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Fear is not a natural response to a stimulus. It is a learned response. It is the ability to recognize danger and then choose to flee from it or confront it.

We feel fear when the world has taught us that something is dangerous. That something is painful. That something should be avoided if possible.

It takes a long time to deprogram a fear, longer if that fear is deep-seated. So to suggest that a fear is something that someone should “get over” disregards the significant effort necessary.

Image from Futurity.org *

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It’s not just here in the kink community, t’s everywhere.

There’s this big need in some people to make everybody love each other and have big group hugs.

But since this is a kinky blog, I’m going to focus on the kinky problem.

Over the last few days, an anonymous person or group has started a push to bring “unity” to the community. And people are jumping on board because it sounds like an admirable goal.

The thing is that whole “communities” are never unified unless they are doing so to combat a shared threat. And that’s always how it is everywhere. The day after 9/11, everybody put up flags and Republicans and Democrats all hugged each other and passed the “let’s blow up Afghanistan” act nearly unanimously and within a matter of days. But sooner or later, when people stopped being scared, we went back to fighting with each other again about tax breaks and abortion.

The only way this community, the people of bdsm/kink/leather, are all going to come together as a single group is if a Senator puts a bill on the floor tomorrow that makes BDSM a criminal offense. Club membership will soar, everyone will donate a bunch of money and we’ll all show up and march to protect ourselves. But when the bill is defeated in a few weeks, we would all go back to our separate little huts until the next dragon comes along.

The only way we will ever have a functioning, cohesive one-world government that covers the entire globe is if aliens attack. Until then, we will continue to be a fragmented world.

And with even the smallest communities, such as the Denver kink scene. We will choose to spend our time with the people closest to our own ideologies and personalities. It doesn’t make us wrong, it doesn’t make us bad, it doesn’t mean that anything needs to change.  We need to embrace and celebrate diversity by letting it run its course. We don’t have to all be in the same parties in order to respect each other.

We have our TNG parties because young people have a different energy to them and I like to spend some time immersed in that energy. That doesn’t mean that I can’t still appreciate the different but equally powerful energy of the elders in our community.

So please, stop trying to unify my community. I don’t want one big homogenized blob. I like how varied and special each individual group is. I like that I know I can get different things from different places.

Should we be sure to be inclusive and make sure that everyone has access to the education and support resources that are available, you bet!

But that doesn’t mean I have to like you or that you have to like me. And the notion that any amount of kumbaya is going to change that inherent fact is just ridiculous.