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.
