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After the sacrifices of
World War II, people simply wanted normalcy. The people of the
United States retired to their homes and businesses and seemed
to live conventional lives, but they began to want something more.
It began small, with the Beats and the surfers, but as the decade
of the 1950s ended and the 1960s began, the fatigue with war and
ideology began to take hold. There was still a cold war, but the
penultimate cold warrior, James Bond, could fight communists and
anarchist while still having a woman at night. The more realistic
George Smiley and Alec Leamas could have the adventure of the
spy game, but in the end knew it would come to disaster. While
the Cold War raged fatigue with war and "national causes" in general
began to take over. Ideologies and national crusades were taken
over by more individual causes, ending the war, civil rights,
sexual rights, and, in the end, all that was left for most people
was exhaustion and a sense that they needed to reap some of the
good life that they had fought for. For most people this came
out in the great burst of sexual freedom at the end of the 1970s.
Along with this came the
intense need for people to "find themselves". This was heartily
mocked by the conservative movement. They, after all knew who
they were, they were their causes, the same way that the people
of the middle part of the 20th Century identified themselves with
their causes. The old found identity in what they believed, but
the young looked for their identity in who they were.
Being a male Dom in the late 1970s was a moveable feast. Many
of the things that gave rise to the kinky communities of today
were just beginning then. TES, which began in 1971, was a great
place to hunt. After the publication of "Interview with a Vampire"
more women began to investigate the scene and so were available
without having to explain that you would like to tie them to the
bed as a part of the sex play. All you had to do was bite their
neck.
There was a tee-shirt popular
in the mid-1970s which read something like "I'm tired of reality,
I'm just looking for a good fantasy" and so people found their
fantasies. The SCA, a group which reenacts the Middle Ages, began
with the "last tournament" and a demonstration against the 20th
Century on the streets of Berkley, CA in 1966. By the late 70s
to early 80s it existed in most of the country and many of the
people who were making the computer revolution happen were members,
balancing their hi-tech worlds with the simpler social mechanisms
of the Middle Ages. Their major convention on the East coast,
called the Pennsic War, grew until it attracted thousands to come
and live a medieval fantasy for two weeks every August. Other
groups created Ren Faires so that the general public could have
a fantasy medieval experience, for a price. These fairs became
sexual hot beds, all those performers camping out together, and
places where kinky sex could be found.
War Games and Fantasy Games,
precursors of today's computer games, were big as well with the
hi-tech crowd, the class nerds who created the computer revolution.
This was the time of the great fantasy role-play craze, with its
attendant backlash. The great fundamentalist outbreak was just
beginning and people who believe in the literal existence of monsters
and devils in the Bible had trouble with people who wanted to
play games with them. What they didn't notice was that the generation
growing up with these games was finding how fantasy and role-play
could enhance their sex lives, recruits for BDSM.
The humanist movement in
psychology had begun to emphasize that a person didn't necessarily
need to fit into a medical definition of normal to be sane, so
colleges sex ed courses began to come to TES and invite people
from TES to talk to them. I did some of that work, as I was closer
in age to the college students than most of the members of TES,
and met, Chastity (not her real name), the first person I brought
into the scene that way. She had come to TES to see what it was
like. She brought her boyfriend, as protection, but left me her
phone number. (It was the only time that I picked up someone and
Master Jack did not. Seduction is the first art of dominance.)
We became (and still are) very close. At one of the lectures for
the Sex Ed classes at her college I answered the question as to
what do people into S/m do I answered it by tying her hands and
having her kneel at my chair while I continued the lecture. It
got the teacher who allowed, it transferred to a less prestigious
branch of the college.
We broke up because she
could not admit to who she was, a submissive woman. She could
not, in her early 20's accept that she was kinky, the old morality
of "normal" vs. "abnormal" preyed on all of us. She went on to
marry vanilla and have children in the suburbs. After 5 years
of marriage or so she called me up and asked how to find the scene
again. She did but only after some long and difficult experiences,
which broke up her marriage (although BDSM was not even the primary
cause of the breakup) and probably would have lost her the children
if her husband had wanted to contest for them. Society believes
there should be a price for cheating on one's husband, particularly
if it is because of one's sexual preferences are different from
that norm.
She had broached the idea
of trying BDSM to her husband and he made a half-hearted attempt,
but it was not to be. She couldn't think of him except as his
vanilla self (and neither could he). She was actually lucky, another
woman I know of broached the idea of BDSM with her spouse and
he suggested a psychiatrist. I am loathed to admit it, but the
vanilla world just doesn't understand what we do or why we do
it. Sex and sexuality to them, in general, there are some exceptions,
is just such a small and fleeting part of the hard reality of
their lives.
Before the great sexual
revolution, which began with World War II and reached its climax
in the 60's and 70's, sex was about reproduction. Vanilla sex
is about finding beautiful women and powerful men. Everyone was
supposed to find someone who fit their own place on the reproductive
hierarchy, marry that person and live a life together creating
children then slowly declining into the sexual abstinence of old
age. This was the way of things, but once effective contraception
and cures for venereal disease came into the picture sex became
a reason for recreation. You combine this with the fact that childbirth
was no longer a life threatening exercise for either the mother
or the child, and sexuality was no longer something as serious
as it had once been.
Indeed, nothing was as serious as it had been. With the coming
of a society of abundance anything could be turned into an entertainment.
While books, movies and television could entertain us passively
there were now games and recreations that could simulate anything.
Games that could make one feel like a general and societies that
could make one feel like a soldier in one of the antique wars
of history. The generation which was born to the people who weathered
World War II and the Great Depression short circuited their own
chance for glorious sacrifice on the battlefield, then went on
to find themselves in their recreations, and BDSM is a part of
that great awakening to the idea that the dangerous excitements
of the past could be recreated without the danger by making it
a living fantasy.
The popularity of BDSM comes
out of that movement. When kinky sex moved out of the brothel
culture and into the private bedroom (probably some time between
World War I and World War II) BDSM was born. Sex became about
bringing to reality those childhood fantasies in which excitement
and fear are sexual stimulants. It is about bringing our dark
dreams safely into reality and as such it is very much a part
of the mainstream culture, which has very much become about fantasy
fulfillment (just look at the popularity of reality TV).
So that is what finding
oneself is in BDSM, finding ones fantasy, finding how one wants
to play at one's sexuality. This play can be confined to the bedroom
or expanded to one's entire lifestyle. The only danger is when
one goes from understanding it as play and begins to think of
it as real. Reality is, after all is said and done, nonconsensual.
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