A Strange Kinship.

The Kinky Crafters' Munch was, by far, the most enjoyable munch I've ever been to.

I think it's because it wasn't about sex. Everyone brought their knitting project or their sketchpad or their jewelry kit and had that as a point of grounding--at first you could work quietly rather than sit awkwardly, and the work became a neutral, natural place to start conversations that was a lot less painful then "hi, I just met you, let's trade details about our sex lives." I'm not a shy person, but munches that jump right into the "DEFINE YOURSELF, FRESHMEAT!" intimidate me--a setting where you can start out with "ooh, is that Byzantine chain?" is a whole lot more comfortable.

And comfortable really is the word, because Internet drama and play-party pressure can make me forget how much I actually like kinky people. Just to hang out with. They're geeks! I'm a geek! I can dig it! And when sex and relationships come up in conversation I don't have to self-censor, and nobody makes the assumption that everyone is straight/cis/monogamous/vanilla unless otherwise specified. The only thing that does go for granted is that everyone has the right to self-define--something that may annoy me when some dork decides to self-define as Master Darkblood Dragonrage, but that's a fair trade for the right to be taken seriously when I say who I am.

There was just a little bit of a sense of a weight off my shoulders, even when we were talking about yarn or radio stations, of being among people who wouldn't be shocked by anything about me. These were people who talked comfortably and openly about having a Daddy, about having a husband and a boyfriend, about being happy their girlfriend found someone hot to fuck--in short, about fucking and loving and living in ways not represented on network television.

Of course it's not my first experience with a kinky community but it was one of my most positive ones. I didn't get turned on, but I got a serious case of the warm fuzzies.



(Also, oh my God do I feel better about my body now. At a BDSM meeting I'm practically a little slip of a thing just by being under 200 pounds. I don't mean that as schadenfreude--I mean that if a 350-pound woman can talk about her body and show it off and have men admire it like it ain't no thing, what business do I have wallowing in "oh no, I'm not pretty like the ladies on the teevee" self-pity?)