I spend too much time on Facebook. Family, friends, local news, pages and groups for pretty much any interest, including BDSM, and I spend a lot of time there. I enjoy the diversity, the opportunity to learn, to interact with a wide variety of people from different backgrounds and with different interests and experiences. However, despite that, I normally keep my private messaging between family and friends in real life.
This past weekend a member of one of the groups I belong to reached out and asked permission to PM me. Not really thinking about it, and I had no idea who she was, I said yes. We had a brief, maybe 20 minute conversation, platonic, friendly, and then I had to run off to do some work. Really didn’t think about it at the time. Later that day though, I had cause to.
One of the daily rituals that my slave and I share is to take a few minutes, or as long as necessary, to talk about our day. In particular, we always share any of our conversations outside the ordinary course of our daily work. It’s a chance to decompress, to unwind from the daily grind of work and transition back into home life. When I told her about that Facebook conversation, she made a comment that had me thinking about my behavior, which in turn led me to this post.
I’ve been around a bit and one of those things you quickly learn (hopefully not the hard way) is that you do not socialize with another Dominant’s submissive and I’m not talking about playing here. You do not walk up to a collared submissive and begin talking to her without first engaging with her Dominant and receiving permission. Unless, of course, you already have an established relationship with both the Dominant and the submissive.
There are actually a whole host of commonly accepted rules in the BDSM communities about how we act at public or private events. Things like, you don’t touch people or toys without permission, be polite, don’t interrupt scenes, dress to the code, and so on. Of course, rules can vary, but in general it’s mostly common sense. The problem comes when we move from real life to social media. Most of us have these habits of forgetting that there are people on the other side of the screen, that etiquette should not stop at the keyboard, that we should behave online with the same degree of decorum that we do in real life.
In the incident that I related above, I was wrong. I accepted a PM from a woman I did not know without doing my due diligence. I should have looked at her profile or activity on Facebook more carefully, once realizing that she was a collared submissive, I should have either denied her request to talk, or reached out and spoken to her Dominant first. There was nothing inappropriate in our conversation, but there was a breach of trust between her and her Dominant when she spoke to me, a breach that I participated in – and that was wrong of me.
Let me suggest that all submissives should have their Dominant’s permission before reaching out to talk to another Dominant. And Dominants should already have an existing friendship or at least a relationship with a Dominant before talking with their submissive. We do this in real life, we need to do this online as well. My only exception might be if someone reaches out for help – in which case, human life and safety, as always, trumps all of our rules.