It’s the norm in the kink community to maintain an identity specifically for “the scene”. That’s usually a scene name, used on social media and at events, and perhaps a separate email account. For many of us, Fetlife is the only source of “kinky social media” that we need, but quite a lot of people…
Category: Concepts
Informed Consent
If we were writing some kind of guide to the principles or philosophy of BDSM then “informed consent” would probably be our opening chapter. Nearly everything else we talk about, when you distill it, is based on informed consent. It’s the dividing line between BDSM and abuse, it’s the basis of SSC and it’s the…
The Four Stages to Exploring Your Fantasy
No-one wakes up one morning and says “check it out, I’m into kink now”. We come to all things through a process. A desire takes root, and we prod at it and probe it to see whether it will stick or is just a passing fancy, and how important it is to us. Most of…
Quiz: How Kinky is Your Ideal BDSM Room?
It’s the silly season, so no apologies for the lameness of this work-distraction. Festive planning would be so much easier if it was multiple-choice like this quiz. Choose the elements that make up your fantasy BDSM room and let Buzzfeed tell you where you rate on the naughty scale. Design Your Own BDSM Sex Room…
Moving Beyond Maslow’s View of D/s and M/s Relationships
Most religions and moral systems see one of the great human problems as selfishness. A common and unifying philosophy is that personal development is a transcendence from the self to a larger purpose. Around the middle of last century, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and others aimed to liberate and enlarge the self. This was the…
Special Snowflake Syndrome
We’re all a bunch of bad-ass mofos, no doubt, but there’s this regrettable thing that happens to some people when they discover BDSM that I thought might be helpful to talk about. When I say “regrettable”, I mean that if it happens to someone in your orbit, then one morning they’re probably going to wake…
Pushing Boundaries Without Breaking Limits
I’ve taken a little snip from a thread on Fetlife that encapsulates a common viewpoint of Domination that I think contains both myth and jargon: … its important to realize that we also have to push boundaries to help a sub grow. Otherwise you stay in your little box and never get outside it. That…
Clique Schisms
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born Antonio Gramsci – Selections from the Prison Notebooks i’ve been clicking around recently looking for a sense of subcultural belonging. One of my favourite podcasts is nosafeword, and i stumbled across an episode called “Clique Schisms”. Sparky…
Fassinger’s Model: Mapping Our Journeys in Kink
This is a companion piece to our previous article The Cass Identity Model: Mapping Our Journeys in Kink In the same way that we looked at the Cass Sexual Identity Model, I’m going to attempt to re-situate Fassinger’s Model of Gay and Lesbian Identity Development in the context of BDSM subcultural identity formation. Fassinger’s Model…
The Cass Identity Model: Mapping Our Journeys in Kink
i grew up with the boom in technological advancement we call the Internet Era, so i am one of the so-called “lucky ones”. In my time, laptops and phones have become thin and the speed of the internet has grown fat, in something of an exponential graph. By the time i was 15 i had…