each time it takes a step further to get to where we need to be. Because it triggers the same pleasure centres as nilla sex, it results in over-riding and then totally replacing the normal sex drive.

Our Obsession With Safety

We are the genre that spawn the likes of Myra Hindley, Fred and Rose West and John Robinson. All walks of life have their share of nutters. The thing that seperates us from the psychopaths is sanity, the understanding of the consequences of our actions, and it is our sanity that enables us to function within society, occupations and relationships. Our sanity saves us from being classified as mentally ill.

I guess it often comes across like we are dismissing people's fun as if they do not have the right to it but in reality we are trying to say "for your own sake and safety don't make out that you are like us". Being the way we are makes us more aware of the dangers than those who do this for a bit of fun and so there is bound to be a gut reaction when we see people playing at S&M and meeting others yet showing a total disregard for the fact that they might be approached by somebody more need-driven by a paraphilia or deviation.

We are also aware that whilst paedophiles lurk in kiddy chatrooms and Ted Bundy types lurk in adult chatrooms then the sexual psychopaths will lurk in BDSM chatrooms. So can you imagine how we feel when we push the safety issue and get told that a BDSM meet is no more risky nor more dangerous than a nilla blind date?
It's not easy to make this understood when we broach it in the chatrooms. People see it as us saying we are better than them. They get defensive. We are not all eloquent speakers. The typed word is limiting. Language and intonation are mis-read. The pack forms against us and chaos ensues.

©2004 Michelle - Circe
 and on behalf of

Chris - MC
Chelsea
John - domj
Claire
John - InYourThoughts
Paul - paulatvmaid
EGO
Jenni
Wayne - Gower
Linda - heart_and_soul
Alan - CS
Alison - Ally-Bound



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