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Dustee -> RE: COLLARME: Abusive messages to new member with disability (6/1/2006 5:19:22 AM)
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Good advice everyone. I have a couple things to add. A common personality trait found among submissive women is emotional vulnerability and even extreme sensitivity. While it's quite easy to blithely say, "thicken your skin or don't go online," please realize that some of us have been trying to do the first half of this for years, even decades, and not succeeded very well at it--probably because, for whatever reason, we are not constitutionally capable of it and maybe also because our particular personality or physical appearence generates far more and far more frequent virrulent hatemail than those of you who recommend skin-thickening have ever had to deal with. Telling someone to "just" thicken their skin is often about as useful and as insightful as telling someone with a powerful physical addition to "just" quit. If such people could "just" do such things in such a facile fashion, don't you think they would have done them by now? Far better, in my opinion, would be to give such people specific, detailed, helpful tips on how such skin-thickening (or adidiction-breaking) can be sucessfully acomplished! Share your experience and skills in ways that are useful to others.
As for the second part of that statement, the "don't go online," it's totally unrealistic. It can be dangerous, difficult, and far worse (in terms of emotional disappointment, stalking behavior, rape by "well respected members of the bdsm community" posing as bdsm, etc.) for a submissive woman to find a dominant via real life, face-to-face venues. Shy people frequently find in-person "kinky meets" such as munches, very off-putting. The range of available partners is also extremely limited when you go the "real life" route and the chances of you meeting someone personally compatible are considerably reduced. If a woman has an extreme need for this sort of relationship, online is pretty much the only sensible way to go. And if she's "different" in any way (it isn't just the handicapped who get picked on: the overweight, the old, and the women who are less than phsyically desirable in any way get the same sort of horrific rudeness) she will get treated to muliple hateful attacks on bdsm boards by people whose idea of dominance is gradeschool playground bully antics. To decrease some of the hate that gets flung at you, a vulnerable person who is incapable of forming a "thick skin" can do the following:
--Do not post a picture in your personal-ad profile and only send your photo to those who have written you several (not just one) decent emails. State that this is your policy in your profile.
--Likewise, for the sake of honesty, mention in public that you have a disability if you have one, but do not state what it is. Again, say that you will tell correspondents or chatters who are not troubled by such things about it in detail after some trust has been established. By keeping it general, you take away anything specific the immature can target, and they'll move on to an easier, more obvious target to spew hatred toward. You do need to mention it exists, however, otherwise you will be cconstantly disappointed by indiividuals constitutionally incapable of handling someone with a disability turning tail and running from you or accusing you of horrible dishonesty (to mask their own weakness) as soon as they find out.
--Do not rely on personal-ad sites as your only online venue for meeting dominants. Try bdsm chatrooms and messageboards (preferably ones not connected with any personal-ad sites) or perhaps even start a blog or participate on a popular one as low-key and more natural ways of getting to know people and developing a support network of friends and acquaintances. In all such places, a general rule of thumb is that the more decent people talk openly and publically on the board or in the room. They will not privately message you without first getting to know you and what you are looking for in the public space.
The other thing I wanted to say was that, in my experience, collarme support staff and moderators will respond to extreme forms of abuse that are clearly documented and verifiable (for example, clear identity theft, "parody" profiles, journal entries that mention your username, or constant stalking harassment from a single individual creating multiple new profiles to harass you with each time you block an old one--by "multiple new profiles," I mean harassment from more than three or four different IDs who clearly are the same individual or who claim to be "friends" of that individual.) The "report" button does not always have an option that covers these kinds of abuse, but at the bottom of the collarme home page is an email link called Support. If you use that link casually to report the standard "he was mean to me!" sorts of emails that every woman on this site gets you will not recieve a reply but if it's what the staff considers an extreme sort of harassment, they do look into it.
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