njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SimplyMichael
As someone who does a bit of teaching and presenting, for the most part I agree with the OP although from a very different slant. National level presenters and stuff at major events you don’t get a lot of “handwringing” over safety in the same way and the whole “I am old guard” crap is mostly a local line of bullshit.
Most classes are taught by people with very little experience, usually less than five or ten years. So they get a bit of local notoriety as a “rope top” or a “serious” flogger and they start teaching. I just to talk down about them but the reality is they ARE the local expert and until you get out into the wider world, your knowledge may well rock…for the area you live in.
Safety IS important but again, it is overwrought with floggers. Kidney damage is only likely if you beat the shit out of someone with the HANDLE of your flogger, even eye damage is not likely and the reality is, other than apocryphal rumors, no real report of an injury has ever surfaced.
Most of what I teach are relationship oriented classes, things like communication for example. People like the OP are the ones that keep me from doing stuff like a topping class, or one on negotiation. I would LOVE to do a class purely on using the voice, but again, most people wouldn’t know what they might be missing. Seems silly to even think of a class like that but I know it would make a lot of people scene’s hotter because I see people fail to use their voices to their full potential.
If you are talking spanking or flogging,then safety training is a bit of a joke, for the very reason you aren't going to be able to do any real damage doing those things unless you deliberately, for example, flog someone in the eyes (and that doesn't take much brain cells to figure out is wrong). When it comes to other things, I think having information is important, whips as opposed to floggers can cause serious damage and when fooling around with electrical play, suspension and the like, it is better to know the reality. Even people who play around with things like extreme temperature play (using ice/dry ice on a warm sub) can potentially cause issues, like someone going into shock, and knowing how to deal with it is important.
Where learning from others is important is what is written in the above, commuications and how to work together is critical. When people move on to more heavy duty scenes, for example, subs can come out of it pretty shaky and knowing how to tell the difference between real distress and a sub processing and how to handle it can be important.
Do you need workshops done by an 'old guard person' to be safe? No, there is a lot fo information to be found out there that can do almost an effective job, and more importantly, people getting into scene play these days have a ton of information to figure out what is more risky and what isn't. I have to agree with others that a lot of the 'old guard' nonsense is pretentious crap, a lot of people trying to bring glory to themselves by being 'correct', and half the stuff they claim to teach isn't safety, it is how some "sir someone or the other" back in the 'glory days' did it....... To be fair to the whole old guard mentality, there was a kind of reason for it, something older folks in the scene will tell you about, and that is back then, 35 or40 or more years ago, there just wasn't the information out there and a lot was taught through a kind of apprentice methodology; once books started appearing in places like B and N, and the Net came about, it simply became an anachronism, and if people weren't smart enough to look up information on techniques they likely wouldn't go to a class either. There are things that concern me, people who see porn stuff and think they can do that at home, people who read the Gore books and think what goes on in the book is realistic, and so forth, but that is always going to be a problem, there were a generation of people who got into BD/SM when Madonna and others made it 'pseudo cool', including some pro dommes, and they left a lot of wreckage behind because they do so clueless...
Okay, so what value do workshops hold? I think they can be a way for newcomers to see what kind of things are out there and see what they may want to try or not want to try, and it can help them over the hurdles so to speak. More importantly, rather then being about 'this is the right way to do things' workshps and classes can be a way to show different ways to try things, new ideas on old topics, how to add depth to things, etc. The difference is not about preaching 'how to do things' but rather "hey, these are things people have tried, you might find they work for you, too".
In terms of public play parties, DM's probably reflect local law enforcement and such, they probably aren't afraid of what you are doing but are afraid of the law. For example, a cut after a caning is no big deal, doesn't take an MD to figure out it doesn't mean much, but many places sadly have a perfect excuse to shut places down if they feel it is 'endagering' public safety (even in relatively sane NYC, they have people in the city government and law enforcement who are none too cool with bd/sm, including one now retired ADA in the sex crimes area who thought anyone topping in a scene should be charged with assault and abuse, that that can never be 'consensual' and other tripe..... Any kind of hint of sexual contact, any kind of thing like using pentrative toys (with or without condoms, doesn't matter) can bring a backlash. Yeah, some DM's have problems as do some observers, they don't have the experience to know what is going on, and that is the fault of the organizers for not making ground rules clear (having been to more then a few public play parties and spaces, usually such misconceptions are cleared up pretty easily if the group running it knows what they are doing).
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RE: Seriously... we need to learn how to do this? - 
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