This is the problem with the current "tolerance of all" thinking of many people who claim to be into BDSM these days. SMPride fought for public awareness in order to get the consent laws changed on S&M activities but people turned up at the Pride March in fancy dress and S&M was mocked rather than taken seriously. It was all very Eurotrash. Now anyone and everyone is told to go to a munch, especially if they venture into a chatroom and say "so how do people meet in here". Rarely does anyone check whether the person is even interested in BDSM or if they are vanilla and just looking for a quick shag. They are recommended to go to informedconsent.co.uk and find their nearest munch and this recommendation if often given by someone who never actually ventures beyond their keyboard themselves.
You only have to go back half a dozen years or so and you'll find that munches were fairly closed shops. New people were brought along by a regular and if that new person turned out to be a twonk it reflected on the reputation of the person that had introduced them.
A person I knew used to interrogate people with "who do you know?, where do you go?" in an effort to separate the chaff from the wheat - but they can all answer that one these days. They go to the clubs and fairs, they buy their corsets and their leather trousers, they attend and create munches for the down times between club nights and go to each others parties - yet the number that actually do BDSM seems minimal. "But wait!" They cry "We fit in the "alternative" part" - hmmm - that is a fuzzy edged wishy-washy part of the umbrella to stand under isn't it - to someone who has just spent 10 years in a lights out/missionary position only relationship a blow job would seem alternative - and maybe to them it is, but it isn't BDSM.
I'm all for raising public awareness but this isn't happening. What is happening instead is a watering down and mainstreaming of BDSM to some fetish-wearing-silk-scarf-to-bedhead-ann-summers soft porn kink experience, and those that feel the need to nail tits to tables and staple gun scrotums to wooden floors will still be seen as nutters and, at this rate, will never win the right to consent to such activities in the eyes of the law.
So who let the press in?? Who took this journalist along to the Medway Munch or was he recommended to go by some unknown face in a chatroom?? His press report ridicules BDSM. Nightshades in Edinburgh had to close and relocate because of press infiltration, Laurence Pays of Roisseys lost his job as a probation officer because of his involvement in BDSM and a guy from Herts still languishes in jail because a "sub", who probably thought it was all kinky fun and games came face to face with a sadist and went howling to the police about abuse. Probably after having spent a month in chat doing the "whip me, beat me, make me scream" act.
We all gathered happily under the pansexual umbrella of BDSM, safety in numbers I guess, but safety isn't there. The more the numbers grow the less safe it becomes. There are too many mis-guided, mis-informed or downright dishonest people and they are starting to grossly outnumber the BDSMers. I'm starting to wonder now if it wouldn't be better to segregate a bit more. I, for one, don't want to be linked too closely with the weird and wonderful fet wearers, nor with the people who do a bit of tying up and spanking before love-making.