I’ve been hemming and hawing about posting a conference review of TOKink, which took place April 28-30. I’ve been back for over two weeks now and I’m still chewing on what to write. But my procrastination can’t last forever - I have promised a couple of lovely someones a write-up, and I’m the kind of girl who keeps her promises.
I think part of the reason is that I have some not-so-good things to say and I know the conference organizers and don’t want to hurt their feelings - especially since I know they’re going to read this. But I’ve finally managed to pick apart the nuances of this and I think I can do it right.
The thing that makes it easiest is that the conference itself was incredibly well-organized. 
No, I’m not just saying that to be nice - it really was a great job. There were a few glitches, but they were the sort of thing people do encounter when organizing major events, and they’re such technicalities it’s not even worth getting into them here - I’m sure I wouldn’t be telling the organizers anything they haven’t already figured out themselves. Seriously: the location was great, the schedule was clear and easy to follow, things happened on time, and the play parties were impressively well-organized and well-monitored with good music, good lighting, excellent play set-ups and great atmosphere. The TOKink play parties were nothing like that cold, industrial gymnasium/airport feeling I got at the TES party in New York… on the contrary, the (very large) room was set up in such a way that every station felt both intimate and easily accessible, and you could watch a scene from the other end of the room without ever feeling like you were in a hangar. And somehow, despite standard hotel carpeting, walls and tables, the place didn’t feel like it was a makeshift dungeon in a boardroom - it really just felt hot, sexy and spacious. Very very cool indeed.
The workshop line-up was pretty awesome too. The topics were wide-ranging and really fascinating, with a general focus on play techniques, which I really like - don’t get me wrong, theory is great, but when I spend a weekend devouring BDSM, I appreciate a well-rounded meal, and that includes lots of hands-on fun and demos galore. There were sessions on everything from bootblacking (hot!!) to pain processing to various forms of genital play to academic studies of kinksters to slavery to flogging to scent training. All of the ones I attended were super-informative.
Okay, okay, so the bad parts. I’m getting there!
It sucks to say this… but I have never in my life encountered so many overblown egos among the presenters at a kink event. Gawd! It was awful. And most of them were dominants.
Now, there were tons of wonderful people there also. In fact, I’m still in touch with no fewer than four people now that I barely knew before, and can sense solid friendships forming. And beyond the ones I connected with more deeply, I met quite a few other folks who impressed me to no end - attendees, presenters and organizers. But one of the salient features of my weekend was having to deal with quite a number of people whose self-importance was just disgusting. These are the kind of folks who give dominants and tops in the SM scene a bad name.
Let me say that in no way is this a criticism of the people who ran the conference - the organizers of a conference can’t be responsible for the behaviour of everyone who attends it, or everyone who presents at it. With that in mind, the bad experiences I had haven’t soured me on TOKink at all; I plan to go back next year because the experience as a whole was a blast. I will perhaps simply know who to avoid next time around.
So before I do any real bitching about bad dominants, I should probably lay out my opinion of what makes a good dominant.
The way I see it, a big part of doing good dominance is the way a person approaches it, not necessarily their practical skill level with toys or rope or whatever. Dominance, as I see it, needs to be done with respect, not entitlement; with humility, not ego; with generosity, not selfishness. I think these things are at the core of it, and if a dominant loses sight of them, in my view they lose their "true" power as well, and become no better than a schoolyard bully - whom pop psychology (rightfully) tells us are not strong or dominant at all, but weak and taking it out on people weaker than themselves. This is exactly what people hate in “bad” dominants… people who are pushy, self-centred, inconsiderate. In BDSM circles the phenomenon is commonly known as Tops’ Disease, which is basically another way of saying "being an asshole" except that it’s specifically applied to people on the dominant or top side of the coin.
I feel there are often parallels between teachers and dominants. Teachers need to focus people’s attention, manage a classroom, respond to questions, listen to their students so they know what they’d like to learn and how to help them get something out of the class, take a group’s thinking from points A to B, and be "on" at all times while on the job. I’m sure we’ve all encountered teachers who clearly talk for the pleasure of hearing their own voices, or whose egos ride so precariously on their perception of themselves as knowledgeable that they respond to any challenge or "threat" with great shows of sweeping authority far out of proportion to the issue at hand. I know I’ve met teachers like this here and there throughout my academic career - from preschool to university.
The way I see it, the principles of good dominance are exactly the same thing as the principles of good teaching, just filtered through different spheres. I always learn a lot from teachers who are respectful of my intelligence and of the classroom, not those who talk down to their students or bully them; teachers who are confident in their knowledge as it stands, but who acknowledge that like everyone in life, they are still learning too, and who can admit when they don’t know something rather than puffing up to defend their qualifications; who are there for the pleasure of seeing and helping people learn and take joy in that process, rather than to shore up their own sense of reigning expertise.
Trevor Jacques, one of the conference’s keynote speakers, gave a lot of interesting data about the BDSM community as part of his speech - he carried out an enormous independent academic study of BDSM practitioners and was presenting the breakdown of certain features. One of the facts he mentioned that struck me was that the vast majority of teachers within the BDSM world - in other words, people who pass on their knowledge in the context of conferences and other teaching opportunities - identify on the top/dominant end of the spectrum. I wonder if, had more bottom/submissive types been teaching that weekend, the flavour might have been different… because sadly, I encountered a few dominant teachers at TOKink who really showed me what not to do as a dominant teacher myself. (I suppose in and of itself that was a learning experience. Hmm. Silver lining!)
Here are a few examples, minus identifying details. (I am, after all, not interested in defaming people. Bad for the karma.)
While I was presenting one of my workshops, the presenter next door was speaking so loudly that their voice was totally overpowering my workshop. I chose to work around that by gathering my people closer and enunciating well, but one of the people in my group went over and asked them to tone it down so we could hear too. The other presenter’s response was to yell a threat over the wall that separated the groups - something along the lines of (allow me to paraphrase) "Wanna see who’s more dominant here?"
Um, no. I truly have no interest in comparing penis size with someone in front of two classes full of people who are surely interested in the subject matter at hand far more than in a battle of presenter egos. Yuck.
In another workshop, I asked a question of the presenter, thinking perhaps their technique, which was sexual, could be useful for me in a BDSM situation that was non-sexual, and I thought perhaps they’d have pointers on how to do that. The answer was one of the rudest I’ve ever heard - they basically told me in no uncertain terms, in front of a large audience, that non-sexual BDSM doesn’t exist, and if I thought it did I was lying to or kidding myself.
Gee, thanks for calling my honesty and the authenticity of my personal experiences into question in a large public setting. Y’know, in Shakespearian times that would have been cause for a duel, and with good reason - it’s incredibly inconsiderate to just randomly insult people’s ethics like that, whether you agree with them or not.
Luckily I don’t find that sort of invalidation particularly threatening - I know non-sexual BDSM exists because I’ve done it, and I’m hardly one to shy away from the sexual when it’s present, so I’m relatively certain I’m not delusional about this. I don’t require expert validation of my experiences for them to be real. But I lost an enormous amount of respect for the presenter in question, whom I used to admire. Not so much for their opinion - we’re all entitled to ours, and I certainly have mine, and I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. But the attempt to publicly shame someone who disagrees with you says much more about your own terrible manners and lack of consideration than it does about the person who has the different opinion, and it showed me that even experienced presenters can fall into the trap of thinking their way is the only way and all others are wrong. Yikes.
And then there was the presenter who spent a quarter of their workshop repeating, ad nauseam, how truly "evil" a dominant they were. Once or twice was mildly funny, but when we got up to the dozenth time, it started to feel like they were trying to convince themselves of their own scary dominance as much as the audience - and if they really needed to insist on it that much, it’s probably not true. Not to mention irrelevant to the content of the workshop. The person’s ego-driven insistence on their own persona made it really hard for me to listen to them very seriously - I wanted teaching, not theatrics.
And then there was another workshop, a facilitated discussion, in which two of the attendees (both identifying as dominants or at least switches, from what I saw at least) turned into a lively debate between one another, apparently not realizing there was a whole group of others in the room who might not have been interested in their little witticisms. They took their discussion so far from the original topic that I really wished they’d have gone out for coffee and left the rest of us to talk about the issues at hand. The moderator - much younger and less experienced than either of the talkers - tried to jump in more than once to turn it around, and the two talkers didn’t leave any space for it or even acknowledge the effort. It was painful. And downright rude.
To me – and bear in mind this is my own, highly subjective view of things – dominance is a way of moving through the world with grace and serenity and self-knowledge and the willingness to learn, and all the power that comes with that. I hope I never forget that if someone gives me their submission, it is a gift and an honour, never something I magically “deserve” because I happen to flag left. And I hope that I never forget that if someone is giving me their attention in a classroom, it is also a gift and an honour, and one I can best return by respecting them and doing my best to provide whatever it is they sought out by coming to me in the first place. Not by sucking self-validation from their presence and cutting them down if they disagree with me.
I was already in the habit, when teaching, of telling people "I’m not an expert, but I will share what I know, and I invite you to share what you know too because one of the perks of teaching is that I get to learn from my students." The experiences I had with some of the TOKink presenters have shored up my conviction that this is a good idea, and I want to try and find even more ways to work that approach into my teaching in the future. I never want someone leaving a workshop I give with the sense that I’ve just insulted or belittled them, or that I think I’m much cooler than they are. Nobody wants to waste their time on that kind of experience, and I don’t want to be the source of it.
One dominant presenter at the conference did something very different. At the very beginning of their workshop, they spotted someone in the audience and singled them out - for an apology. The presenter said (paraphrased), "I was rude to you last night, and it was uncalled for, and I am sorry. You came upon me unexpectedly and I snapped at you, but I should not have spoken to you that way. Please forgive me."
The presenter then went on to say to the classroom something along the lines of, "Just because you are a dominant doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be humble. In fact you’re only really doing dominance well if you do it with humility, when you can admit when you’re wrong, and when you take responsibility for your mistakes."
Needless to say this impressed me enormously. It was refreshing to hear, and whaddaya know, my respect for them shot up ten notches with those few sentences. We need more people like this in the world of BDSM.
I wonder… I wonder who might show up if, at the next TOKink, I offered to host a facilitated discussion about the role of humility in kink - on the part of a dominant. It would certainly be fascinating to see.
In the meantime, I am going to chew some more on the idea of humility within BDSM. And I’m going to pursue the friendships and connections I made at TOKink, and go back next year, because I think the good people far outnumber the rude ones and I want to hang out with them and take part in making community with them. If you want a community to reflect your ideals, you gotta participate, ya? And I want a BDSM community that’s full of considerate, respectful, polite perverts, not rude and self-absorbed ones.
Call it a personal bias, but I don’t see BDSM as disassociated from the rest of someone’s existence. To be a really authentic part of you, power in BDSM (whether dominant or submissive - and yes, there is much power in the submissive role) and power in life almost have to be one and the same, otherwise one of them is just playacting (showboating?) and I don’t have much faith in that.
BDSM is no different from everyday life; we just wear lots more leather. We still need to remember our pleases and thank-yous, regardless of where we sit at the table.
