I'm a very bent person.

I've been kinky, I would estimate, for my entire life. My first erotic memories are of watching video game characters get beaten and tortured by their antagonists, not understanding why it was that the bare-chested, black-hooded Executioner figure on the box of Dark Castle pulled so hard at something inside me; why villains, male and female, winning out over male heroes was so attractive. Later, it was slotting quarters into Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat arcade machines just to beat the snot out of Chun Li or Sonya (or to have the snot beaten out of me while playing as them); even later than that, it was the digitized T&A of DOA and the games that came after it. But I'm straying from my point, which is:

I have been kinky for a very long time, and a lot of what's wrong (or right) with me can be laid squarely at the feet of the Internet.

I hit puberty right around the time that the internet really exploded, came of age with Prodigy and CompuServe and AOL and the World Wide Web. Some of the earliest searches I can remember making were for information on BDSM, D\s, and related topics - stories, rules, "how-to" sites, anything and everything I could get my grubby little mitts on. I read voraciously, trying to learn everything the internet could tell me. I cruised the personal and professional web pages of pro and amateur Dom(me)s, looked at thousands of pictures, memorized enromous chunks of text about the philosophies of power exchange and the sancrosact laws of "Safe, Sane, Consensual"; I printed out and pored over long lists of suggested activities, scribbled all over "contracts" designed to help people find common ground in submission, and checked off item after item on "rules for submissives." Like I said: voracious.

And I read stories. I read stories by the truckload, the bus load, the boat load. I read a Library of Alexandria's worth of stories, maybe two Library's worth, maybe three Library's worth. I read until my eyes practically fell out of my skull -

- but I never thought the stories I was reading were real. From the first, even at 13 years old, I knew that this was *fiction*. This was *fantasy*. Even at 13, I knew myself well enough to know that I would never want to be submissive to another person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I knew that stories about fantastically rich dominants who had stables of slaves and spent all day engaging in absurdly overheated discipline training sessions were classic examples of wish-fulfillment pap at its worst. I understood that dank stone dungeons were, unless you lived in a real castle already, just a myth.

I remember something I read, a long time ago, by a woman who was apparently pretty active in the early BDSM internet. Her name, sadly, escapes me (it's been 10+ years), but she talked about meeting someone for a scene, and how she had to reconcile the fact that being tied to a futon in a stuffy 3rd floor walk-up wasn't the same as her fantasies about being a maiden in a dungeon - and the fact that, once the scene started and got good, *it didn't matter that she was tied to a futon instead of chained to a stone castle wall.*

So, where am I going with this? Well, lots of places, most of which are conclusions I leave you to draw on your own, but there is one thing in this little ramble that I feel it's absolutely essential that everyone walk away with:

When I realized I was kinky, and that there were other people that were kinky, the very first thing I did was *research.* Lots and lots and LOTS of research - using whatever non-fiction I could get my hands on. I read, and read, and looked, and read, and watched, and read, and still didn't think I'd gotten it all, or nearly all, or even a thimble-full of "all." There were whole oceans of information out there, and I was a very small fish to be swimming in them.

I'm older now, and a LOT wiser, and a much bigger fish when it comes to BDSM, its philosophies and its activities - and I know that I'm still far from the biggest fish in the sea. I'm a medium-sized shark, not a great white or a hammerhead and certainly not a whale. I still learn new things (although these days I learn a lot more from people than from the internet), I still surprise myself, I still see room to grow.

So what am I saying?

I'm saying that, no matter how much you think you know, there's always more to learn.

I'm saying that stories are fantasy, and while fantasy is well and good, it's a lousy way to prepare for reality. A little common sense and an open mind are much better preperation than a whole library of erotica could ever be.

And I'm saying that to think otherwise - to think that reading a few overheated sex fantasies where the men are all called "Master" by pneumatic PVC-clad blondes and the women are all addressed as "Mistress" by submissive bodybuilders with 10-inch cocks - is to be arrogant, closed-minded, and foolish, which are three things no dominant worth having wants in a submissive and no submissive worth being had wants in a dominant.

There's your food for thought. We'll see you fine kinky folks next week.