This weekend
Posted by Tanos on Sun 14 Nov 04, 5:02 PM
Tags: events
A very busy weekend. Club Lash, the Manchester Munch,
shopping, the Couch Club and lots of friends old and new.
Mostly good news, but a couple of sour notes in amongst
it all due to human nature, all the same.
Club Lash seems to have bedded down nicely at the
Tunnel. A good turnout (it was pretty well full from 11
onwards), equipment being used in earnest and a great
atmosphere. They've also still got room to expand
(downwards!) if the numbers continue to grow.
On Saturday, the Manchester Munch was also well
attended. We stayed for most of it, and by the time we
left, the basement where it's held was well into
"standing room only." After all these years, it's great
to see the oldest UK munch still going strong, and still
providing "painless" introduction to the scene for new
people. 
In the evening, lili and I went to the first night of
the Couch Club. This is a new monthly night at MUD, in
central Manchester. MUD is a great venue for small
parties (it's a for-hire city centre dungeon with
top-quality equipment and furniture by Fetters) and the
Couch Club is another of these low-key, "get on with it"
play events. After a bit of violet wand and flogging,
lili and I bailed out around midnight - exhausted!
We walked back via the Printworks, through the throngs
of people queueing up to get into the bars, and milling
around. We stuck out like sore thumbs: me all in
black with a leather holdall, and lili with the silver
VW case and her black leather corset. (There's still a
bit of the cache of a secret underworld in the scene,
despite all the mainstreaming of fetish and now SM imagery.)
So a great weekend.
The only downside was some of the bad news we heard
people talking about. I knew that Nemesis had got some
unwelcome negative publicity in the local press from
one local, anonymous vanilla person with a non-BDSM axe
to grind. I also knew that the Kinkfest day of workshops
and talks in London on 11th December is the subject of a
dirty
tricks campaign from someone associated with a "rival"
group. But I hadn't heard that SM Pride was also getting
anonymous nastygrams from some equally bitter loser.
I think
the people who stoke up rivalries to try to "take over"
don't realise the full implications of the Kinsey
numbers for interest in BDSM (for example, about 5-10%
of the general
population engages in SM for sexual pleasure on at least
an occasional basis.) That's a hell of a lot of room for
growth in the various subcultures and communities that
loosely form the public BDSM scene. That means this
isn't a zero sum game: you don't need to fight over
people's "allegience." There isn't some fixed number of
BDSM people to draw from for your event. Rival events
don't "steal" your members: they pull more people into
going to events.
My "selfish" view is that I want to see more BDSM events
and groups flourishing. That's a major part of why I
devote so much time to keeping IC going: it helps people
find each other, get into groups, organise and
publicise their events. That means I then have that bit
more choice about what to go to when I feel like going
out for the night, and surely that is a good thing.
I expect 99.9% of the visitors to IC feel pretty much
the same way about all the choice we now have.
Edited Sat 10 Jan 09, 1:37 AM by Tanos
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