Cyber/meatspace… the old quandry…

On a list I am on ( BDSM Living It ) the topic of “cyber” relationships came up. As I looked through my archives here I could not see that I had written anything on the topic. This seemed strange to me and I checked my email archives and found a few items. To correct the lack here on my ‘blog I have collected them in this post for future reference.

 

posted on 05/22/2003 by me to “AbsoluteBDSM”

You’ve hear it before and it’s always the same… and it’s always bullsh*t 🙂

• Without physical interaction, cyber isn’t “real”
• Since you can turn off the computer, it isn’t “real”
• Without the problems of living together, cyber isn’t “real”.

Bull 🙂

“Real” D/S requires only ONE thing to be such – there must be a real power differential. In other words, submission and dominance. Hence the term “D/s”.

There is NOTHING about submission or dominance that requires physical force, or physical interaction. Thus, a non physical relationship can absolutely include D/s – thus it can be real.

I know of many, many meatspace relationships that are 24/7 and have absolutely no reality in them. They words dominance and submission are used – yet neither exist. They live a lie, a fantasy, and an illusion that they create and maintain.

They fact that they have to share rent and bills adds no reality to this.

I’ve said it before and it remains true… the ONLY thing required for dominance is the ability to convey stimulus to the submissive. If you can do that, then the potential for dominance exists.

Are there differences? Of course. But then, there are so many DIFFERENT types of relationships that these differences are irrelevant to the reality involved. Just because living together may bring with it some difficulties sure doesn’t make it more “real”.

Can some people just “turn off” a screen? Sure. Of course if they can then they weren’t actually under the influence of dominance. The same people could hang up a phone, or walk out of a room, or refuse a punishment. If the dominance does not exist then the communications medium or the physical proximity is not the issue.

If someone needs a hand on their throat, or a look in the eye, or a whip across their back to trigger their submission then I say good for them. But that is not universal – your truth is not everyone’s truth. Power can and does exist between minds… and if you think you could simply reach out and log off – then you have never felt dominance mind to mind.

 

emailed on 09/21/2002 by me to a private recipient

Basically, there are two traps when people try and be sympathetic to online relationships (both are meant to be nice, and both are wrong and sometimes insulting (IMHO) ) you fell into both of them.

1. That while “you” want to feel your lovers touch, that others don’t and that’s valid. While that is true in its way, it sort of indicates that these people (online folks) don’t desire those things. This makes them seem alien to the reader, they reader instinctively thinks “why don’t I believe that?”
2. The old saw that we should be nice to those in cyber relationships because it might be all they can have the poor shut in things. They deserve our pity, they are doing the best they can so be nice to them. Again, this is a point but it leaves a fairly bad impression.

To me, the important, crucial understanding of Cyber is that there is NO difference except in our perception of it. Now, obviously your article will convey YOUR thoughts, not mine (I like it BTW) but I figured I would toss this idea at you.

EVERY issue in cyber has exactly the same issue in “meatspace”. The issue is recognizing that they are the same problems in a different context, with different pitfalls but similar core issues.

DEPRAVATION: In a cyber relationship, for you, you would feel intensely the lack of physical contact. In my current ROMANTIC relationship my partner doesn’t like to kiss. I really like kissing but currently refrain from doing so with her because she asked me nice. I could say “One of the things I really miss about my current relationship is a long slow kiss in the morning” and I am still talking about my meatspace girlfriend.

TRUST/HONESTY: In a cyber relationship, it is fairly easy for someone to be deceptive for a short period of contact. Obviously, the more contact you have the harder it is. In meatspace it is fairly easy for someone to be “superdom” when all you see of him is at a BDSM club or a date once a week. Are the methods of gaining trust and avoiding deception different? Sure, some of them. But the core PROBLEM is the same.

LIMITED OPPORTUNITY: While it is true that some cyber would prefer to be R/T but cannot and thus “settle”, this is also not a unique problem. I know many people in meatspace who only get out to a BDSM club once a month, or swveral times a yer, because they are ina  vanilla relationship. Or how about someone who goes to the local BDSM group munch even though they don�t like the group much because it is to far to drive to a better one? Same problem, different setting.

Cyber and Meatspace are different, they are different circumstances that influence the same reality - our life, our relationships and our growth. They are not fundamentally separate worlds.

 

posted on 06/29/2003 by me to BDSM Living It

I’ll take a moment and say that in the larger community these ideas are far from unpopular or radical… hell, at the moment they are positively trendy in most large groups 🙂

[ a snipped comment that many in BDSM are dysfunctional people ]

I disagree with this. Though it is a very popular and often repeated bit of “common knowledge”, there is nothing objective to indicate that the BDSM community has a disproportionate number of dysfunctional folks.

The fact is, the whole society is rampant with people who are, or judge others, to be less than well functioning – it is an epidemic brought on by our currently victim worship and the attendant desire to belong by being off kilter.

[ comment bemoaning the fact that words are being re-defined, and blaming this on online groups ]

This is NOT an online problem, it is a community problem. It so happens that the use of online discussion tools allows the infection to spread – but they are not the cause, nor did they originate it.

As a reality, the online tools for communication are in fact the only real defense the community has from the incessant watering down and destruction of ideology that is inherent in the rise of petty group politics and tin pot safety Nazis.

Those people who don�t believe that BDSM is limited to slap and tickle, self definition and the rising tide of softening expectations are a minority – and it is only the online communication medium that allows them to for a significant block within the larger one.

If you think the arbitrary nature of the terms is one that comes from, or lives on, online look around you in the meatspace BDSM community sometime.

The “online menace” is amusingly blamed for all the evils in the world … and that in and of itself shows you that most criticisms of it are invalid.

• I have seen online blamed for BDSM being too soft and too hard.
• I have seen it blamed by the “hard styles” for the rise of “soft style” and vice versa.
• I have seen online blamed for the use of safewords, and for the current rising rejection of safewords
• I have seen online blamed for the rise of unreal expectations, and for the lowering of all expectations.

In short people, stop blaming it for your own problems. If the community is lame it is because they ARE lame, the “online” world is no more to blame than the telephone is … allowing people to communicate is not the cause fo the stupidity they discuss while communicating.

[ comment blaming the ills of the world on people who use the online medium to communicate because the author felt they were to weak minded to handle the real thing ]

Hardly. Heck, most of those people in meatspace BDSM don�t live anything I recognize as BDSM. They are incapable of doing any of this “for real” in any way I understand it – they have no real authority, no real consequences, no real submission and no real understanding of what any of those words mean.

This is not the fault of email.

Further, “online” BDSM has been an active, useful and important tool for communication since I started logging on in 1982. It has been a HUGE influence for more than a decade. This is nothing new, it is not “on the rise”.

There is noting specially strong or brave about someone who does a little slap and tickle, safely wrapped in their safewords and doing it all according to their SM101 checklists. They are living a fantasy every bit as unreal as an role player online ever has… they just get to pretend it ISN’T role playing … that they are rebels cause they are “real time”.

No wonder they are desperate for a group to blame and look down on… they know they have no real claim to their own terminology … but at least they can point at someone else as being “fake”.

[ a comment blaming the online world for the rise of politics in the meatspace groups ]

I hate to tell you, but this has ALWAYS been a factor of the meatspace community – if you think online contaminated it you haven’t been paying attention 🙂

[ a comment blaming rules and regulations in the community on the online medium ]

Funny, I feel the same way about all the people who justify those rules and regulations by telling me that those rules are important for it to be “real” and that my rejection of those rules marks me as someone living a fantasy.

Of course, they blame that on those “online” people 🙂

 

posted on 03/21/2004 by me to DOMINANCEsubmission

[ a comment that while the people and feelings may be real, the relationship itself is not if it is online ]

That doesn’t make any sense.

A relationship is only defined by the interaction between humans. There is no other reasonable definition when discussing them. Thus if the interaction, intentions and feelings are real the relationship MUST be real. There is simply no other option.

It is somewhat easier for an online relationship to be dishonest or fraudulent, but that is not at all the same thing as it not being “real”.

There is nothing magical about being in the same room with someone that blesses that relationship with the stamp of “reality”. And if so, how long does that take?

• Is being in the same room for 1 minute enough to make it real?
• Is being in the same room for 2 minutes enough to make it real?
• Is it a day?
• Two dates?
• A scene?
• The wedding?

How much “real time” does it take to me branded “real”? Obviously things are more complex than simply the idea that online = fake and face to face (meatspace) is “real”.

In fact the only good definitions are that relationships between people are always real, but a fraudulent relationship means it is not always the relationship you thought you had.

I know you were hurt (you mentioned it) – but that depth of feeling defined that relationship as “real” – no other reasonable definition exists that I know of.

posted on 03/22/2004 by me to DOMINANCEsubmission

[ a comment that for those poor ‘cyber’ people this may be all they have! ]

I hear this line of reasoning a lot, and it is often presented in a way that is incredibly dismissive and insulting. It’s kind of like when vanilla people say “We should accept BDSM, some people can’t handle a healthy relationship and that�s the only way they can feel like they belong”.

You know, its been 25 years or so since the general public began meeting and communicating with each other view computers, and it was longer before that when “party lines” allowed long distance phone relationships to develop. To dismiss all those relationships as being something to be tolerated or accepted out of pity for those poor shut-ins who can’t have anything “real” is not only insulting but, well, rude.

I know a large number of intelligent, well adjusted humans, both in the scene and without, who actually have social lives and have had and currently have meatspace relationships who still *gasp* form a connection with someone they met online. I am sure that�s hard for people to believe when online relationships are so often dismissed as the last refuge of the socially stunted or inept.

I can only conclude that the general dismissal of a relationship that happens to have a computer as a communications medium (as opposed to letter or carrier pigeons) in the community is from a general over focus on sex or the fact that a lot of people have been hurt and are bitter about the whole thing.

No doubt there was much hand wringing and upset that the telephone would kill romance because it ruined the general use of letters as a communications tool.