“Rules are made to be broken along with the skulls of those who would try to impose them.”
“Learn the rules, break the rules.”
“Structure exists to be subverted and hierarchies are made for overthrowing.”
Chaos!
Anarchy!
Freedom!
Who has lived a life so worthless as to never have known the joy that can only come from breaking a rule someone else has made and flaunting that breaking in their face? There is a reason why outlaws are heroes in every culture. The very act of rule-breaking is an expression of human freedom in the face of those who would try to limit that freedom. And in BDSM that act becomes more than an expression, it becomes a way of living.
Ok, the first thing I want you to do is take everything you may have heard about the history of modern BDSM and throw it out the window because what you have been told is not true. It did NOT begin with a bunch of foul-smelling, semi-literate morons who came back from the second world war and bought motorcycles with training wheels. They were an aberration, a carbuncle on the privities of humanity. The only reason anyone takes anything seriously about them is because of a massive publicity campaign.
The true story of modern BDSM begins actually in the late 1800s with the reaction against the extremes of Victorianism that became known to scholars as the Adversary Culture. It was out of this movement which existed to flaunt the rules of the good Victorians and drive them nuts, that the broader contemporary culture, of which BDSM is a part, came. It produced the writers and artists of its time and ultimately took over the arts and literature and academia, at least as far as the Liberal Arts were concerned. It was nourished with discontent and boredom and produced an entirely different culture from the one that spawned it, a culture based on creativity and hedonism. And it found its greatest expositor in Aleister Crowley. (Hence the crossover between BDSM and Magick which is far more common than was realized until about 10 years ago.)
The adversary culture, with its galleries and libraries and absinthe stayed more or less apart from the mainstream of the culture. It was the place of the educated and moneyed, people who had time to spend using their brains rather than their hands, not worn to the bone with monotonous labor and the raising of broods of children. In short, the upper and upper middle classes. And it was in these classes that BDSM as we now practice it had its true origin. It was born of boredom with vanilla sexuality and there was enough free time and money for other routes to be explored and enjoyed.
The true forebears of modern BDSM were the decadents and the intellectuals. They had their own literature, their own codes for communicating among the masses of the great unwashed, and they were rule breakers to their very core. The only problem with them was they were rather hard to find. It was not that they tried to stay hidden. The author William Seabrooke would take his girlfriend out on the streets of New York in the 1920s with her hands tied behind her back. It was more that the class they came from made it difficult to meet them. After all, they did not want to hang out with just anyone, especially those pigs on the motorcycles. That was why they were hidden, not out of fear of law enforcement to be sure. They had the power to put any cop who would dare to interfere with them doing the equivalent of walking a midnight beat at Cabrini Green unarmed. No, they just kept to themselves and their own social class.
In the 1960s things broke open. We boomers did that with our sexual revolution. And Transgressionism triumphed again as the barriers collapsed. In 1973 bondage became totally mainstream with the publication of the Joy of Sex and a host of paperback sex manuals in its wake. S&M was soon to follow with the rise of punk and performance art. By the early 1980s BDSM was cool and has remained so ever since. If it is no longer the absolute cutting edge of fashion, it is certainly a mainstay of it and the pleasures of ropes and whips are now accessible to even truck drivers and loading dock workers.
Unfortunately it was fashion that created the doorway for the Leathermen to come in and spread their plague of structuralism. The Uniform had a certain appeal. There are folks who like to wear leather and here was an opportunity to wear lots of it.
But it came at a price. You see there are people who need rules and structure in their lives and the subculture that gave them the costumes also provided rules and structure by the ton. But it was worse. The true BDSM culture was averse to overmuch organization. Remember, these were people who had organization up their noses in everyday life. They did not want more it. But the structuralist culture loved organization. Its guiding principal of a place for everyone and everyone in their place required it. So they had clubs and officers and organization names and rituals and funny hats all of which came along with the fashion. And the idea of clubs made sense to a subgroup of the old BDSMers.
There are two types of people who have trouble finding partners in the real world. Dominant women and submissive men. Male doms and sub females never had any trouble finding partners because they were merely amplifying the roles of the broader culture. But the roles of dominant woman and submissive man were and are so totally counter to the basic assumptions of the broader culture that it was very difficult for them to find compatible people. Organizations provided a solution to that. A discussion club could very well be a place where such people could meet and not have to dance around their respective desires. This created a peculiar situation where the discussion clubs of the 80s and 90s had a membership dynamic that was in exact opposition the dynamic of the broader BDSM world, of which they, the clubs, were a very very tiny part only they did not realize it.
So what you had were two numerically insignificant tails of the BDSM world, the Leathermen and the discussion clubs, seeking to wag a much larger dog.
There was only one real problem for them. Some Transgressionists also found their way into the discussion clubs. Some clubs were even controlled by Transgressionists. And then the scene exploded!
ONLINE!!!
The main problem of the BDSM world heretofore had been communication. It was sparse at best when it existed at all. The coming of the Internet changed all that. And that meant that the dynamic of the BDSM world changed, particularly for those whose experience with it had only been through the clubs for now they learned that the overwhelming part of the BDSM population is het, male dom, female sub. The gay leatherfolk, who thought they were the whole thing, now learned to their dismay that they were nothing but an oddly costumed drop in an ocean.
But the structuralists had one more advantage. They were the first to realize the potential of online back in the days of the BBS’s. So online, in its chat rooms, took on a very extreme structuralist viewpoint and people discovering BDSM through the medium of the computer often have made the mistake of thinking that what goes on in chat rooms is the same as the real world.
But online also gave a voice to the Transgressionists as well. And the fight was on.
You see the fact is that we really can’t all just get along. The Transgressionist lifestyle is a knife at the throat of the Structuralist one. The Structuralists cannot impose their rules effectively when there is an whole branch of the scene that will never follow them. As their only weapon is excommunication, use of that weapon only expands the Transgresssionist numbers as they welcome the outcast with open arms. Thus, by our very existence, we are a menace to them. We can break all their rules with impunity and ignore their disapproval. They are faced with those to whom their words lack the power to persuade and over whom they have no power to coerce. Thus, they are often reduced to helpless sputtering as they repeat the doctrines they have held for so long only now to be responded to with laughter rather than respect.
So once again the Transgressionists are coming into the ascendant, this time to stay.
Copyright Dagger Dom
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