Ok, read this on a web site and had to share it...
technobarbarian@my-dejanews.com raises the issue--
I recently participated in a discussion group in which it was argued that a negative effect of the internet on BDSM was that it was causing it to lose its aura of mystery. The person advancing this argument talked about how membership in the gay leather community had formerly required visiting some extremely sleazy bars--where now one could join from the comfort of their living room. He felt that this had caused the community to be "diluted" by people who were less committed than the traditional members.
[...]
whadda ya' think? Is BDSM losing its mystique? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Oh, hell, YES it's a bad thing! You kids today are spoiled rotten--lazy little bunch of technopeckers ... why, back in MY day we had to walk six miles through the snow every morning just to get to the leather bar, and eight miles at night to get back. And this wan't one of your fancy-schmancy "Alternative Lifestyle Clubs" either, with your potted palms and your espresso machines; this was a one-room leather bar with no shingles on the roof and a pot-bellied stove in the corner ... 'course, we couldn't afford wood back in those days, so to heat the place we just cut glory holes in the sides of that ol' pot-bellied stove and every boy who joined up had to spend his first year in the stove, like it or not, but by God it made a man out you ... kept the place pretty comfy, too, 'cause the number of diseases a boy got workin' them holes, his body temperature stayed up around 110, 112 most th' time.
We didn't need no fancy-ass "Dungeon Monitors" either, nosin' around fluttering over everbody's "technique". All we had was Crazy Hank ... he made the older boys help out the younger ones, and if he didn't like what you were doin' he just hauled off an' gave you a boot in the ass that'd cripple a mule ... everybody hated Hank, but we respected him too, by God; he didn't need a bunch of charts and graphs and New Math to help you figure out what was what, I'll tell you that.
And we had to write our slave contracts on the back of a shovel, we didn't have these "FAX machines" that you kids have today ... yep, wrote 'em out on an old rusty shovel with a piece of gleet from the privy out back--what, you were expecting charcoal?--and if you went inside to do it, your piece of gleet woud get all soft from the heat and you'd get marked down for bad penmanship and have to lick the whole shovel off and start over; but if you stayed outside to do it, your cock ring would get to be about eight below zero ... oh, you can tell a man who came up in MY day: frostbite of the vas deferens, that's something you kids just don't understand.
Call yourselves BDSMers--? Faugh! Maybe we didn't know much back then, but we knew the difference between chaps and a polo shirt, that's for damn sure. My first chaps were made from Martha White flour sacks; I laid 'em out in the paved road on hot days so they'd pick up that road tar 'n' get black and stiff... couldn't afford much, but we learned how to get by, all right. We learned respect, endurance, commitment ... and we didn't go running for the doctors every time somebody got a hangnail, or came out in head-to-toe scabs, or had a milk bottle stuck up his ass.
Yes, I learned a lot in that little one-room leather bar. A lot that you kids won't ever know, with your condoms and your video machines and your sex shops on every corner. Them were the days.
SlackTop
Lazy little technopecker
~The above article was found at the following location, and reposted by elorin@usa.net~
http://members.aol.com/lolitates/inmyday.html