The Dom = Dickhead syndrome

by Chris M.

While some dominants are true artists cultivating a gourmet's appreciation of pleasure, pain and power, others are mere peevish control queens, itchy for a chance to criticize, get belligerent, and boss others around. Still others, new to the community (but not to Gor novels) make the classic error of equating their sexual dominance with an overbearing, overreaching manner dominated by virtue of their presence at an SM event. Regardless of how dominant you are within your consenting relationships (and more power to ya!), you can no more "assume" consent in your interactions with others, than you can in an SM scene. Dominants who assume its okay to boss others around, and rudely demand subservient behavior, are making the classic newbie error of assuming it's okay to touch or grab other bodies without asking.

The Realness Police (Your kink ain't My Kink)

In which your conception of SM is judged inferior to mine. Scoffing at scenes for being too mild, too heavy or to whatever. Pet peeves include switching, use of humor in scene, lack of interest in 24/7. Even if they are consistent in their beliefs they are mistaken in thinking their standards should command anything other than the polite respect from you that we owe everyone.

Expert-itus

The state of confusing one's own expertise with the ability to pick nits and find faults in other people's play, demeanor, protocol and motives. While sharing scene knowledge is generally a good thing, it can be, and often is, overdone. Go easy on the free advice.

The Imperial-Imperious confusion

Some scene folk, in an effort to appear imperial (kingly, of high standard, worthy of respect) conduct themselves in a manner that is imperious (overbearing, bossy, judgmental). A surprising number of scene folk are born to this confusion. Some attain it after a few years in the community, as they assume community leadership positions or when they decide they should be recognized as authorities, if not superiors. While some clearly feel that imperious behavior demonstrates expertise, importance, and intelligence, in truth it almost never fails to alienate potential friends and play partners, making the offender look bad.  Below is a table highlighting the differences between desirable imperial behavior and the often time reality:

While pecking order tactics like those on the right are fine for beings with the spiritual depth of sparrows and chickens, in humans they are shallow, unkind and run counter to the spirit of "safe, sane, and consensual". Who can argue that the properties on the right are more effective than those on the left? Even so, unwise bystanders occasionally reward boorish behavior with attention and respect, reinforcing it and making our collective problem worse. When new people see community leaders and players of high prominence acting this way, some will try to emulate it, believing it to be proper, accepted or connoting high status.

Scaring the horses

This is one that deals with conduct between members of the community and the culture outside. Some people enjoy the nonconsensual involvement of strangers, in exhibitionism scenes in restaurants, public parks, etc. This kind of play can be hot as blazes, but can be ethically questionable, and in some cases illegal. While I have enjoyed the transgressive rush of public play myself, I have come to question whether it's right to force others to see what we do. On the other hand, there are forces in our society that would gladly forbid grown men holding hands in public. I have no fixed advice to offer here. This is a charged issue and one you must grapple with on your own.

WHY WE DO IT AND WHY WE TOLERATE IT

So what makes people act this way? There are in fact many factors that contribute to the behavior described above. As wonderful as the kink community can be, we are all exposed to subtle and seldom discussed irritants that contribute to stress, uncertainty, and the sheer cussedness I have described above. Life as a taxpaying worker, parent or citizen can be difficult enough. Compound it with the responsibility of maintaining a top secret personal life, and the job of developing and maintaining a whole new set of sexual and social ethics that neither mom, dad, or any of your vanilla friends have ever dealt with. And like water over stone, it can wear on you as the years tick by. Thesestress factor set the stage for the anxiety, impatience, loneliness, meanness, depression and the empathy deficit mentioned earlier. I have compiled a list of these factors which surely contribute to the bad behavior we occasionally see:

The scene is a small world, and quarters are close, closer than we might like at times:

Because BDSM is an interest that selects at random, we often find ourselves spending a lot of time with people we might not otherwise choose as friends.

The scene is intensely intimate:

We express our inner fantasies and fears, sometimes share partners, see each other nude, watch each other come... Is it any wonder people are sensitive about how we are treated by others?

Because our practices are scandalously diverse, we often find ourselves in the presence of activities that make us uncomfortable:

The scene is a strange place and it takes a while to adjust. And some things you may never get used to.

The pressures of closeting:

The pressure of maintaining a secret life, of hiding your leather life from friends, colleagues and family adds a constant overlay of tension to daily life. Scene folk have to manage the presence of fetish contraband (toys, play equipment, clothes, literature and erotica) whose discovery might be catastrophic. The risk, real or perceived, can encompass loss of employment, friends, family, even custody of one's kids.

Jealousy, loneliness, and competition for partners are facts of life, in the scene:

People without play partners may become unhappy or angry. People seen as getting more than their share can trigger insecurity and resentment. Even people with partners may see threats around every corner. The scene, like any fringe group, attracts its share of eccentrics and outcasts, some fascinating and agreeable, others less so.

Newcomer have:

New people unacquainted to the scene's protocols occasionally touch, grab or conduct themselves inappropriately out of pure innocence. Although individuals typically learn to deport themselves over time, the constant influx of newcomers means newcomer naive is a constant, grating issue.

The realities of the party circuit:

It is a hard fact of scene life that most parties are private and their invite lists finite. For every guest invited there are 20 left outside. The guest list is dictated by what the hosts can afford, their circle of friendships, the size of their home and many other factors. But it still stings to hear about a party without getting an invite. And it happens all the time.

Email (the medium of choice for many SM participants):

Without a friendly face or modulations of human speech, text encounters can be easily misstated/misunderstood. Couple that with the sometimes blunt writing style of email users everywhere, the added gravity of the written word, and the ease of escalating a private remark into public rebuke with a misplaced keystroke, and you've got the makings of an online food fight.

Guy Baldwin, keynote speaker at Leather Leadership III, and a prominent leatherman psychiatrist, found that an unusually high percentage of his SM-practicing patients had suffered abuse as children.

Others - because of their SM interests - have grown up feeling alienated, alone and have led difficult lives. The upshot is that there is a lot of anger and insecurity out there that can manifest as uncivil behavior.

Some of the erotic roles we regularly encounter in the scene (the pitiless slavemaster, the haughty dominatrix, the abjectly helpless slave, the unhousebroken adult-baby) are not necessarily archetypes of reason, tolerance, and maturity.

Within the magic circle of a scene this is fine. Bravo for you, if you can find partners to share your predilections with and send them away happy. But these roles are less appropriate in pre-scene negotiation, netwoking, and working with volunteers in SM social and support groups. It is a crucial necessity for the mature scene person to be able to switch off the attitude (yes 24/7 types, this goes for you too) and adhere to acceptable adult behavior in dealing with others in the SM community.

One of the more sobering aspects of this list is that there really are no easy solutions to any of these problems. The scene is small, people are sensitive, invite lists are short, and we really do have some truly eccentric people who will continue to behave eccentrically.

But, there is room for hope. We do a good job of establishing and enforcing play standards to make SM safe and hot. We are improving all the time as educators of play practices. But, interpersonal conduct, outside of the SM encounter itself, has not yet been made a priority, and it's probably time it should be. We must recognize incivility (defined in part by the examples in this report) as a threat to the health of our community, and commit ourselves as individuals, to improving our behavior.

THOUGHTS ON FIXING IT: A PROPOSED APPROACH

The first thing we need to do is agree that improving our interpersonal behavior is worth doing. Once wve made that decision, we need to start elevating the importance of interpersonal conduct as an attribute of mature and responsible members of our community. Through mentoring and our education programs we need to send the message that incivility defined by the examples in this article is inappropriate behavior for citizens of our kink community. While "scene etiquette" (a narrow subset of civility), is a staple in the SM educational cannon, it deals mainly with protocols of deportment and standards of interaction, and doesn't address the deeper issues of cultivating compassion, tolerance and a more attuned awareness of our SM brethren. Those are tougher ethics-driven issues, often without simple answers.

Nonetheless, improved civility should be presented as causal to the following desirable conditions:

• Making the scene a welcoming place for newcomers
• Stability of friendships
• Respect of peers
• Trust of potential play partners (civility generally means stability)
• Strengthening ones personal network of contacts
• Supporting the position that sane, responsible, well-adjusted people practice SM.
• Establishing fairness and justice (which are eternal) as having greater importance than popularity, and bureaucratic clout (which are fleeting and can vanish at any moment)
• Reducing the wasteful and exhausting melodrama that Strengthens the community and makes it healthier

Secondly (to avoid reinventing the wheel) we need only look to our most famous safety maxim. I propose that we all, as scene folk and organizations extend "safe, sane and consensual" into the arena of interpersonal conduct. If we turn the laser beam of SSC onto our social interaction we would surely notice the following:

Uncivil behavior is non-consensual

Good manners and general kindness should become the coin of the realm. To do less is to engage someone in a quasi-scene without consent. Gossips and scolds should consider their behavior in terms of the consent of those they are discussing. Subjecting someone to a tongue-lashing or a gossip campaign is really no better than drawing out a flogger and hammering away at them without warning. If being a bastard or a bitch is your thing, and you have people to do that with, hooray for you. But don't be that way to people who have it agreed to it.

Uncivil behavior is not safe

Cruel, thoughtless behavior can hurt people, deeply and for a long time. Just as humiliation can be more traumatic than physical pain, the emotional harm inflicted from incivility may far exceed even what was intended. Acceptance of incivility sets a poor community standard, where interpersonal nastiness becomes normative. Mature, decent people will simply not remain in our midst. Furthermore small acts of rudeness or disregard can balloon up into clique wars. And if the safety of your intended victim means nothing to you, consider this: people have a way of paying you back, for better AND for worse. Be nice and people will reciprocate. Be a jackass and that's how others will see and speak of you. This is a small world: don't hand someone a motive to get you back later. The leather gods have a way of evening things out. The community is close, memory is long, and paybacks are a bitch.

Uncivil behavior is not even all that sane

For years, many of us felt like freaks before finding this community. To reinforce feelings of rejection in our brothers and sisters by deliberately withholding human decency, or subjecting them to deliberate hardship, is just not defensible. Those who find themselves constantly at war with or inflicting imperious behavior on their scene fellows, would do well to begin some serious soul searching and perhaps seeking out the help of a professional. Three years on the couch did a lot of good for me.

Thirdly, we need to recognize that changing our own behavior is the principal goal. Assholes (and we have a fair share of them) are not looking to change. The gossips, scolds, hypocrites, and Macavells are not going to read this piece, at least not with an eye towards cleaning up their own behavior. We will have to change our own behavior first. We must learn to extend kindness, decency, care and concern beyond our personal circle to members of the community at large. We can't force others to change, so we must strive to make the changes in ourselves. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard and ideally establish higher standards. Make incivility part of how we grade our brothers in leather and ourselves. Even when we feel we have been wronged, we must strive to behave honorably. Mahatma Gandhi said, "We must become the change we wish to see in the world."

But for those who are unconvinced, who feel their behavior should not be constricted by what other adults would describe as common decency, consider this: Even at the most crass, selfish level possible, one reason to refrain from meanness, gossip, and other expressions of incivility is that they frankly don't work as long-term tactics. Even those who hate with all the passion in their hearts have no durable long-term means of persecuting others. Incivility is only effective in the way a nightstick is: it definitely helps to win fights, especially against an unarmed foe. But soon, you run into problems. People don't like getting clubbed. They don't even like others getting clubbed, and once you become known as someone who does it, it starts costing you. While the dictators of history silenced their enemies through murder, torture, or war, not even the most domly of dominants or the haughtiest of scene bureaucrats hold any lasting means of oppression. Oh, people can cut you from party lists, speak unkindly of you, warn potential partners against playing with you and attempt to exclude you from their activities and social circles. But, they can't stop you from speaking out against their unfairness (especially in the age of the internet), from meeting others, starting social circles of your own and throwing your own parties to which they are not invited. Black Rose has endured a few genuine tyrant wanna-bes, but none so powerful that they were able to escape their own inevitable decline and diminished reputations. People who steal from the club coffers, ignore safe words, spread malicious lies, violate trust, or attempt to steal the partners of others - invariably wind up with the reputations they deserve. Long story short, if enough people clean up their own behavior, then, in time, the power players, scene cops, abusers, and gossips, will find their bad behavior increasingly visible and increasingly frowned on. Perhaps, then there may be change.

And lastly, something needs to be said for the power and wisdom of accepting the scene as it is. Is not perfect, nothing in life is. But many situations can be dealt with by calmly deciding not to let them rob you of your joy. It is necessarily easy to forgive, forget and move on, not for me anyway. When I feel wronged my reflex inclination is to strike back, to retaliate, to really point out and dwell on the fact that we been aggrieved. Is always worked out better when we succeeded in looking past the occasional annoyance and injustice and made a note to not treat others in ways I haven't liked being treated myself.

So even with the occasionally ugly interpersonal behavior we find in the scene it still has great people and the potential to make a dramatic contribution in your life. It is still an environment where dreams can and do come true.