Due to massive tourism, it’s more difficult for kink communities to develop, grow and establish strong leadership and connections with the membership. Leadership continually struggles with tourist types who are drop-ins, movers, shakers and weekenders. Drop-ins, movers and shakers visit the area then set up either temporary or short-term residency. Drop-ins are looking for a free ride on the community’s back. They feign lifestyle interests and impose their dysfunctional problems on the community. Movers are those who have established a new residence in the area, and as a new member they want your community to respond and recognize them. Shakers are new members who want to impose their standards, beliefs and methods on already established communities. They are new to town and immediately try to establish their place in the community through a leadership or officer type position while pushing for changes. Weekenders are the average tourist, here for a short vacation or a convention, and then they go home. All of these types wreck havoc in the kink community.

I’ll begin with the least problematic – weekenders. The biggest disturbance from weekenders is the time and energies they eat up with questions, curiosity and annoyance. They don’t understand the basic etiquettes of kink communities, and many believe kink means free sex. Our groups are based in “Sin City” which quadruples the number of weekenders seeking free sex. Groups in the community are inundated with emails, queries, and munch visitors seeking a quick, kinky, sex connection. A few of the community members are Pro-Doms who provide this type service, but the tourists do not want to pay for it. So, Mistresses and group leaders receive dozens of solicitations from males who want to serve for one day, one hour, one short length of time for anything, so they can go home and brag to their buddies about the kinky sex they had on vacation. The amount of time wasted on “weekenders” is mind-boggling. Add to that, many weekenders lie about their temporary status, and ask for interviews or screening to join a group or serve a dominant. It becomes tiresome for the leadership in the community, when they continually exude time for these sex-seekers. After a while, burn out with weekenders causes leadership to put forth less effort to bring newcomers into the community. Many groups close their doors to newcomers.

Weekenders are a mild disruption when compared to drop-ins, movers and shakers. Drop-ins, movers and shakers wind up in the community because they were seeking a new life, new job, or greener pastures. As soon as they discover the kink groups, many join immediately but only stay long enough to cause a disruption.

Drop-ins are more disruptive than weekenders, but not as problematic as movers and shakers. Drop-ins are submissives and dominants looking for free rent in the new community. They make connections via email or cyber training, and then move in with a selected lifestyle partner. This is an easy method to obtain free rent while checking out a new city for relocation. Most come with a ton of baggage including laziness, joblessness, kids, dysfunctional, mental illness, attention seekers, braggarts, ego-nuts, etc. The problem with drop-ins is they just drop-in, stir the pot, and then drop out. Drop-ins have found that feigned dominance or submission could get a few weeks of free rent while they make up their minds about temporary relocation. It can also get them some of the attention they desire – which is mostly negative. Once a drop-in has set up housekeeping under the auspice of being lifestyle, they usually join a few message boards. I have found drop-in dominants tend to start out on message boards stating that they will not join public groups, but prefer to practice their lifestyle privately behind closed doors. Then, they begin written tirades about why private is better, why their lifestyle beliefs and practices are better, and what’s wrong with the community at large. They tend to read the boards, and then poke a barb into the most inflamed spots of discussion. Many of these “private dominants” are just online masters with no real experience. That is why many of them will not join public groups. If they did, they would be quickly exposed. Drop-in submissives are another story entirely. They join the message boards, and then fake submissive attitudes. They wait for the dominants to jump up for the new treat - an uncollared submissive. They attend munches right away, and worm their way into the community. Many dominants are so eager to find a submissive, that they will snatch up any open prey. But it doesn’t take long for the dominant to discover the new sub is too much trouble, not lifestyle or a drama queen. The new submissive is then passed around from dom to dom and group to group, until she has burned her path with the whole community. It’s only a small problem unless the submissive uses negative gossip to open more doors.

Movers are a big part of the problem. Movers come to the community with minor-to-good experience or background from another community. Immediately, they tout their community’s perfect workings, and want the newly joined kink community to conform and change to the style and workings to which mover is comfortable. Movers demand a lot of attention, and recognition of their own expertise and ideas. Movers disrupt meetings, munches, parties and events with complaints, ideas for change and remarks that the current set up, no matter how well it has worked in the past, is now unsafe. Movers come into a community, disrupt the groups and membership, and then move on when people begin to ignore or deny the mover’s ideas and suggested changes. Occasionally, a mover will become a shaker, and establish a short-term leadership position or even start up a new group, but when the group begins to develop, the mover moves on to another town leaving the group to die out.

Shakers are the very worst. Shakers join a community and snake their way into some type of leadership or officer position. They start out with an offer to volunteer their expertise in some lifestyle area. Then they subtly begin to condemn the workings within the community. Some look for the internal conflicts and offer to negotiate a truce, but play both sides seeking the best position for themselves. Some tout years of experience (usually unchecked and untrue) and then seek an elected position, only to run the group or event into the ground and then disappear. Some challenge the leadership of an already established group, hoping to take it over so they do not have to do all the work needed to start their own group, causing many internal conflicts within a group. A year of nonsense from a shaker can crush a group to its core. Imagine a newcomer (shaker) strongly challenging an established leader who has been struggling to take a group toward a new goal. The shaker’s aggression and touted experience secures a leadership position and the old leader, who was doing good things with the group, is now out. The shaker tries to manage the group, but the group soon discovers he just does not have the skills or leadership qualities to make it work. Then the shaker bails out, leaving the group scurrying for new leadership. The old leader is no longer interested in the flaky politics and lack of support from the membership and moves on. The shaker, now embarrassed, also moves on and the shambles he has created force the group to begin anew.

In addition, in tourist towns, most movers and shakers do not cause problems in just one group. Due to the lack of cohesion and communication among the community, they can move from group to group, complaining about the last group they disrupted with hopes the next group will side with them and welcome them. This causes greater rifts between the groups, splitting the community further.

Any community that does not have a strong cohesion suffers from every strike. The lifestyle already has a large turn over, due to members who partner with vanillas, members who leave the lifestyle to avoid conflicts within the groups, and the many who just move on to other hobbies and interests. Only a very few truly commit themselves to lifestyle living, and they usually become the community’s leadership.

Kink communities develop best when the membership does not experience tremendous turn over. Tourist town communities are inundated with movers and shakers who land in the town for a few months-to-a-year, stir the pot, and then move on. If a community is able to identify and corral problem makers in the community, it thrives better. But most movers and shakers cause their disruptions and move on before the community can do that. So, in order to survive, kink communities in tourist towns have to develop unique methods of advertising and screen newcomers on a constant basis. Sadly, many groups become discouraged by the problems these newcomers cause, and close the doors to new members, or make the screening process so difficult that new members look elsewhere. Eventually the groups die out. This leaves the community with new groups beginning all the time, which contributes to a fractured community.

In order to thrive, kink communities in tourist towns find themselves divided according to how individual groups deal with the weekenders, drop-ins, movers and shakers. In our community, the inflow of the problematic members has caused a round robin of new groups constantly developing and dying. One group welcomes newcomers but only for occasional parties, one group member provides a party location for income purposes, one group is decisively geared toward lifestyle old-timers and rarely permits new members, and the leather community remains separate from the rest of the groups while experiencing their own difficulties with tourism. As for the community at large, we all sit back and watch the message board comments from outsiders about our lack of cohesion, fighting and factions, and we laugh at their suggestions as to how to fix it. Until you’ve lived it, you cannot possibly understand.