Hey thanks, again. I appreciate that you listen to me—and I hope that this conversation might actually make it somewhere, since it’s public. It’s always going to be up to people to hear this, though.

Maybe the reason there is resistance on the parts of these groups is because the advantages of supporting ourselves as a larger community are unclear.

I don’t think they are unclear. I think a lot of people would welcome the coming together of different communities as Floating World (partially) seems to have succeeded in showing. I’m talking about the space for my branch, which I feel is not given the kind of room it deserves and is in fact being actively harmed by the dangerous notions presented by absolutists, the current state of professional BDSM, and all the other things we rail against.

They can’t have things both ways, however. You can’t invite people who are different from you to join with you and at the same time actively undermine their existence and expect them to feel invited. That’s hypocrisy.

Any thoughts on specified, articulate goals, or where to find them?

I want to find more people like you and me and show them that things are not actually so hopeless, because people like us who just haven’t been as lucky as we have been are voluntarily turning away from us in frustration every time they continually run into the big, dumb brick walls that are embodied by just about everything Bitchy has ever bitched about. I think a part of doing that is communicating with other communities, because I guarantee you that at least some of those people I’m looking for are in those other communities, too.

Maybe the reason there is resistance on the parts of these groups is because the advantages of supporting ourselves as a larger community are unclear. Any thoughts on specified, articulate goals, or where to find them?

There’s very little point in trying to jam together different people who don’t even like each other that much to begin with. As Richard once told me, a single shared activity is not actually very bonding.

That said, there does need to be understanding on everyone’s part that we are not entirely dissimilar. In that sense, I think we should think of ourselves as one large community at the same time as we recognize the importance and the inherent advantages of being parts of many smaller organizations.

Don’t get me wrong, things are actually a lot better today than they were one year ago, and they were better one year ago than they were the year before that.

The thing is, a lot of the specifics of the cultures of these individual groups aren’t articulated. They’re something people have to learn by going.

Of course. DSF was actually a branch off of TES founded by people who disliked TES’s way of the world. I have no problem with that. CV, for that matter, is in a way another branch.

My point is that even though every tree has many different branches with dozens more leaves on them, they are all part of the same trunk, they have the same roots, and they need each other and their own space to survive.

Is the goal you’re articulating one of creating an all inclusive single space, or of creating a network between individualized spaces through which we can communicate with, get support from and support other groups?

As you pointed out, DSF doesn’t feel welcoming to people of your particular orientation, and yet they’re all very nice, very friendly folks. So, perhaps rather than hoping to expand their community to include us, we could try and link the two together; advertising for each other, spreading similar news stories, referring people whose interests may be stimulated by each other’s cultures. If they were willing to define themselves more clearly, perhaps the experience we had would have been very different. But not many groups are willing to stand up and say “we want to do this specifically, and we want to do it well” (we want to teach, we want to hold parties for a certain orientation, we want members interested in x, y, z.) A group attempting to reach every single person and cover every single interest seems bound to fail, because they’d be too focused on being all-inclusive to form achievable goals.

The thing is, a lot of the specifics of the cultures of these individual groups aren’t articulated. They’re something people have to learn by going. We got no forewarning that DSF wouldn’t be a good fit for us, because they claim to have a completely welcoming and supporting culture when in practice they will welcome those different from them (like us), but are not equipped to support them.

On the other hand, although I find the organization interesting, I’m never going to show up at, say, GMSMA. I’m not actually a member of that community, and as such I’m not invited. But that’s okay – what I’d like would be to know more people who are active in GMSMA, so that I can share experiences with them when appropriate, and exchange information about our separate groups and cultures that I can them pass on, or use as reference material.

At the moment, there’s no tool or place that can link everyone together, so there’s no easy and quick way for someone new to go find a place they might be welcome. But if, say, someone created a massive group calendar . . .