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Are
you new to the BDSM lifestyle? Just beginning to explore your
dominant side? Maybe you're ready to take the leap from online
to real life? Even experienced dominants are going to find interesting
pieces of informatin with Rick Umbaugh's new colum Getting
Started.
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This column
is going to be about how to get started as a dominant. Over the
years I have seen many people try to get into the scene and fail
because they weren't willing to do the work necessary to learn about
how to do the things needed to be successful. I will write about
how to find the scene, how to find a partner, how to get into a
relationship and the psychological effects of domination. What I
will not talk about is technique, for that the readers will have
to find hands on instruction.
Over the last decade the number of people who have discovered their
kinky side has grown and grown, mostly because the Internet has
increased our visibility and our capacity to contact each other.
When I was growing up there was no scene, at least none that a kid
could find in the Midwest. There was the sexual freedom movement
of the late 1960s, but that was more about the number of partners
one had than about the quality of one's sexual partnering. There
were porn books out there, John Campbell and the House of Milan
were just getting started, and there were the Gor Books and the
Bond Books, which were mainstream and full of SM. My first exposure
to bondage and slavery was the Hercules movies of Steve Reeves,
a movie about Atlantis, whose name eludes me, and of course Spartacus.
These movies influenced the direction my sexuality was formed. The
fantasies of living these adventures got me turned on and I wanted
to bring them alive.
These fantasies, once they became a part of me, got me in trouble.
There is an old Calvin and Hobbs cartoon were Calvin is speaking
to his stuffed tiger, Hobbs. He is trying to write a short story
but he can't think of what to write. The tiger, being the adult
part of him, tells him to just write what he feels. "Every time
I do that," Calvin says, "they send me to the school psychologist."
Fortunately we didn't have a school psychologist when I was in 6th
grade or my passage through that school system would have been much
more difficult. I wrote a wonderful SM story for my 6th grade English
class, which outed me as being kinky and pretty much killed my social
life all the way through high school.
College was a different matter. I went to one of the premier theater
schools in the country, Southern Illinois University. It was a school
also known for its wildness and I fit right in. In 1968, in the
midst of the sexual cornucopia that was the "hippie era", I found
a woman who fantasized as much about being tied up as I did about
tying her up and we went right to it. I shudder today thinking of
all the mistakes and all the ways I could have hurt her, but fortunately
nothing bad happened. Which is rather the point of this story. We
made the mistake a lot of beginners do thinking that BDSM is like
vanilla sex, that without any kind of knowledge of what we are doing
we could just plunge in and start.
Of course we had no resources, except for the local hardware store
where we found rope. This was before the days of SM 101, or even
Dr. Alex Comfort, whose The Joy of Sex was a strong advocate of
bondage in the bedroom, that would come later. Fortunately we both
had a good time and she was not injured by my clumsiness.
Today there are almost too many places and ways to learn. A person
calling him or herself dominant can sound like a dominant, can say
the words and either accept or contradict the orthodoxies of the
times to sound more experienced than they are. While many of them
will eventually understand that what we do is rather more complicated
than vanilla sex or, as Easton and Liszt put it in their wonderful
book on bottoming,
| "One
useful metaphor is to think of BDSM as "graduate school sex,"
that you do after lots of study and practice. S/M is sex that
engages the whole person: our bodies, our intellects, our
emotions, our tool making abilities, our imaginations, our
hearts and our souls." |
While vanilla sex can be dangerous sometimes, BDSM is dangerous
all the time. It is, after all, bringing to life our fantasies of
sexual adventure and danger. It can also tap into our deepest, most
dangerous psychological needs. Because the amount of trust needed
to allow someone to tie you up or flog you the bonds between partners
in a BDSM relationship are stronger and violation of that trust
can consequently cause much more trauma than the break up in a non-kinky
(vanilla) relationship. Everything aspect of vanilla sex is enhanced
by making it kinky. That is the whole point. People who participate
in BDSM do so because the risk makes everything that much more tasty.
It is this amplification of the effects of sexuality that is the
reason we need to get training.
So, how does one get training? The best way to find training is
to find a support group in your area. These support groups began
in 1971 with The Eulenspeigel Society. It was created in New York
City inspired by the gay liberation movement which had sprung up
as a response to the Stonewall Riots. This was a group of kinky
people who answered an ad in the Village Voice to meet. At first
it was simply to support each other, to get sensitivity training
and find strength in numbers, but it moved rather quickly into having
members teach other members how to do things. One of them was good
at bondage, so he showed people how to tie each other up, another
was good at spanking, that kind of thing.
From these humble beginnings the modern organization, now called
The TES Association grew. This spawned other organizations as people
from other parts of the country began to see the value in this and
formed their own organization. It is one of these organizations
you have to find. For a long period of time these groups were centered
on the larger, more progressive cities, and to a large extent they
still are, but there are many other smaller organizations as well,
in places one would not expect to find them.
The best way to find these groups is the Internet. A selection of
sites with comprehensive lists of many of the BDSM groups will be
included at the bottom of this column. I would suggest that this
would be your first stop in finding an organization. Next would
be any alternative newspaper, if you are a college student there
might be a listing in your college paper. While we are still somewhat
politically incorrect there are some groups on campus which have
become established.
If you can't find ads for organizations specifically that point
to organizations, then you should be able to find a place which
sells sex toys. Go in, if they sell BDSM equipment then there is
a good chance they will know where you can find an organization,
there might even be literature there which will point you in the
right direction.
Lastly, while I don't advocate learning the craft of dominance in
books, there are three books that I would suggest ordering as a
perfect introduction to the scene:
The
New Bottoming Book and The
New Topping Book, these are books about what it is like to be
a top or a bottom. Also, you might want to order When
Someone You Love is Kinky, which is an examination of how to
deal with the vanilla world, as you will inevitably have to as your
interest in kinky sex evolves and grows. All of these books are
by Dossie Easton, who is a sex therapist and Catherine A. Liszt,
who describes herself as a writer, educator, pervert and pain slut.
They give a wonderful introduction to the Leather Community, to
which everyone is welcome.
Rick Umbaugh
qui bene amat bene castigat |
To find a BDSM
near you, TDV recommends the following sites:
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Direct comments or
questions you might have for this column to:
rickumbaugh @ thedomsview.com |
