CaringandReal
Posts: 1397
Joined: 2/15/2008
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Hi Jeff,
Probably all the wrong people took your "pearls before swine" remark pesomally. That's usually how it happens, the perps are too emotionally retarded/vain to know it's addressed at them, while the more sensitive ones who were trying to help will think it was addressed at them.
The thing you were talking about in the pearls comment, couples not airing their dirty laundry in public, is absolutely true and it's done because of what you experienced: other people are all too eager to criticize and tear about someone they hardly know on a message board who shows any sign of weakness (or what they imagine to be weakness). And yes, it does result in an almost overwhelmingly distorted view about the "bliss" of bdsm couplehood. But only, I think, in the minds of the very naive or inexperienced. The rest of us, new to bdsm or not, are not that new to life and we know that life doesn't magically stop thowing shitballs at us just because we're in a bdsm relationship, however happy it may be.
So maybe a few very naive people get a wrong idea because so many do not speak about the bad or difficult aspects of their lives just because they don't want to be analyzed limb by limb by the ignornat, lazy uncaring posters who never think about the recipient's feelings before they run their mouths off. Naive people are going to get wrong ideas every place they look, even from the best of advice or most honestly relayed experiences because their minds are immature: they're looking for quick, easy, fun, magic, no work, no trouble, no problems solutions to life. And people often find exactly what they are looking for.
Someone with absolutely no experience with bdsm but who has a few grains of commonsense and normal experience with life will be struck when reading this messageboard, not by all the magical wonderful kinky relationships there are out there, but by how utterly terrified people are about speaking about the realities in those relationships. They've been around a few decades they know shit happens, even to saints, and these are certainly not saints who are posting, lol, no matter what their self-opinions might be. And then they'll start looking for the root causes of the terror. It's not hard to find and if you've already had experience with messageboards of any type, you may already know the answer.
Remember the woman from England, who posted about her daughter? She was tarred and feathered, and would have been burned at the stake, if some self-rightous posters had had their way. Remember (this one is more recent) the chick who got totally smeared in the gorean forums for making a couple of casual and unthinking comments. They were... unfortunately, but I don't think the situation would have exploded into a fireball if it hann't (thanks to certain "helpful" individuals contributions) gotten all mixed up with the fact that she had recently started a second stealth profile and accidentally outed herself on it. Oh, people were SO horrified over that! Oh the terribleness of her Crime! Nothing she said was no credible because she had been caught out in wanting a second private profile! Oh lawds a mercy! She became Public Enemy #1! Knowing life and the type of individual who makes that sort of commentary about others, I suspect the most horrified of all were certain people who had done the very same thing--or had bestest internet buddies who had done the very same thing (significant cough)--but who had got away with it (nobody had discovered their deception) or had smoothed it all over due to their personal forum popularity or ability to spin a bad thing into a good thing. In messageboard ethics, the only truly "evil" sin is being caught at something. Sigh.
It's no wonder that others seldom speak up the way you did. Of course what you did is throwing pearls to swine, and most people cannot bear the hypocritical acrimony they experience when exposing the least bit of weakness, unless their goal for being here is only to educate, not socialize (the latter sort of individual is very rare--many people use messageboards for socializing and not feeling so alone, if they're heathly, or else for committing hate crimes or bolstering their sense of superiority through sneeringly putting others down for their imagined sins, if they are mentally unwell--and most of us do a little of both).
In the future, if you ever do this sort of thing again, you will get the same results, I expect. People don't change much. When in a herd/group, most act like a herd member while imagining they're being completely individualistic and new in their ideas, and that seems to include following some very basic stem-brain rules, like "attack the weak members or drive them out because they will make the herd weaker." You aren't weak, and openly admitting to difficulties is anything but weak, but that's now how the herd-mind sees it. Mooo!
But to be balanced about it, a lot of the comments you received were quite understanding and compassionate and there were a lot people trying to be helpful and not use your situation to boost their personal egos. A few did the usual herd stuff, but I don't think the majority did. Still, it can hurt when anyone, no matter how compassionate they are, talks about your situation in the third person. If people could remember to address their remarks directly to the one expressing the problem, it would seem a lot less like a cold, unfeeling scientific analysis.
_____________________________
"A friend who bleeds is better" --placebo
"How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home." --thomas harris
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