LadyPact
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quote:
ORIGINAL: leadership527
Is this really true? I actually went and reviewed what I'd seen regarding leather threads and in general my impression goes something like this:
- A small percentage of people are affronted by it for personal reasons. I'd call this number about the same as people affronted by pretty much anything else.
- Most people saying "live and let live"
- A few people espousing leather as the one true way -- clearly this group is going to generate a negative response, but the response isn't to leather exactly but the "true way" component of the message.
I also think people tend to confuse the granting of a piece of leather as some sort of validation or intended validation outside of the leather community. I mean that when a leather person says something like, "I got to be a master because those in my community assessed me as being one" I think some people tack on a hidden "and so that makes my master title more valuable than a non-leather one". This is the same thing that happens on pretty much any other topic. It's virtually impossible sometimes to talk about what I like about my relationship with Carol without someone else inferring a "better/worse" judgement. For some reason, "What we do is best for us but I recognize that what you do is best for you." seems to be a hard concept.
I hardly know where to begin. You might want to have Carol get you a cup of coffee.
Part of this is about perception. Some time back, we had a really good thread about how one person felt that Daddy Dom dynamics were attacked unfairly. While basically it was the same situation as you're seeing here now, she saw it more because that was her way of life. She picked up on it more because it was always on threads that were on the subject. She also was seeing the comments buried in other topics that were in many threads.
I would have to say that I feel the same way about this. It would be hard for someone to just go back and research the leather topics to find it. A lot of the comments about the leather community are buried in threads that didn't have that as a topic to start out with. It will creep in somewhere around page sixteen of the twenty-three page flame fest on the definition of a Master or what does slavery mean to you or a hundred other trainwrecks where it's cropped up in the last four years.
If this were just My personal perception, I'd figure that I was just being overly sensitive to it. Unfortunately, I'm not alone in it. I've had occasions where I've asked one leather person or another why they don't post here anymore (this was a few years back) and they'd tell Me they have the same view. Leather people haven't always been welcome here. They saw that and left accordingly.
I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm speaking for the entire leather community. It's not My place to do so. What I will tell you is that, yes, certain things mean more to Me because there was more of Myself invested in them. It's just not the same to Me as something I could buy from the store. That doesn't mean that I expect it to mean the same thing to the world at large. I suppose, at times, I do ask people to at least accept that something has value to Me where they see none. I even get presumptuous enough to think that some folks can just accept that the way of life matters to Me, and hey....... I'm kind of an ok chick. Maybe there's something worthwhile there.
Live and let live? Yeah, I struggle with that sometimes. It can be hard to grasp the concept that I feel something so strongly that you don't. I have to work on that. It's not always easy. It takes getting past that first reaction of 'how could you want to be anything else?' Of course, I get in My own way of that at times.
Here's another tough one. You're right about one of your comments. There are certainly folks who come here or they are out there in the community and the leather thing comes out. The problem is that other messages are coming out, too. The word "asshat" comes to mind. These are the kinds of folks that I just sit here to Myself and think, for the love of mike, I hope everybody doesn't see us like that. That's not unique to leather. Every group has them. Kinky people, Gorean folks, Christians, politicians, lawyers, and just about any "group" you can think of. Everybody gets judged by the bad examples. They are the first ones to get brought up when people are different, or especially when someone in that "group" wasn't exactly a great human being to begin with.
As to the one true way, I think people go overboard on that expression. If it wasn't the true way for Me, wouldn't it make sense for Me to be doing something else? It's not like I wrote a bunch of lifestyle options on the wall, threw a dart, and decided that was the way I was going to go about this whole thing. I didn't chose this particular sub culture on a whim. I promise.
_____________________________
The crowned Diva of Destruction. ~ ExT
Beach Ball Sized Lady Nuts. ~ TWD
Happily dating a new submissive. It's official. I've named him engie.
Please do not send me email here. Unless I know you, I will delete the email unread
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