Domination & submission _ the BDSM relationship handbook ( PDFDrive )

Chapter 5: Online BDSM Relationships
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 BDSMrelated
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, middleaged,
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.