http://www.leatherleadership.org/library/LLC6Baldwin.htm
(not because I agree with everything he says or in the rightness of Old Guard, but he talks a bit about how the bdsm community has lost its “sizzle.” Which is something I’ve felt at times, and one of the reasons I backed away from it for a while…)
What strikes me most about those who question me closely about the Old Guard is how passionately they seem to be searching for something which they believe will somehow satisfy a deeply felt need….a longing for something they sense has been lost to us. When I question people closely about what this need is……it almost always can be reduced to a few key words: sexiness, cohesion, intimacy, trust, reliability, integrity, accountability, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of familyCommon perceptions out in the leather world today, are all too frequently summarized by remarks like these:”The leather scene is dying.”"The magic and the mystery is gone.”"We’ve lost sight of what’s important, and allowed ourselves to be distracted.”"What’s happened to the connectedness?”"I think that what I’m looking for hasn’t existed for a long time.”"We’ve allowed the very essence of leathersex to evaporate into thin air.”"Where is the Passion?”It does seem very clear to me that many people are simply not feeling something that they think they should be feeling about their leathersex experiences and leather life.
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The energy of nearly all of our organizations thus became harnessed to two main goals: 1) to teach our own people how to do BDSM sexuality “properly” which meant technically correct, and 2) to defend and seek tolerance for our sexual practices to the non-kinky world…..we did this by adopting the mantra of “Safe, Sane, and Consensual”……and we did our best to sell it to them……and to ourselves. And we have done that for the last 15 years. And we’ve done it despite the fact that, privately, some of us know that lots of hot BDSM is anything but completely safe & entirely sane. So, in order to have our sexual practices match up nicely with our public propaganda, we essentially steered our BDSM education along the most conservative and ultra safe guidelines…..and in doing so, we pulled much of the bite and sizzle out of doing BDSM and sanitized it beyond belief!!! It’s no wonder that so many people are complaining that leathersex feels “flat” to them these days, and are wondering, “is that all there is?” Clearly, bunches of people are ready for much more than Dungeon Masters permit in the over-supervised, intermediate-level dungeons we see at events nowadays.
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…and that we recognize that love, intimacy, honesty, intensity, accountability, family, and self-challenge are much more important than achieving pin-point accuracy with every single whip-stroke.
