BEYOND TRANSGRESSION
THE ROAD BACK TO ANARCHY
When I was a young perv, living for the fun of it and enjoying myself immensely, we had a small group of writers and artists and punk rockers (some of whom had a closet full of suits they wore during the day) who were into what is now called BDSM. Back then we called it B&D, or S&M and we pretty much used the terms interchangeably because we did not realize just how important it would be to define every word with Talmudic fury and make war with each other if our definitions happened to differ. We were having too much fun, finding new ways to tie up our girlfriends, experiment with cattle prods and blow torches, stick needles into people and occasionally hang a sub out of the window of a studio one of our folks rented in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. (The rents in that place were cheap back then.)
We had no rules, no nonsense about protocol, no SSC bullshit (SSC had not really been invented yet) and if anyone had dared to lecture us about any of that we would have hanged HIM out of the window by his neck! Safety, don’t be ridiculous! Worrying about the precious feelings of the damned nillers? Don’t make us puke! Hell, we had the megabucks of the arts community to draw on if any cop had been damned fool enough to get in our way. We’d have screamed First Amendment from the rooftops and made their lives a living hell.
And the dumb pigs were just smart enough to know it. They certainly knew better than to bother us.
So what went wrong? Damned if I know.
Maybe we just got old. People found other things do with their life and their art. Most got married, settled down and ended up with boring lives and annoying children, living in a nice house in Naperville and occasionally musing before the fire when the wife is in bed and the kids out carousing about how things were once good and how gray the world has become.
And some of us just found ourselves with people who did not have an ounce of courage and would not know it if it sat on their faces. They so wanted to conform, to be popular and accepted that they would make any compromise in order to get that.
We found ourselves in discussion clubs, and SSC appeared and we figured it wouldn’t hurt so we didn’t make an issue of it. We kept our anarchist core and became the Transgressionists, the rule-breakers, the folks who didn’t give a rat’s ass what the gays did or thought about anything. But Paradise was lost and no amount of martyrdom would bring us to it. We were stuck in those damned clubs listening to boring lectures on safewords and safe sex and safe this and safe that and what the hell happened to good nasty fun?
And in our heart of hearts we were shouting “FUCK SAFETY!”
And then we encountered the Structuralist dogs, may Allah piss in their beards, who tried to impose their protocol garbage on us and then our old selves reared up and told them what they could do with their protocol! And it felt good! For a brief, glorious moment we were alive again! The Transgressionist soul began to re-emerge and the rules began to crumble. The uniform (the silly vest and funny hat) passed away to be worn only by the poseur and the talentless. People created groups and play spaces that prided themselves on the fact that they had no rules. And the stranglehold of the clubs that people had to join in order to have access to dungeon space (unless they had one in their own house) was slowly but surely broken.
It seemed for a glorious moment that the old days were going to come back. Ah, would that that were true.
A new battle zone was created, online.
Online—the blessing! A way to meet people, to create groups and communities out of nothing, the problem of contact solved forever! A place to trade ideas and learn things one may never have thought of.
Online—the curse! A forum for the preachers and the pompous, the wannabee with 20 aol years of experience who does not know which end of the whip to hold but feels it proper to lecture those who have rope older than he does. A place for any bullshit artist with a website to proclaim that he was initiated into the Secret Oriental Red Dragon and Sushi Society for the Promulgation of BDSM Knowledge to the Big Nosed and Funny Smelling Gajin. A place where any whore can write from her street corner in Hollywood and expect to be listened to.
And the nonsense they have created!!
The Safety Scum with their cowardly worries about everything! Don’t do this! Don’t do that! Don’t go outside without your hard-hat because you might get hit by a meteorite!
The Law-Abiding Chicken-shits, oh, so worried about what society thinks!
And the Silly Subbies with their nonsense about Honor and Respect! HAH!!!! We never used those stupid words, not even in the darkest days of the discussion clubs.
Online, a place of a hundred million voices, all shouting at each other, all seeking the just the right club to hit people over the head with.
It ain’t working!
We can promote the blessings of Anarchy to the mailing lists until our fingers fall off from typing. We can create the most-kickass websites in creation and still we are only a group of voices in a cacophony. Online is not the way to go, at least not for the long haul.
No, the answer lies in the words of Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill. “All politics is local.”
We have to go back to the groups. No, not the discussion clubs again. Their day is dying even as I write. What is needed are groups of pervs dedicated to the blessings of Anarchy, autonomous groups, answering and answerable to none. Small groups willing to tell their local community to go fuck itself if they have to, those are what is needed.
You see, words on the screen mean nothing. It really doesn’t matter if someone on the other side of the country approves or disapproves of what you do. There is nothing they can do about it one way or the other. The people that matter are the ones you deal with in real time on a regular basis. So the time has come for us to take a page out of the playbook of the old revolutionaries, to create small cells of subversion, little groups of Anarchists, Scene Terrorists if you will, but unlike the revolutionaries of the last century, not meeting in secret, not hiding their activities, but doing them in a spotlight, ramming their transgressions up the tight asses of the preachers and the pompous, making a point of doing everything they disapprove of, being it serving beer at a party to shocking the despised nillers (may Allah cause them to live for eternity in excrement). And when the preachers disapprove, not engaging them in debate, not playing Socratic and Scholastic games with them, but simply batting them aside with a “We don’t care what you think. We don’t care what you don’t approve of.”
It only takes a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel as the old saying went. We must be those rotten apples, corrupting the purity of the purists, stealing people away from them and reducing their purity to a laughing stock. And as they writhe in their helpless fury, stamping impotent little feetsies, Paradise will return and the curses of SSC and Protocol and Rules and Dungeon Monitors will pass away from us. Those that want them will have them but they will know that they can never hope to impose them on anyone else, never again!