stella41b
Posts: 4258
Joined: 10/16/2007
From: SW London (UK)
Status: offline
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Last month was the 10th anniversary of my transition and throughout much of that period a significant part of my support network has mainly been friends and people from what is known as the BDSM community. However this has included periods when I have been street homeless and when those friends weren't there or able to support me and I was alone and throughout this period I still logged into sites such as this one. Things are much better now, back then I wasn't present on the message boards, I never met anyone but there were two or three people, and I do remember two dommes in particular one from Bristol and the other near Glasgow - during the time when I was in Warsaw - who took it upon themselves to spend a few minutes sending me a message asking me how I was. It gave me hope and the faith to get out of my circumstances. Throughout those 10 years I can honestly say that what we refer to as the BDSM community has offered and provided me with far more support and understanding than the LGBT community.
Why am I sharing this with you? This is why. I would like to make the point that we are not all a community of like-minded people, this is obvious, but what seems far less obvious to some on these boards is that this is not just one happy band of jolly kinksters. Some of the people here are going through difficult circumstances, they are vulnerable, isolated, stressed, perhaps trying to make headway through some sort of personal crisis, depression, or whatever. They aren't able to get to events or munches, meet people, they don't have happy relationships, friends, they don't have much more perhaps than a computer, monitor, keyboard and mouse and this website and these boards is their support network.
Maybe I'm wrong here and these things are obvious to everyone, but this isn't always apparent and I for one wouldn't be too sure. Now I'm not going to gild the lily here and say that this is just about general topics and semantics when I see time and time again it' also comes out on threads where people are in distress for whatever reason, they're hurting, and instead of asking the OP further questions and trying to gain a better understanding (taking into consideration that maybe due to emotional anguish or whatever emotion the OP may not be as coherent or as well thought out) out come the opinions, the judgments and every so often the putdowns. The keyword here as quite rightly IMHO stated in the OP is consideration or indeed the ability to see things from a different perspective.
Not that I'm seeking any sort of brotherhood of man because that's being unrealistic, and this hasn't been much of a problem here and isn't exclusive to these boards - it does happen elsewhere and to a far greater degree - but even so here it seems to be a growing trend. I guess part of the reason is, just like any message boards or forum on the Internet frequented by regular posters, opinions are formed, friendships are formed, cliques are formed and enemies are found and any sensitive topic carries a certain amount of risk that it could descend into a flame war between rival factions or even between individual posters. Part of the attraction I guess in posting here is the fact that we can share our thoughts, feelings, experience, knowledge and opinions to a much wider audience where, provided we stay within the TOS of the website we are free to post as we wish. Another part of the attraction has to be not just the learning, knowledge, making friends, finding people and solutions, but also the entertainment value, the debates, the thrashing out, the hairsplitting, the oneupmanship, witty one liners, drama, and so on but does this really need to be at the expense of someone else's feelings?
Sure we can be dismissive, brush the issue under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist, or just shrug our shoulders and say 'well you know, shit happens' and 'if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen'. I did come across this other thread myself, a thread which had suddenly appeared over ten pages and I thought 'I see.' I went through the first two pages, the last two, and thought 'ha' and left it alone. But I did come across on a couple of the postings the sort of attitude of 'this is how I express myself if you don't like it then it's your problem'. No it isn't. Just because you have an opinion doesn't justify putting it across in an obnoxious or offensive manner nor does personally attacking other posters in any way validate your argument. You see it doesn't matter whether you are stating an opinion, giving facts, advice or whatever it all comes back to that one word consideration.
I'm not saying here either I'm whiter than white, I'm not, but when I get messages from regular posters who have decided to call it a day and they explain to me why it does make me stop and think. What is it we're trying to achieve at the end of the day? Do we really want a forum which is exclusive at the expense of other posters or would we prefer a more inclusive forum? What are we trying to achieve here, both in ourselves and collectively? How can our contribution to these boards influence that collective?
A cause for a little reflection perhaps?
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