You’ll probably know more about my age than I’d want you to once I told you that I have lived most of my life without the internet. It had its perks, in an old school kind of way I guess. But one thing was cruelly lacking: access to information and to communities. For someone like me, it was a terrible thing. My very first pre-pubescent fantasies revolved around sexual control. My first dates forced me to constantly pull myself back to a gentlemanly behavior and a kinder touch, when all I wanted was being rough and directive.
I had been brought up in a progressive feminist environment, and who I was was not ok. Not by those standards.
Throughout my teens, I greedily read articles about SM communities. They looked like secret societies that I’d never be able to find. They organized secret parties a la “eyes wide shut”, for a guarded elite that would forever remain out of my reach.
I convinced myself that my needs to control and inflict pain were just “another fantasy” that I could live without. I tried. For two decades. It was hell. My sex life was limited and boring, I hated myself for those fantasies I decidedly couldn’t get rid of, I wondered whether I was sick, evil, or simply broken.
The internet changed all that. I already lived in India when it came around, and it was already pretty well developped by the time it reached me. The first thing I did was to look for a community and, miracle, I found collarme, a website mostly focused on meeting other kinksters, but with a rich discussion board, where far away people freely gifted their valuable time to help greedy noobs like me.
My life was never the same from that point. I met other people like me, discovered I wasn’t broken after all. I realised generations of kinksters before me had encountered similar issues, thought about them and built a sophisticated sub-culture where I could learn about consent, about negotiation, about safety and skills…
But most importantly. I discovered something that I consider, to this day, to be the most amazing, beautiful and unexplainable miracle of all: there were people out there that loved to receive what I was dying to give. They didn’t ask for anything in return, they just wanted me to be me, because it allowed them to be them. It was simple, happy, wholesome… it was kink.
And I would not have had access to any of that without those amazing people who came online daily, who gave their time and efforts to answer the same questions again and again, with infinite patience and kindness (and sometimes not, but that’s ok too, I’ll take the knowledge whatever form it takes).
In a way, I owe them my life. I always felt a huge debt of gratitude towards the kink community. That is why I knew that if given a chance, I’d be a part of it. I’d pay that debt forward and be there for the others that didn’t feel ok with themselves.
Things have changed today. Budding kinksters not only have at the tip of their googling fingers the totality of human knowledge (polluted with a lot of disinformation, for sure…), but also a world that is more diverse and more accepting of their difference. At least in certain spaces, that can be found by those who search.
However, nothing replaces what kinksters share: humans exchanging experiences, challenging each other’s views, guiding each other though the multiple pitfalls that we encounter during our kink journey… and supporting each other through the existential turmoils that we go through when our deepest selves get challenged by the revolutionary complexities of kink.
Are those communities perfectly safe, pleasant or fair… certainly not. They have the same proportion of great humans and despicable ass holes than the general population. They are what we make of them. But I know one thing: they’re a pretty great alternative to being alone. Because kink isn’t simple. It’s a bloody nuclear power plant. And trying to make sense of it with a pencil and a sheet of paper is a losing battle.
Eventually, a community is nothing but the sum total of its members. As Eldridge Cleaver once said “There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem”.
