by Loren Berthelsen, Editor in Chief
Leatherati's latest poll, which asked readers to tell us what they thought are the 3 most important activities our leather clubs and organizations should be engaged in, was prompted by a strange three-way divergence between perception and intention and reality.
Here's what I mean. We interact with a lot of people in our community from very diverse backgrounds. When you ask people officially, say in the context of an interview, what their club or organization does or what their mission is the answer is universally, "Fundraising".
But...when you get people to let their hair down, their off the cuff answers are quite different. Despite fundraising being the purported most important task of their club, people are really and truly tired of fundraising themselves and being confronted with fundraising at every turn and every event.
Let's look at the results. The top three answers were:
#1 - Education - BDSM Leadership Skill - 56.4%
#2 - BDSM Play and Sex - 47.9%
#3 - Promote Brotherhood - 44.3%
And what came in almost dead last?
#9 - Fundraising - 8.6%
Kinky people crave knowledge, they want more BDSM play and hot kinky sex, and they want to feel like they belong. And they really, really don't want to do another boots to balls raffle sale no matter how worthy or needy (and they all are) the beneficiary is.
The other question we often ask people is "why". Why did you join your club? Why did you run for your title? Why did you attend this event? Their answers generally support the poll answers. Our community feels special and unique when you contrast it to the world at large. We have a special bond that grows from our love of fetish and radical sexual expression. And being human we are endlessly curious and social and sexual. So we're looking for someone to teach us the things we don't know. We're looking for someone to share that with. And we're really looking for chances to get a fantastically good nut off!
Analyzing a poll is an exercise in simplification. The question and the answers can never fully express every variation of individual beliefs and desires. We shoot for the most obvious and grossly stated and then simplify the answers to a quick digest. Illuminating but not especially life-changing.
Given that, what then is the take away from this poll? I think it says that we have to question everything about what our clubs and organizations do and contrast that to what we really want to be doing and ruthlessly close the gap. Are we doing what we want to do or what we think we should be doing?
Case in personal point. I will come clean here, in a very public way, that I loathe fundraisers in bars. I've spent the last 20+ years of my life trying to save my brothers and sisters from the indignities of AIDS and cancer and homelessness. The need was and is bottomless and eternal. Today I just want to go to a bar to connect with fellow kinksters, cruise and maybe get to abuse the hot sub across the room, and enjoy an adult beverage without being berated over the microphone. I can't make fundraisers go away so I look for opportunities to put myself in a different space where I can learn new tricks, find new friends, and grab some great play by the balls. When I absolutely can't get out of a fundraiser my new benchmark is that whenever possible it must benefit something that supports my kink community, such as the Leather Archives & Museum or the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom.
Except in rare cases our clubs and orgs are what we do in our free time. Since we don't make money doing this we better make sure we're getting paid in some other kind of currency. There was a book I read eons ago called Wishcraft about building a successful and fulfilling life. One of the exercises the author asked the reader to do was to try and reconstruct a typical day from our childhood. What kinds of activities did we take part in? What did we really enjoy doing? I'll spoil the exercise entirely by telling you that the result is that kids only willingly do the things they want to do. They gravitate to the things that make them happy. As adults this is rarely the case. Personal happiness take a distant backseat to obligations and social pressures. Does what you're doing in your club or org really make you happy? If not, change it.
For our part, we'll continue asking the same questions but now I'm going to add one more, very simple one, "Why?" Socrates had it right.
About the poll:
Full results are listed below. 140 people from across the US and Canada contributed. I think it's interesting that there is a greater than 10 point difference between the 3rd most popular answer and the 4th and 5th indicating that the top three answers really resonated with people. Also notable is the equality of views on SSC and RACK, and the relatively low importance placed on them. The dead last answer really didn't surprise me. Exclusivity is almost universally downplayed in our society in this day and age. And of course we talked about the low score for fundraising in the context of how much of our life it consumes versus how little time we think we should be expending. Preserving protocol was a little surprising until I thought about how little time we actually spend on teaching and passing protocol to new generations.
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