Approaching the wider world...

 

 

Just a quick piece before bed; I’m single and I’ve been single most of my life.  As such my contact

with BDSM has mostly been limited to the Internet.  I am, to put it pathetically, one of what an Australian girl I met last year referred to as ‘those guys who wank off in front of a computer’.  Yet that gives me a distinctive perspective, because when you’re alone, BDSM can be scary. 

 

 

I don’t mean in terms of the practices involved.  They can be scary for anyone and are best approached slowly and carefully.  What I mean is the wider BDSM community itself.  Now, I’m not saying that anyone’s unfriendly or overly hostile.  Rather it can be a shock to see what it’s really like.  The Internet skews images of BDSM, either through the prism of porn, or the intentionally hostile lens of certain media commentators.

 

So when you go to a BDSM event and you see ordinary people, of all ages, shapes and sizes and from all walks of life together, it can be a little jarring.  Maybe this reflects badly on me but I’ve only got my own experience to go on.  Last year I went to a party in Bolton.  The venue was a warehouse that had been converted into a playspace and was run under the name Crimson Crowbar.  I went because they didn’t need any fetish clothing as part of the dress code.  So I put a nice shirt and jacket and went after work. 

 

It was an eye opener.  For one thing I’d never seen anyone in fetish clothing before, nor had I been able to walk around watching people being whipped, caned, flogged or paddled.  For another thing pretty much everyone else there had far more experience than I did.  Thankfully they made me welcome and the Australian girl and I (and yes, I wish I could remember her name) became friends quite quickly.  Yet going around watching men old enough to be my father being caned, grown women being bullwhipped or having needles stuck in their back, it was obvious that this wasn’t a world for the faint-hearted. 

 

Admittedly if you’ve been single and relatively alone for as long as I have, you develop a sense of every new experience as something to be savoured, no matter what it is.  That’s made my break-up from girlfriend easier to bear, though it’s still hard a lot of the time to think of spending the rest of my life without her.  That’s digressing however so back to my point, which is this.  If you’re in a couple when you realise you like BDSM, try and find a few others you can talk to before taking the plunge of going to community events.  That way you’ll have a better chance of enjoying yourself.

 

P.S. I'm going to try and solve the problems with posting.