THE DEATH OF AN IDEA
It isn’t often that I get to write an obituary and actually I’m rather glad that I don’t. After all, if I liked the person who died I’m not going to be exactly in a writing mood and if I didn’t like the person, well, it’s sort of ill-mannered to say that the dead person was a lousy SOB and the world is better off without him, not that that would stop me, but it seems a lot of bother to put it into writing. I just say it.
Anyway, this isn’t for a person, it’s for an idea, a rather obnoxious idea that never really got off the ground and is now pretty much dead and buried and that is the notion that there could ever be some sort of centralized control for the BDSM world. Ok, one can see that this never had a chance just by looking at it. I mean, given the vast multiplicity of styles and viewpoints, ranging from extreme Structuralist to total Transgressionist, and the jealousy with which players and groups guard their autonomy, I don’t see how anyone who gave the idea that there could a central controlling agency a second thought could reasonably expect it to work. I mean, even if it could get a number of groups to go along with its edicts, the controlling group would immediately be faced with a number of organizations that would have nothing to do with it and the groups that did accede to its claims to authority would probably split rather dramatically in short order.
If ever there was a recipe for scene civil war, this idea was it.
But fortunately for all of us, no matter what side of the fight we would have been on, the idea is dead. We don’t even hear about it any more, though one can find the older traces of it if you search through the web and look at some of the chat logs posted. No one now seriously thinks that any uniform control or even standards are possible in the scene. There is has simply been too much communication and out of the arguing the realization has come that we are just too independent a bunch of old farts (and young farts too) to let any pretended authority claim the right to tell us how to run our groups or our relationships or our play. After all, even the calmest of our people have something about which they are on a hair trigger and all it takes is someone to set it off.
It just goes to show one simple fact. Anyone who thinks that a scene community can be controlled will learn, very very quickly, just how uncontrollable it can become.
It isn’t often that I get to write an obituary and actually I’m rather glad that I don’t. After all, if I liked the person who died I’m not going to be exactly in a writing mood and if I didn’t like the person, well, it’s sort of ill-mannered to say that the dead person was a lousy SOB and the world is better off without him, not that that would stop me, but it seems a lot of bother to put it into writing. I just say it.
Anyway, this isn’t for a person, it’s for an idea, a rather obnoxious idea that never really got off the ground and is now pretty much dead and buried and that is the notion that there could ever be some sort of centralized control for the BDSM world. Ok, one can see that this never had a chance just by looking at it. I mean, given the vast multiplicity of styles and viewpoints, ranging from extreme Structuralist to total Transgressionist, and the jealousy with which players and groups guard their autonomy, I don’t see how anyone who gave the idea that there could a central controlling agency a second thought could reasonably expect it to work. I mean, even if it could get a number of groups to go along with its edicts, the controlling group would immediately be faced with a number of organizations that would have nothing to do with it and the groups that did accede to its claims to authority would probably split rather dramatically in short order.
If ever there was a recipe for scene civil war, this idea was it.
But fortunately for all of us, no matter what side of the fight we would have been on, the idea is dead. We don’t even hear about it any more, though one can find the older traces of it if you search through the web and look at some of the chat logs posted. No one now seriously thinks that any uniform control or even standards are possible in the scene. There is has simply been too much communication and out of the arguing the realization has come that we are just too independent a bunch of old farts (and young farts too) to let any pretended authority claim the right to tell us how to run our groups or our relationships or our play. After all, even the calmest of our people have something about which they are on a hair trigger and all it takes is someone to set it off.
It just goes to show one simple fact. Anyone who thinks that a scene community can be controlled will learn, very very quickly, just how uncontrollable it can become.