Observations and thoughts

How to Be Kinkier  More Adventures in Adult Playtime

Playing Well With Others  Your Field Guide To Discovering, Exploring And Navigating The Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities

The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage

Bondage for Sex

Secret Magazine (BDSM magazine no longer published but still interesting and available online)

Cuadernos de BDSM

Juegos BDSM 

The last two are Spanish magazines so interesting primarily to those who speak or can at least understand Spanish fairly well.

There are plenty of submissive heterosexual individuals who explain their submission to a member of the opposite gender as a result of their belief in male or female supremacy, while there are also dominants of both genders claiming that one gender has superiority over the other and so it is the one's destiny to serve the other. Let's now consider a hypothetical submissive gay man. If he finds somebody to submit to, this will be a male dominant. Let's suppose now that he explains his submission to an other man as having to do with his belief in male supremacy, despite the fact that he is a man himself! Why turn sexual orientation into an ideology?

For people truly wishing to be informed about the subject, this is a useful although obviously not complete list of relevant non-fiction litterature dealing with various aspects of BDSM, of interest to people of all roles.

A to Z of BDSM

How to Be Kinky A Beginner's Guide to BDSM

Screw the Roses Send Me the Thorns the Romance and Sexual Sorcery of Sadomasochism

BDSM Basics for Beginners A Guide for Dominants and Submissives Starting to Explore the Lifestyle

Domination & Submission The BDSM Relationship Handbook

Consensual Sadomasochism How to talk about it & how to do it safely

La Laisse A Common Sense Approach to Dominance and Submission

Sexual Masochism The Sexual Pleasure of Pain

The Many Shades of BDSM

Two Knotty Boys Showing You the Ropes A Step-by-Step Illustrated Guide for Tying Sensual and Decorative Rope Bondage

Two Knotty Boys Back on the Ropes

The Ultimate Guide to Kink BDSM Roleplay and the Erotic Edge

The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual

The Curious Human Phenomenon An exploration of some uncommonly explored aspects of BDSM

On the Safe Edge A Manual for SM Play

Master/slave relations: Handbook of Theory and Practice

Learning The Ropes A Basic Guide To Safe And Fun S/M Lovemaking

Jay Wiseman's Erotic Bondage Handbook

Different Loving The World Of Sexual Dominance & Submission

50 Ways To Play BDSM For Nice People

Shibari The Art of Japanese Bondage

The Beauty of Kinbaku

Bondage Basics

Shibari You Can Use Japanese Rope Bondage and Erotic Macrame

More Shibari You Can Use Passionate Rope Bondage and Intimate Connection

Essence of Shibari Kinbaku and Japanese Rope Bondage

SM 101 A Realistic Introduction

Conscious Kink For Couples

Extreme Space The Domination & Submission Handbook

BDSM The Naked Truth

50 Shades of Kink An Introduction to BDSM

BDSM101

Das Bondage-Handbuch (that's in German)

The Better Built Bondage Book

Complete Shibari vol.1 Land

Complete Shibari vol.2 Sky

The traits that characterize scammers are more or less known and often mentioned on such sites, in sections dealing with how to avoid such people, but it doesn't harm to mention them. Usually they are requests to contact them elsewhere or asking you to give them a mail or skype address without giving you any reason for doing so, being from a different country then the one they live, asking a lot of questions but avoiding answering any at all or doing it by using stereotypical ways of expression, and ultimately asking for money or other favors. The issue is of course to detect such signs long before the conversation goes to money.

On an other such site I am a member, a couple of months ago I received a message from somebody in a neighbouring country, it was a rather short message where she asked me to contact her at some non BDSM-related social networking app. There are perfectly reasonable and legitimate reasons for somebody to ask you to contact him/her somewhere else, but she gave me none, and I refused saying that whatever was to be said could be said there without any problem. Then she told me that the particular site plus many others of similar content was blocked in this country and she had to use VPN in order to access it. I checked it and found out that this was true, so in order to make things easier for her I gave her an alias mail address in order for her to be able to contact me, which she did. I replied to her mail, received no reply and when a few days later I sent another message in order to ask her something that I had thought about in the meantime I received no reply either. I waited for some time and then, having concluded that she was ghosting me, deleted the alias address I had given her and blocked her at the site she had first contacted me.

Scamming and ghosting are obviously not two identical activities, the motives for the first are purely criminal, but where there is common ground is the utter indifference for other people. The scammer is interested in others only as long as he/she gets or thinks that can get something out of them (money usually), while the ghoster doesn't have the will to find time in order try to understand others and also give time to others to understand him/her. The particular example I brought up, had a fully reasonable reason for wanting me to contact her somewhere else, but didn't bother to explain that in the first message. 

Based also on various posts on this site and elsewhere, a lot of people seem to take ghosting very emotionally, there is one really nasty aspect to it, that if somebody disappears without a trace, you can't be certain if his/her silence is ghosting or has actually to do with something else which might have happened to this person. It is however such a common phenomenon nowadays that when somebody disappears like that the best is to wait for a while in case something has indeed happened before assuming that ghosting is taking place, and when such an assumption is made erase every way this person has to contact you again, because one thing is certain, the person who ghosted you once, will ghost you twice, so better not waste any more time. Therefore somebody must always be ready to block such people, and particularly if using email for communication, to have available a list of alias addresses and give only some of them and never the main one.

I write "mindfuck" instead of mindfuck, as I don't doubt that there are people who really get excited and horny by the latter, a mental connection is necessary in any case, two people who are potential partners must be able to understand each other, I write "mindfuck" thinking of an another tendency. On BDSM sites there are profiles of people saying that "I don't say what I want, it's up to others to find out, because they have to fuck my mind before fucking my body". This is something obviously problematic, since you cannot really know what's going on inside an individual's mind and psyche even if they are people whom you have known personally and for a long time, sometimes not even inside you, let alone somebody whose existence the only reason you are aware of is because he/she has a profile somewhere. I do have a reservation for this, but my suspicion is that very often "mindfuck" is nothing but a cover story for people who actually simply do not wish to tell what they are looking for. 

Coming now to the "feminist" type issue, I still remember vividly the first conversation I ever had with somebody about BDSM online several years ago. We were chatting and although we hardly had exchanged  a few words, she asked me "how many subs have you had?". I explained that I hadn't known a person wanting the same things out of such a relationship as me among the people I have met in real life, that's why I had turned to the web, no reason to do that otherwise, and I was at the beginning of my search, hadn't yet met such a person in real life, let alone had a sub. We kept conversating for some time, as we had some similar interests outside BDSM, but in at least the first four times we chatted she made the same question. Our contact proved to be a dead end and was duly stopped, but some time later I noticed her posting on the website's forum (it was a Greek site) complaints about various guys she had had contact with and specific things which they had said to her during private conversations, plus publishing lists about what she didn't like about men in general, she was therefore a classic "feminist" type, although hardly a unique example, I mention her as being very characteristic.The interesting thing with this "feminist" was that just a short time previously, she had kept asking me how many subs I had in the past, obviously because that was exactly what she wanted to hear. I don't doubt that there are plenty of women who have had reasons for complaining about men, but one common complaint specifically regarding BDSM, is men "having lied about their level of experience". This obviously happens because that is what many women want to hear, and so many men, fearing rejection due to "lack of experience" oblige. Therefore there are many people, who simply wish to be deceived, consciously or unconsciously, and when they realize the truth, put the blame on somebody else. Although numbers vary from site to site, usually there is a men/women ratio of at least 5 to 1, something which can be very easily understood by women who undergo the little trouble of checking how many men are registered on such a site and how many women. Taking into account just how fewer women are, plus the fact that a very high percentage of them are nothing but scammers, looking only for money, it doesn't take a lot to figure out that when a man claims to have had dozens of subs serving him in the past, there is a very high probability that he is either exaggerating or simply lying. 

In conclusion, the "here to learn", "mindfuck" and "feminist" approaches, either due to purpose, naivete or sheer stupidity, come down to one thing, those people taking no responsibility whatsoever for their own words and deeds, and particularly if something goes wrong, to be able to place all the blame on somebody else. They are always about somebody else, the "here to learn" type implying and often also declaring openly that it is the duty of the other members to "teach" him/her BDSM, the "mindfuck" type leaving everything to be guessed by others and the "feminist" type not taking any responsibility about what she wants as she doesn't express it in the first place. This is flatly wrong, as those people seem to forget that whenever somebody joins a website, regardless of subject matter, he/she first declares that is 18 years old and above, therefore an adult and legally fully responsible for his/her own actions. 

I must first stress that all those thoughts are not about specific people who are members here, but about various types of people and patterns of behaviour that I have noticed both online on other relevant sites and in real life. There are essentially three such types that I have noticed making their appearance frequently and consistently, the "I am here to learn" type, the "mindfuck" type and the "feminist" "I only complain about men and I only say what I don't want" type. These people and behaviours are not restricted to one gender, although the third one is particularly common among the female one, hence the term "feminist". Since however being heterosexual it's women I have primarily been in contact with as they are my subject of interest, those are behaviours I have primarily observed among women, although the first one, which will be the subject of this post, can be often seen among men as well.

One particularly common phenomenon in BDSM-related dating and social networking sites, is people claiming that they are there in order to "learn". The first and obvious question which this arises is whether BDSM is something that can be taught by one person to another, in the same sense that a person can teach somebody else how to cook a recipee or to drive a car. The answer is equally obvious, that BDSM is not one thing, but an acronym of various situations, of which some can be of interest to one person with others being of interest to somebody else, therefore it is by default not one thing which can be taught by one person to another. Secondly, a need to be dominated or dominate or do both is just like any other need something inherent which only the individual itself can know for sure if and when it exists within him or her, can somebody expect from somebody else to know exactly when he/she is hungry and needs to eat, thirsty and needs to drink, or in need of going to the toilet?

All this doesn't of course mean that there aren't things to be learned about BDSM, just as it is the case with any other subject. First, if somebody wants to try one or the other such activity in real life, he/she has to take into consideration that several such practices carry a larger or smaller amount of risk, therefore it is crucial, for his/hers own safety as well of everybody else who is involved, that this person is properly informed about the subject. The issue here is to find reliable and responsible sources of information, which first and foremost means eponymous ones, something which by definition is very difficult to be found on BDSM sites, where most members are anonymous and very often faceless as well.  For the person who genuinely feels the need to be informed, the best is to start with the huge amount of non fiction litterature on the subject, written by known people, dealing both with more generalised and more specific related issues, and which for the most part can be found online and mostly for free, on sites like Internet Archive (and yes, there are people who don't know what Internet Archive is) and other similar (mostly ebook) sites. Only when somebody has a clear idea of what he/she is looking for in the first place should he/she join such a site in order to find other such people, especially in case it is difficult to meet others in real life. An other way of learning is for somebody to explore those desires through a relationship, while keeping always in mind that certain things somebody might fantasize about possibly won't work in reality, something that must always be taken into account and always be respected. The very contact with other people, online and offline, can naturally teach somebody lessons about others and how they behave, but the very reason this post is being written is that when various people claim that they are there in order to "learn", very often what they actually have in mind is something completely different from the things mentioned above. What this is plus the "mindfuck" and "feminist" types, which all essentially come down to one thing, will be analysed in future posts.