It seems there is no area of life in which pretentious, judgmental and cliquey people cannot totally fuck up the vibe—not even the worlds of consensual non-monogamy and dominance/submission are safe from them.

I mean, I would like to think that while such sexually open-minded sorts aren’t going to agree on everything, perhaps they’d at least leave off the hypocrisy, finger-pointing and “I’m more pure than you are” crap.

Sadly, not.

My wife and I recently decided after years of buried desires and frustrated libidos (that had started erupting into an otherwise strong marriage and fucking things up) it was time to open up our marriage. My wife, being the overambitious researcher that she is, delved into finding out all she could about open relationships, and teaching me quite a number of things of which even my open-minded, very kinky self was unaware. For example, we quickly became savvy enough to discover there was a difference in the consensual non-monogamy community between “polyamory” and “swinging.” No problem with that, except that I quickly found that the gulf between the two is sometimes as wide as that between Israel and Palestine. That part is a problem for me, as I loathe broad stereotyping and judging (most of the time…unless you deserve it, of course).

Frankly, I’ll be honest that most of the pretension I’ve seen in the consensual non-monogamy community has been from the polyamory side of the fence, with a few too many people, for my comfort, deriding swingers as promiscuous and getting offended at the mere suggestion that there is any common or overlapping ground between having multiple loving relationships on the one hand (polyamory), and having sexual fun with multiple partners on the other (swinging).

I can’t help but point out that in order to get to those multiple, loving, committed relationships, you must have done some dating, and probably had some pre-commitment sex, which kind of made you a swinger before you were polyamorous. But suggest that, and you will all too often get the virtual version of stank-eye from the person, a few choice words, and the admonishment that “Well, I was seeking loving relationships, not just sex.”

Or something like that.

Pardon me for thinking that sometimes, sex itself is a laudable goal, and we don’t always need to be seeking love. I’ll settle for respect, and liking each other’s company enough to do more than have sex and only sex. Frankly, I don’t know that I have time to properly date outside my marriage (nor does my wife), so we’ll probably end up swinging from time to time in controlled spaces like parties, not only to have fun but in the hopes of connecting to people worth having relationships with. Does that have to make me a horndog with commitment problems? No. It makes me a wise time-manager with a healthy libido and self-control.

But I digress.

So, getting back on track, there is the other example of prudishness and pretension I encountered (where it doesn’t belong): dominance/submission. You see, I encountered some people online, mostly subs, recently who took exception to my assertion that D/s activities are sexual at their core. That is, even if actual sexual contact doesn’t occur between a dom and a sub, there is something sensually powerful between them in the D/s relationship. Not necessarily love or sex, but something very, very intimate.

What I got back from some people, was the assertion that a sub could get satisfaction without any such feelings being in play—that the act of serving was the goal.

What makes this all the more ironic is that the people arguing this with me were on FetLife.com, a fetish site. Last time I checked, fetishes and kinks were sexual at their core, even when, as I said, actual sex or orgasm doesn’t take place.

I mean, if you just like taking orders and serving people, you’d become a hotel housekeeper, or a priest, or nun or something, not a sub, at least in my opinion. Isn’t the sexual/sensual component what makes a person a sub, and not simply a pushover or a service worker? When you seek out a specific person to serve and to hand over control to, your sub nature is expressing itself in some intimate way where you are seeking something deep and abiding beyond mere work or service or friendship. You are seeking to fill a hole that people in the general public cannot fill, nor even your family and friends. Perhaps not even your spouse or lover.

And yet I am told that a sub cooking and cleaning for a person may very well be on some wholly non-sensual and non-emotional mission to serve, and is every bit a sub, rather than being a person expressing a kink or fetish.

I have grave doubts about the likelihood of that.

What both the consensual non-monogamy and D/s examples I’ve noted share is a large amount of self-righteousness. The alternative sexual lifestyle or kink, as expressed by that person, is elevated to some spiritual, or least lofty, position. It is placed above those “base” actions that are common or even dirty.

Moreover, both examples include an element of trying to remove sex from the equation. There is a strong undercurrent of prudery that I’m feeling here—the notion that we have to distance D/s and polyamory from sex for some reason. That they need to be put in separate boxes.

Pardon me if I find it just a little ridiculous for a polyamorous person to accuse people of being promiscuous when he or she has probably had many, many partners before finding the third (or fourth, or fifth) person they and their primary partner need to round things out. Pardon me if I find it laughable for a sub to tell me I’m being narrow-minded to say that sexual feelings (or at least sensual and emotional ones) feed a kink or fetish like D/s, and that’s what makes being a sub something other than a
“service-oriented” personality manifesting itself.

It’s pretentious, plain and simple, as well as repressive.

And it’s unnecessary.

It’s OK for us to have our subdivisions. I have a smoking fetish, and there are numerous subsets of that fetish, some of which I find quite repulsive personally. But I don’t consider those who like those particular subsets of the fetish to be repulsive themselves. They simply have different tastes than I do, and that’s what makes the world of kinks and fetishes so much fun sometimes. If some guy thinks a smoking woman is sexy visually but can’t stand the smell of cigarette smoke, for example, I don’t consider him less committed to the fetish than I am. There are so many differences between people and groups, and that makes things more interesting. But I look for the ways in which we overlap and agree, rather than trying to section myself off as having the “right” version of the kink or lifestyle.

Good Lord, haven’t we seen enough of that shit in religion, politics, parenting, employment and a host of other places? Do we need to war amongst ourselves in the world of kink, fetish and alternative sexual lifestyles to say who’s right? Who’s more noble? Who’s more pure? Who’s more true to the practice? And do we need to deny the healthy value of sexual expression by trying to deny that kinks and fetishes are sensually or sexually intimate activities? Isn’t that kind of like telling your daughter to respect and seek marriage, but admonishing her she probably shouldn’t enjoy sex with her husband?

If you like to clean the toilet and cook every day for some person who doesn’t live with you, and perhaps be humiliated by that person verbally while you do so, that’s great—if it works for you. But don’t tell me that it doesn’t fill some deep and abiding D/s need in you that is kinky.

If you want to have a stable triad or quad relationship that is just like a marriage but simply has more people in it, great. But don’t try to tell me that lust and sexual gratification never played into the equation and that it’s all about love, as if you’re some saint. Shit, I have a loving marriage, and sometimes life inside of it is just about getting base needs met, such as getting one or the other’s rocks off.

Really, folks, we don’t need prudes within the kinky and alt-relationship populations.

We deal with enough of them outside them already.