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tigreetsa -> RE: Do Basic Conversational Rules Need Not Apply In BDSM? (5/15/2010 9:05:06 PM)
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I think all this depends on whether you are more concerned with being yourself or with fitting in with others. In the latter case the behaviour of other people is important, in the former it isn't.
Contrary to what a considerable number of people think an interest in WIITWD doesn't make you any different as a person, it doesn't give you any sort of social privilege or special status, other than you are an individual who is interested in WIITWD. The people you find here are really no different from the sort of people you walk past on the street, the people you work with, the people in your social circle or family or friends. They're still people, individuals.
Are there really any 'socially useless' people? Or are there just people that many people as a collective regard as useless because they don't happen to conform to common social or cultural stereotypes? Is it not the truth that these are people who are in fact not useless at all, but just people you cannot understand or relate to?
It isn't the person that changes in any way here, just their way of thinking. There's no shortage of people who come here complaining about having to conform to 'vanilla' and live up to external social expectations at the expense of their personal individuality who compromise that personal individuality by seeking to do just the same here in WIITWD - conform to external social expectations within WIITWD.
You see to be here all you need is a made up screen name and an e-mail address and you become part of the website. Unlike in real life there's not much possibility of ever having to face the consequences for your actions other than how it affects your online persona. You can have as many ego trips and power trips as you like, you can defy social convention as much as you wish, and if you really badly screw up all you need to do is to delete your profile, go off to a similar site, do the same thing there, and hope that when you come back there'll be different people and everyone will have forgotten about you.
There's an awful lot of people on this site who aren't seeking to become themselves or express their own individuality but instead they're chasing unrealistic illusions of perfection both within themselves and within other people. The thing is if you work hard enough and long enough on your illusions they replace the reality and become the reality themselves so that not even you, nor the people who know you, can work out which is which.
The thing is, there are people here who are themselves and have a firm grasp on reality and they see all this for what it really is. They see right through the illusions and can see the signs coming a mile off. What's more, they remember the reincarnations of those who have screwed up and moved on, disappeared and come back. They recognize them almost straight off.
This is possible because BDSM and WIITWD is as individual as the person interested in it. Any society or community is merely a collective of individuals and just because something is commonly acceptable or standard practice among many people doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be acceptable or standard practice for you.
It doesn't even matter that this is a dating site, personals site, sex hook up site, whatever because whenever someone makes contact with you the first thing they're looking for - whether positive or negative - is your attention. Everyone comes here more or less out of self-interest and it's those interests which determines whether they wish to develop that contact with others or not.
That choice whether to engage with them or not and how you interact with them rests entirely with you - the individual. Does it therefore really matter what other people think?
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