Domination & Submission: The BDSM Relationship Handbook (13 page)

“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.”

-
- Peter Steiner cartoon

depicting an actual dog at the keyboard.

The New Yorker, July 5, 1993

Many people get their very first taste of
Domination/submission and the BDSM lifestyle via the internet.  Web sites,
chat rooms, fetish portals and virtual worlds have all combined to make the
internet a veritable buffet of BDSM and kink in general.  In fact, it is
so
plentiful and omnipresent, one often finds BDSM-related images and references
in places it where they
shouldn’t
be, such as on web sites and in chat
rooms that are frequented by under-aged children. 

If
you
happen to be one of those people whose
only exposure to the BDSM lifestyle has been through the internet, you may very
well find yourself wondering about the differences between the
online
BDSM lifestyle and the
real-world
one, and about the
validity
of
your online experiences.  Our goal in this chapter will be to try and
answer some of those questions for you, and perhaps provide you with a road map
that will help you to make the leap from
virtual
D/s relationships to
the
real thing
, if that is what you seek.

The online BDSM culture is truly a double-edged
sword in many respects.  On one hand, it allows a person with absolutely
no prior experience or knowledge of the lifestyle to dip his or her toe into
the waters without fear of ridicule or harm.  On the other hand, it allows
a person with absolutely no prior experience or knowledge of the lifestyle to
misrepresent
himself as an expert,
without worrying about any potential
consequences.  The horror stories one hears, again and again, are enough
to make some people shun the online BDSM culture
entirely
.  It is
disturbingly common to hear tales of middle-aged submissive women who learn
that their supposed Masters are actually
teenage girls
.  Not only
do men turn out to be women, but women are revealed to be men, and children
routinely pose as adults.  In short, the one thing that you
can
trust to be true when it comes to internet BDSM is: 
Nothing is ever
what it seems
.

My favorite story about online relationships
concerns two overweight, middle-aged, heterosexual men who posed as
twenty-something
lesbians
in order to engage in frequent cybersex with
naïve bisexual or lesbian teenaged girls.   What happened,
instead
,
was they met and seduced
each other
, and
fell head over heels in love
. 
Imagine their mutual surprise, after
months
in a loving and ostensibly
committed online relationship, when they discovered the awful truth. 
Apparently, karma is not only a
bitch
, but she has a wicked sense of
humor.

Online BDSM culture and relationships can be
illusory, deceptive, and abusive.  They can also be entertaining, honest,
and fulfilling
if
you approach them with open eyes, the right attitude,
and take proper precautions.  We’ll discuss those precautions later in
this chapter, after we’ve talked about some of the different venues where you
may encounter the online BDSM culture.

Text-Based BDSM Chat

For most of the people who use the internet
today
,
it’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time when the internet existed
without
the World Wide Web, robust graphics, or the high speed networks that made them
all possible,
but there was
, and I was caught up in all of it from the
very beginning. 

My first exposure to the online BDSM culture was in
the mid-1980s through an online service called
CompuServe
, which was the
very
first
major internet service provider.  In the beginning,
CompuServe charged roughly
$5 per hour
to connect to their network and
overseas,
where I was stationed at the time, a person could easily spend $30 per hour in
surcharges to connect through CompuServe’s international nodes.  Needless
to say, at those prices, only the most obsessed and committed computer geeks
bothered to do so.  Yes,
people like me
. 

The reason for my obsession was something CompuServe
called
CB Chat.
  It’s humorous to think of it now, but at the time
it was called
CB
chat because the marketing gurus at CompuServe believed
that would be the best way to explain the concept of a
chat room
to
people who had never heard of one before.  The idea was to invoke the
familiar notion of
CB, or citizens band, radio.
  Yes, we’re talking
about the very same CB radio fad made famous by the popular 1975 song
“Convoy”
by one-hit wonder C.W. McCall, and the 1978 movie by the same name. 
By the way, if you’re
not
familiar with the song, do yourself a huge
favor and avoid the temptation to look it up on You Tube.  It could be
days
before you get that earworm out of your head.   

The chat rooms or
channels,
as they were
sometimes called, were organized by topic or lifestyle, and I naturally
gravitated to the BDSM lifestyle channels.  There, I learned that the
online BDSM culture –
even then,
in the internet’s infancy - was
far different
from what I’d experienced in real-life and there were a
lot of new rules to
learn
.  A few years later, around 1988, other alternatives to
CompuServe chat became available, including America Online (AOL) and a
multitude of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks.  Today, there are
literally
thousands
of IRC chat networks in existence, with the four
largest being EFnet, IRCnet, UnderNet, and DALnet.  Many of the customs
and online protocols that were developed by the CompuServe fetish community
then were adopted by the users of these newer chat platforms, and most are
still in practice, even now. 

During the early days of the internet, certain
protocols
had
to be followed in order to make sense of a BDSM culture
that
could only be expressed in text.
  There
were
no websites or
social media portals like Facebook or Tumblr.  The very notion of being
able to have an internet-based
voice-chat
,
a la Skype
, was still
decades
away.  Even the ability to attach a photograph to an email in order to
send it to a friend was beyond the technical abilities of most people.  In
other words, if your message couldn’t be expressed in letters, numbers,
punctuation or symbols, you were quite simply
out of luck
.

So, we
adapted
.  We learned to use
plain
text
to provide all of the necessary vital clues to a person’s status,
relationship, sexual orientation, and standing in the online BDSM community to
anyone who happened to be paying attention and knew what to look for. 
Dominants
capitalized
the first letter of their names; submissives used
all
lower-case
letters.  Submissives referred to any male Dominant
who was not his or her own as
Sir. 
Female Dominants were referred
to as
Ma’am
,
Miss, or Mistress.
  Personal pronouns such as
you,
him, her, and they
were capitalized if you were talking
to
a
Dominant.  If we were talking
about
a Dominant, then we capitalized
the
Him or Her
.  If we were unsure, or we were addressing a mixed
group, we sometimes used torturous grammatical monstrosities like
Y/you,
T/them, or
even
E/everyone
.  You could always identify the
chronically clueless by their admirable but terribly misguided enthusiasm in
misapplying this particular protocol, which would sometimes resulted in
grammatical abominations like,
“H/hello E/everyone, H/how A/are Y/you A/all
T/this E/evening?” 
Nice try, but no cigar.

We couldn’t always figure out a person’s
sex
without asking, but we
could
immediately tell who was
collared
by
the addition of bracketed initials at the end of a collared individual’s
name.  For example, if a submissive named
slavekitten
was collared
to a Dominant named
DarkKnight
, her username would often look something
like this: slavekitten{DK}.   If slavekitten were to log on one day
without the {DK} attached to her name, you instantly knew what that
meant.  She had been released from her collar.

Despite the advent of the World Wide Web and the
tremendous growth of more technically sophisticated chat platforms the appeal
of text-based chat has remained as strong as ever, with over 3,200 IRC chat
servers currently hosting
hundreds of thousands
of chat channels each
day.  The most popular IRC program is mIRC, which can be downloaded for
free from practically any freeware or shareware download site.  Some
popular BDSM-related websites maintain their own custom web/IRC interfaces,
which allow visitors to use their web browsers to access the site’s IRC chat
servers.  To learn if your favorite BDSM web portal has an IRC chat
server, just look for a search box on the site, and search for the term “IRC
chat.”

Virtual Worlds BDSM Chat

As computer technology and networking capabilities
increased, so did our ability to explore a robust and growing BDSM culture
online.  The first networked
virtual worlds
were developed in the
1970s by the Department of Defense and deployed on ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network), the precursor to what eventually became the modern
internet.  By 1978, the first non-commercial virtual world to be deployed
on the internet was called MUD1, which ironically stood for
Multi User
Dungeon
.  The
dungeon
in this particular instance was more of a
Dungeons and Dragons
sort of dungeon, than a
BDSM
one. 

By the late 1980s, commercial versions of virtual
worlds had begun springing up, most notably
Habitat
by Lucas Films, and
WorldsAway/Dreamscape by CompuServe.  These experiments in virtual worlds
led the way for the immensely popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing
Games (MMORPGs) that followed, like
Ultima Online
and
World of
Warcraft
.  Today, the most popular virtual world chat platforms are
IMVU
for Windows, Second Life for Windows, Play Station Home,
and
The Sims
Online.

Virtual world chat programs added an exciting
visual
dimension to what had previously been limited to letters, numbers and
symbols.  Suddenly, you no longer had to guess or ask about a person’s
sex, you could figure it out simply by looking at that person’s 3D
avatar
. 
Of course, nothing prevents a person from misrepresenting his or her sex by
choosing an avatar of the opposite sex, but why let a little thing like
that
dampen our enthusiasm for the magic of 3D virtual worlds?  The process
of choosing an avatar to represent you in this virtual world also came with an
added
bonus:
the ability to be the person you always wanted to be.  In
virtual worlds, we are unencumbered by age, obesity, bad teeth, bald spots,
muffin tops, spare tires, small boobs or tiny penises.  Everyone is
perfect
,
or at least as perfect as they want and can afford to be, which for the most
part, is
pretty darn perfect
.

For
some
people, this illusion of instant
bodily perfection can be
pretty heady stuff.
  Combine that with a
large dose of internet anonymity, the allure of consequence-free 3D graphic
cyber-sex, and a ready supply of naïve hormonal teenagers, and you end up with
a recipe for a potentially problematic detachment from reality that
could
be downright catastrophic for
any
relationship, D/s
or
vanilla.  Adding a BDSM relationship dynamic to the mix can be a little
like throwing a bucket of gasoline onto an already out-of-control fire.

The sophistication of the 3D graphic cyber-sex
available in these online virtual worlds is
astounding
, however, even at
its best it is still only as good as one’s
imagination
.  In that
sense, it is really not much different from phone-sex, sexting, or
cartoon
porn
– perhaps better than nothing, but that isn’t exactly
high praise.
 
Some virtual worlds impose bewildering rules on what is, and isn’t, allowed
sexually.  One of the largest online virtual worlds, for example, forbids
erect
penises
and/or
any hip to hip contact between avatars.
  In
fact, if you want your avatar to have a penis
at all,
expect to hand
over some
real cash
for the privilege, since
starter
avatars come
penisless
in almost all virtual world chat programs. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to
virtual
sadomasochistic
sex, things get even
more
complicated and
frustrating.  For sadists who get off on inflicting pain on others, and
masochists who enjoy the sensations of pain, a virtual world where no one feels
pain
at all
can be just a little exasperating. 
Imagined
pain
and pleasure are poor substitutions for the real thing, unfortunately. 
Bondage
loses much of its appeal when a person can free himself from his restraints
with a simple click of his mouse, and simulated impact-play has all the
emotional
impact
of swiveling Ken’s little plastic arm to spank Barbie’s
perfect little plastic ass.