“Back in my day, we only had TWO ROLES, and you had to pick!”
OK, Old Guard. Simmer down.
You are welcome to continue boxing yourself into just one label while listening to your 8-track cassettes. No one’s gonna stop you.
Here’s the thing. Back in the day (I was there for part of that, too, 25+ years ago), we ONLY met in person.
Well, we had The Village Voice personals and voice mailboxes to connect, but we really met IN PERSON, and figured out how our kinks overlapped from there.
And it was HARD to find people.
Still is, really, because numbers (I talk about this in my book Dating Kinky—let’s just say the more specific you get about what you want, the fewer potential matches you have available).
But now, we’re mostly online. Not just because 2020 versus 1990, or whenever you did your thing at your peak, but because of a pandemic.
Which makes using our words and communication even more important. Because it helps us connect over what we love and find out who is into things that might be hard limits for us, and do the things.
Now, you might be perfectly happy with “Dom or Sub?”
Or in dating, A/S/L (age, sex, location), as we used back in the days of the alt BBs.
Now, we have more options for our kink roles. We have over 40 on Dating Kinky, and we plan to add more. AND—oh, and this might hurt y’all traditionalists—people can choose MORE THAN ONE!
Whaaaaaat?!?
Yup. One is your primary, what shows on your profile, like “Dominant,” for example, and all of the others are how you can be found with a search, like: dominant, master, top, daddy, sadist, hedonist, voyeur, and so on.
Because there are different ways to make connections and different connections to be made.
But you don’t HAVE TO.
You can choose “dominant,” and that’s it. That’s your right as a kinky American (or, really, wherever, we don’t discriminate based on nationality).
And you can wear only Levi’s (or Jordache, or whatever), think Folger’s is the best and only, and never eat in any restaurants that weren’t around in your childhood.
The rest of us? We’ll be keeping up with the changing times, and enjoying the fuck out of them. smiles
