I'll be there, teaching and hosting Cigars Boots & Chocolate with Kamm. :)
KateHarding.net's "Guest Blogger Starling: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced"
I found this article some months ago and was recently reintroduced to it. My last entry had to do with women related things, let's focus on what goes on inside the brains of us very lovey ladies and woman-identified peoples. The full original article can be found here on KateHarding.net and I recommend every single person that comes to my blog go over there and read it (or read excerpts here). Gentlemen. Thank you for reading. Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities. So you must look fur...
I may be in the minority, but I don't recommend going to DO. I have attended three major DO events, (Fusion, WF, summer camp), as a single man and as part of a couple (with a woman). I have VERY MIXED feelings about DO, the organization. First, I saw multiple instances of single men being very pushy and doing things to other people (99% of the time women) without consent. This was everywhere – in the dungeon, in the hotel rooms, outside in the outdoor campground, etc. I could get the impression that consent was not established beforehand because I could see the (not pleasant) surprise of someone new joining an ongoing scene in the face of not just the person who was the subject of the scene, but also the other people who were around the subject person. Most of these men were never reprimanded on the spot. It’s complete hypocrisy for DO to say ( as they do on their website) that non-consent will not be tolerated. The dungeon monitors (or scene monitors) were often simply other attendees and were just standing around talking to other people or even on their cell phones texting. There is a requirement to do several hours of “volunteer” work at each event for all attendees. I suspect to meet this requirement, some people just sign up to be monitors but they don’t really do the job of monitoring. Frankly, I wonder if in some of these situations, the actions by certain people (who are left unpunished) can be considered sexual assault, and therefore DO may be indirectly breaking a law by providing the environment for this sexual assault to occur. I have heard of people who have been "banned" from all DO events, while other individuals (apparently either friends of the DO organizers, or "famous" presenters or well known people in the kink world) have done exactly the same thing or worse, without a word being said to them. Second, I found in many cases the people there were very cliquish. They had already formed their own very close knit groups in which they played together, and in my experience (and “our” experience as a couple), they rarely allowed new outsiders to join their group. I suspect these people play together all the time, and have understandably developed a very close relationship and level of trust with each other. In our experience, we found it to be difficult to meaningfully play with anyone. I noticed the EASIEST persons who played with new people were inevitably the few single women (with all due respect, not all of whom were my “cup of tea” in the looks department). They were nearly constantly being approached by men, single or not. Not being a single woman myself, I felt very much like an outsider on numerous occasions. During my last experience which was Fusion, I went with a girlfriend (early 30s, athletic, blond, reasonably good looking) who is experienced in the alternative lifestyle, and we actually did not feel comfortable joining in with most of the people because of their difficult to approach attitudes and when they were “approachable”, it was usually a single man interested in my girlfriend. So we played by ourselves, and occasionally watched a scene, but that was it. The food in the cafeteria was not that great in my opinion, and we paid a lot for the meal plan. So overall based on my experiences, I would NOT recommend the DO events. We have decided that we are not going again – there are many other events where I don’t need to spend $300-500 and still meet nicer people at a better run, safer event.
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