THE DEATH
OF AN IDEA
It isn’t often that I get to
write an obituary and actually I’m rather glad that I don’t. After all, if I liked the person who died
I’m not going to be exactly in a writing mood and if I didn’t like the person,
well, it’s sort of ill-mannered to say that the dead person was a lousy SOB and
the world is better off without him, not that that would stop me, but it seems
a lot of bother to put it into writing.
I just say it.
Anyway, this isn’t for a
person, it’s for an idea, a rather obnoxious idea that never really got off the
ground and is now pretty much dead and buried and that is the notion that there
could ever be some sort of centralized control for the BDSM world. Ok, one can see that this never had a chance
just by looking at it. I mean, given
the vast multiplicity of styles and viewpoints, ranging from extreme
Structuralist to total Transgressionist, and the jealousy with which players
and groups guard their autonomy, I don’t see how anyone who gave the idea that
there could a central controlling agency a second thought could reasonably
expect it to work. I mean, even if it
could get a number of groups to go along with its edicts, the controlling group
would immediately be faced with a number of organizations that would have
nothing to do with it and the groups that did accede to its claims to authority
would probably split rather dramatically in short order.
If ever there was a recipe
for scene civil war, this idea was it.
But fortunately for all of
us, no matter what side of the fight we would have been on, the idea is
dead. We don’t even hear about it any
more, though one can find the older traces of it if you search through the web
and look at some of the chat logs posted.
No one now seriously thinks that any uniform control or even standards
are possible in the scene. There is has
simply been too much communication and out of the arguing the realization has
come that we are just too independent a bunch of old farts (and young farts
too) to let any pretended authority claim the right to tell us how to run our
groups or our relationships or our play.
After all, even the calmest of our people have something about which
they are on a hair trigger and all it takes is someone to set it off.
It just goes to show one
simple fact. Anyone who thinks that a
scene community can be controlled will learn, very very quickly, just how
uncontrollable it can become.