No spanking here — boring stuff to follow.
In the last couple of days, I’ve had a rash of people trying (with varying degrees of surface politeness) to influence the editorial policy of this spanking blog. I thought it might be time to say a few words in regard to what I’m all about and what I’m doing here.
To begin: I’m utterly horrified by narrow-minded, prudish, uptight, or censorious kinksters (when I can stop laughing at them). There’s an inherent contradiction in saying “I’m perfectly OK with my own kink, but those people should stop what they are doing at once — no self-respecting kinky person should have anything to do with people who have that fantasy or do that activity.” (Sometimes this comes out as “people like that aren’t really members of our community/shouldn’t be allowed in our community/shouldn’t be respected/shouldn’t be discussed.”) Such narrow-minded and exclusionary kinksters remind me of the cat in that shaved cat picture that floats around in email. When you see the picture, you’re horrified that anybody would shave a cat — but you can’t help laughing at how silly the offended cat looks. That’s how I respond whenever a kinky person denounces somebody else’s fantasy — it’s both horrifying and hilarious to watch.
Thus, whenever I encounter a censorious kinkster, I can’t decide whether to laugh or get mad. But I do know that I don’t believe in shunning kinky people whose kinks squick me. That’s why I won’t participate in delinking campaigns, or change my editorial behavior when one is aimed at me.
Know ye also: I don’t do this for the blog traffic. It’s true that I value all my readers, and I’ll miss anybody who decides they don’t like my content and won’t be back to read it. That said, traffic from blogs makes up a miniscule percentage of my total traffic — well under one percent of the total. That’s why I literally laughed out loud the other day when someone accused me in my comments of trying to stir up controversy in order “to keep the circulation up.” Nothing could be further from the truth. I value your links, folks, but I’m not going to change what I do in order to keep ’em.
Furthermore, I’m an absolutist about free speech. Among other things, that means I have a knee-jerk reaction to pressure. Tell me not to link to something, and I’ll be more inclined to link to it. Criticize my decision to link to or discuss something, and I may choose not to be polite. Why should I be? My blog stories and links are my business. Read or don’t, click or don’t. No skin off my nose. No skin off yours, either. And if you do decide to try and influence my editorial choices, I probably won’t see your busybody input as anything but a rudeness. I may forgive you, if you’re also charming and witty or a friend; but I might also (or instead) choose to mock you. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.
Let me amplify that. I believe that telling someone what they “should” blog about is horribly rude in function, no matter how polite you are when you share your unsolicited opinion. It’s like a nephew I have, who thinks he can say the most horrid things with impunity as long as he uses polite words. He can’t understand why people think it’s rude when he says something like “No offense, but why does your breath smell like garbage?” Sorry, but superficial politeness cannot rescue fundamentally rude behavior.
Moving on: I do have my own editorial standards. Generally speaking, I don’t usually blog about the spanking of children, even in fantasy or ageplay; I don’t usually blog about spankings where there is a strong and explicit lack of consent, unless the fantasy context is very obvious; I don’t usually blog about spankings that result in open wounds or flowing blood; I don’t usually blog about men getting spanked; and I don’t usually blog about spankings accompanied by substantial verbal abuse or deliberate and extreme humiliation. The reasons for these policies (mostly having to do with my own tastes) seem good to me, although I sometimes make exceptions. Sometimes, too, I get flak for my inconsistencies — as in the infamous case of the flash game (a freakin’ interactive cartoon) that featured either cartoon welts or cartoon cuts, depending on your interpretation. (Yeah, go figure. I’m still scratching my head about that one.) Nonetheless, at the end of the day, I get to decide whether something is beneath my standards. My bandwidth, my sandbox, my toys, my rules.
I truly don’t understand kinky people who think their tastes should be universal, and who try to enforce those tastes on others. For example, age play by consenting adults happens to squick me out, so I don’t much write about it. But I’m not horrified when other people do it or write about it. It would strike me as unutterably bizarre to email such a blogger and castigate them for their preferences. My distaste is my own, and I try very hard not to inflict it on anybody else. Same with blood play or verbal abuse. I figure I’m free to ignore these things without stepping on any toes. But I can’t imagine writing to another blogger and telling them they shouldn’t fantasize or play that way, or that they shouldn’t write about what they do. And when I get a letter like that (about once a week), I can never decide whether to laugh or to respond with a hearty “Fuck you.”
Often, I do both.
That’s more than enough for now. I’ll be happy to carry this conversation forward in the comments, but I won’t pull any punches when it comes to folks who want to tell me what I should blog.