Beware of BDSM schools

This morning I entered Second Life late so I didn't have time for more than teleporting around a little. I messaged some with my friends P and c, who were having fun at c's favorite biker hangout, but because I was so short on time I didn't really feel like going there just to have to leave when I had gotten started. Instead I bumped into my friend s tied up tight as usual at Sir R's place, and we had a nice little chat where she suggested some dom she thought I might like. I'll at least keep an eye open, since I think s and I have similar preferences in some respects.

A couple of failures with Masters lately made me start thinking about what they had in common, and one striking thing was that they both attended BDSM schools but at different places. I actually managed to get hold of some kind of curriculums for both those places, and even if they weren't very detailed, they gave me some notion on what they were about.

I've attended a couple of courses for submissives myself, at different slave auction houses I was thinking about letting sell me, but in all honesty those very courses were much of the reason I didn't go through with my plans. Those courses really had nothing to do with BDSM or D/s (dominance and submission) as I know it, but just relayed stereotypical roles for stereotypical role-plays. You know, a "real" dom/me should always be like this, and a "real" sub should always be like that.

Browsing the curriculums of the BDSM schools gave me much the same impression, even if they didn't specify the exact content. Topics like emoting classes, role-playing classes, the submissive mind, the responsibilities of a dominant, introducing the beginner, etiquette for the dominant and etiquette for the submissive at least gives me a hint of that "this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

Looking back at the two products of those two schools, they both had a lot in common. Both managed to present themselves as very pleasant and caring (dominant etiquette?), and both spoke in pretty elaborate ways (role-playing classes?) and made some partly quite good attempts of emoting (emoting classes?). But in both cases, those nice facades just fell apart as soon as scratched even the slightest, revealing your average horny guy just out for some fast virtual sex and probably believing submissives to be easy prey for that.

Oh, admitted, I really fell for both those charades, because I didn't even think about what I saw could be the stereotype result of such schools. However, those schools seem to be better at teaching people to paint a picture than those brief submissive courses I attended at least. But painting that stereotype role-playing facade seem to be all they are good at teaching as well.

I think I would like to give one piece of advice to those thinking about attending such schools. If you don't have the dominance or submissiveness more in your heart than you need to be taught about it, then you should probably start thinking about if that's really what you are meant for. But if you're just out to try yet another kind of role-play, then I'm sure you could find both the teaching and the results from those schools worth-while.

Personally I prefer the kind of "self-study course" my guardian M has set up at his BDSM Institute. It's provocative and doesn't present any simple, ready-made answers to memorize. And if you manage to interpret all of his statements as the gospel concerning BDSM, then you're really even crazier than I am. I know him well and that he and I share many views on BDSM, but not even I can accept all he presents there, which I think is exactly his intention as well.

Anyway, the next time I run into someone telling me he or she is attending BDSM classes or brags about having graduated, I'll probably start looking for the nicest way in the opposite direction.