WHERE SOME IDEAS CAME FROM
Have you ever wondered where some of the loonier ideas about "community" in BDSM have their roots. I mean some of the more absurd notions of social control, the idea of community uber alles, that seems to permeate some of our discourse until folks run into those of us who have the guts to say that the "community" can go to hell.
Well, take a look at the cartoon panel below. It is a do-gooder cartoon inserted into a comic book from late 1957 and pay particular attention to the last panel. The solution that the poor dummies propose for Badly Dressed Social Misfits behaving badly is to, get this, have a committee at their school come up with a code of conduct for everyone. As if anyone would be so gutless as to follow it!
But they were serious, at least the clowns behind the cartoon were and when you realize that the actual demographic for the readers of the comic book it was in was about eight to ten years too young...
Yes, it is pretty silly. But for some idea the notion took root and thus we get damned fools and sundry morons thinking that a given "community" can come up something that will be binding on everyone in it. And of course such things are about as binding as the sort of nonsense that this cartoon proposes would have been then.
Have you ever wondered where some of the loonier ideas about "community" in BDSM have their roots. I mean some of the more absurd notions of social control, the idea of community uber alles, that seems to permeate some of our discourse until folks run into those of us who have the guts to say that the "community" can go to hell.
Well, take a look at the cartoon panel below. It is a do-gooder cartoon inserted into a comic book from late 1957 and pay particular attention to the last panel. The solution that the poor dummies propose for Badly Dressed Social Misfits behaving badly is to, get this, have a committee at their school come up with a code of conduct for everyone. As if anyone would be so gutless as to follow it!
But they were serious, at least the clowns behind the cartoon were and when you realize that the actual demographic for the readers of the comic book it was in was about eight to ten years too young...
Yes, it is pretty silly. But for some idea the notion took root and thus we get damned fools and sundry morons thinking that a given "community" can come up something that will be binding on everyone in it. And of course such things are about as binding as the sort of nonsense that this cartoon proposes would have been then.