Community....

Ok... this is going to be a rant... and as such feel free to stop reading now.

There's been a lot of things going on online about what "we as a community" should do about something (the current threads are all about consent violations).

I have no desire to get embroiled in flame wars so I sit and watch it go by.... but I'm left with one lingering thought...

What community?

It's not 1980 anymore (not that I was even alive in 1980).  All it takes is access to the internet and you can be at your local dungeon/playspace/etc.

In general, I think this is a good thing.  More people have access to things and it's not as scary to find.

But what you sacrifice is community.

I have no reason to think that anyone I see at a play space will be any nicer to me or respect my boundaries any more that the average joe at a bar.  They've had the same amount of vetting as a bar patron.

Eventually, I'll see them a bunch of times, get to know them, and treat them differently...

But that's work I have to do.

I keep seeing all of these things about what we as a community should do to keep people safe.  I think that I'm safe because I'm nearly hyper vigilant about it.  Something could totally happen to me anyway, but something could happen to be at a bar too.

I recently had a conversation with my boss at work.  Our company is getting big (over 100 people) but we still say that we're small and say we act that way, but we've already started acting like a medium size company.  We should stop saying we're small and embrace our new status.

I feel that way about the kink "community."  We act like we're small, that people are somehow vetted, that we should be safer at the dungeon than we should be at the bar...

But should we?  What do we have in place to make that happen?  Is the address secret?  Do we have orientations that are mandatory?  Do you have to know someone or go to the newbie munch to get in the first time?   Do we hold regulars to the same code of conduct as new people?

This is not to say that I don't have a community in the kink scene... but it's my community, my subset of what you might see as the greater kink community.  Friends, lovers, friends of friends, lovers of lovers, all sorts of combination.

That's my community.

That's where I feel safe and I can take down nearly all of the barriers and guards I walk around with daily.

But I have no expectation of going to a public space and being able to truly let go.... unless I've got someone who's going to hold space for me while I'm a bit out of it.

I'm probably a bit cynical about things... maybe it's my east coast bias...

But I think claiming community is kind of a bit of BS these days.....