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Epytropos -> RE: Sir or Master (1/24/2012 6:57:39 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyPact
The list that you are presenting isn't quite working for the same angle. Yes, the names that you have on it were absolutely within the subjects that we are discussing here, but I don't see it in quite the same way. For example, de Sade left us all of his wonderful writings, but who was the person after de Sade that wanted to live the same way he did? Tradition isn't just passing down. It's also who you are passing to. So far, I haven't met anyone who has decided to live the was de Sade did just because they were kinky.
I like your chess analogy, so let's run with that. I've decided that I am going to create a new game that uses the chess board and the pieces. (Hierarchy implied works well.) However, I'm going to implement certain things from other games and add them in. When I'm done, whatever new game that I've concocted isn't really chess anymore, is it? People who are used to playing chess would recognize what I started with, but they would also identify the rules that I made that sound an awful lot like checkers, and the dice that I incorporated and whatever elements I had used to make pulling them all together to create a unique game.
Go a step further and let's say that you are quite an accomplished chess player and you want to play My game. Some of the things that you'll have to know are what makes it different than chess and what the rules the players have to follow. Since it's My game, I'm going to point out the differences so you can understand how to play.
That's not saying that the rules for chess are wrong for chess. It just means they don't necessarily work for My game. The rules for My game are the way we are doing things if that is what we are really going to play.
So, when leather people come on and say that something isn't the way we do things as leather people, all we're doing is explaining the rules for the new game that has certain recognizable elements to it.
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I would argue that de Sade was one of the fathers of rational hedonism as an organized philosophy, especially with Philosophy in the Bedroom, meaning that the adherents of his tradition are innumerable both within the lifestyle and without. Even if we dismiss that conclusion, the similarities between what he does, what we do, and what others before him did seems to show a chain of custody, if you will, of the ways by which we live our lives which stretches back centuries beyond Leather. Certainly there is no regimented code of conduct which followed from one to the next, but there doesn't need to be.
The problem with your iteration of the chess analogy is this: Not all of you (I'm presuming you consider yourself Leather; if not forgive me) play your game and let us play ours and have intelligent discussions between the two. Instead, as I pointed out, many treat the continued (or in the minds of some novel or at very least renewed) existence of our game as at best an aberration of the proper game and at worst evidence of social decline doing injury to tradition. My point was never that your game was bad or that you should play ours, nor even that you shouldn't speak on yours here or elsewhere, merely that if someone from that camp is going to claim novelty as evidence of entropy they must acknowledge that Leather is the novelty. Our game is nearly as old as recorded history. Yours was founded by people who are still around. It's hard to credibly argue which one is more novel.
Mind you, I would also strongly assert that novelty is by no means bad, my personal ethos being to let each to their own, but when people come in and act as if the rest of us are dirtying up their nice, pretty BDSM world then it ceases to be about what they choose to do with their social lives and their bodies and becomes about what they expect the rest of us to do with ours, which is not in any way the same and not in any way acceptable.
What I'm saying is this: Leatherites are welcome to believe or do or discuss whatever they like, wherever they like, provided they don't claim that belief is superior without a valid argument to support the assertion. History may not agree with the traditionalism argument, but I'm perfectly willing to let people go with it if it makes them happy. However, once someone brings it into the public forum and implies that there is a difference of correct and incorrect or superior and inferior; and bases that argument not on any ideas of what Leather offers, but rather purely on the idea that tradition dictates their conclusion, then it's time for a history lesson.
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