"Old Guard" Essay # 2

Old Guard Essay # 2

Please contact the author jaywiseman@yahoo.com for reprint requests and other matters.

Hi XXXX,

Nice to hear from you and, yes, I do remember you. I'm glad to hear that your explorations of "organizational masochism" are bearing fruit. [grin]

Regarding those alleged "old houses" my main impulse is to want to bang my head against my monitor. When I first got onto AOL about three or so years ago, there was this small group -- this couple, in particular --who were cutting a _very_ high profile in the online SM community there about how they were supposedly members of "one of the smaller houses" of a large, elite, ancient, secret, by-invitation-only SM organization that had many houses and that might have been called something along the lines of the Vashi.

Anyway, this was supposedly some "secret society" that was about 1000 years old, involved many of the crowned heads of Europe throughout history, etc. They supposedly practiced "Classic SM" and there were references to things like "the 26 slave positions" and "families registered in Amsterdam."

I almost immediately, when I appeared in that community, got a large number of inquiries along the lines of "is this true?" (This would certainly not be the first time wanted somebody wanted to be regarded as an "expert" in our community without wanting to bother with paying the long, hard dues it takes to acquire some actual expertise.)

I told my inquirers that I had certainly never heard of anything even vaguely like this before (and I have contacts in Europe), but hey, that didn't mean that it _didn't_ exist.

So, being what I like to think of as a fair-minded and intellectually honest person, I publicly invited these people to produce credible, independently verifiable, evidence that such an ancient, esteemed organization actually existed anyplace besides in their own fantasies.

The result: Nada, zip, zero, zilch.

There were some protests that this was a "secret" organization, you see, therefore they _couldn't_ violate the confidentiality of this group by revealing proof of its existence to non-members.

It also seemed to me that, as those pesky demands for credible proof of their claims increased, the prominence and activity level of the people involved decreased.

Now, I know of several private and, I suppose, somewhat "secret" SM groups -- including a few that I'm not supposed to know about. [grin] What their members all have in common, however, is that they don't go around claiming status and expertise in the community as a whole based on their membership in this supposedly "secret" organization that they can't discuss. (What's the current line? "The first rule of Fight Club is...Do not talk about Fight Club!")

What I notice about almost all of these supposed "old guard" or "ancient" SM teachings is a distinct lack of specific attribution (I was taught this custom by "insert name of individual") and/or of independently verifiable evidence (books, documents, etc).

OTOH, such specific attributions and independently verifiable evidence are available relatively easily for the "newer" teachings. In other words, the "newer teachings" (stuff taught since, say, 1974 when Janus was founded, to admittedly be somewhat arbitrary) are relatively easy to cross-check for authenticity, while the "older teachings" are almost impossible to cross-check.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my personal memories of my earliest days in the scene (starting in 1975) deal with the fact that SM was viewed much more negatively than it is now. (The book "The Joy of Sex" was one of the very few widely available books at the time that was actually at least somewhat supportive of SM.)

We thus spent a lot of time back then trying to credibly convince ourselves that we weren't "a danger to ourselves and/or others" merely because we wanted to do SM at all. (I went through a great deal of personal guilt, struggle, and doubt regarding "why" I had such persistent, strong desires to tie a woman up while we had sex.) According to the psychiatric standards of the time, wanting to do SM, no matter how mild and consensual it was, was considered intrinsic evidence of a pretty serious mental illness. We were thus definitely swimming against a fairly strong medico/legal tide.

(As I mentioned before, het, submissive women often faced an especially difficult struggle back then. Given the feminist slogan that "the personal is political" many such women genuinely felt like traitors to their gender.)

Also, back then was a time of sexual freedom, thus it was _much_ more a matter of helping people to feel that they were honestly entitled to explore and find out what worked _for_them_ rather than finding them "worthy" of being allowed to conform to a certain "elite" style of doing things.

In summary, let's set aside the relatively trivial issues like what does wearing a collar "really" mean or is it ever proper for a bottom to initiate a conversation with a top. We spent a lot more time back then on _much_ more fundamental issues, such as helping to reassure people that they weren't dangerously crazy for wanting to do this stuff at all.

What we seem to be seeing nowadays is an increasing number of people stepping forth to offer these "Old Guard" or "Ancient" BDSM-related teachings. Actually, I have no particular problem with this, and if such teachings do actually exist I would be very interested in seeing them. However, I do think that at this point it's only reasonable that we should ask for some level of proof beyond the teacher's personal assertion that what they have to offer is authentic.

At the very least, I would like to see attribution be done in a specific a manner as possible. As Daryl Huff said in his book "How To Lie With Statistics" two prime questions to ask when analyzing an assertion are:

1. Who says so? (Hopefully, we get the name of a specific person.)

2. How does he know? (Again, what is _their_ source of information?)

I don't think that this is an unreasonable position to take. For example, I have a fairly long martial arts background, and I would have no particular problem naming who my martial arts teachers were, or where they got their training.

Also, there are easily at least a dozen or so "Old Guard" leathermen and leatherwomen who are relatively public, still alive, been in the community for "ages" and who have written or spoken on a wide variety of SM-related matters.

None of us were born knowing this stuff. We all had to learn it from somewhere -- if only from our own personal trial-and-error explorations. So let those who wish to hand down the "old teachings" come among us and share those teachings, but let them also share verifiable specifics regarding how _they_ learned them. I have never met a credible teacher, on virtually any subject, who was not quite willing to do exactly that.

I have personally become so jaded and cynical on this point that nowadays the more strongly a person asserts that they are "old guard" (or something similar) the less likely I am to believe them.

Key Point: I more and more strongly believe that whether a given person is something like "old guard" or "old leather" is something _much_ better left for others to say about that person than for that person to say about themselves.

I also am increasingly reminded of the adage that goes: "All con games start with the willingness of the victim to believe."

Regards,

Jay

p.s. I may post an edited-to-remove-references-to-you version of this elsewhere.

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