BDSM is short for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

If all this is new to you, I recommend starting here:

• What is BDSM all about? – Basic debunking, brief and clear.
• BDSM Tip Sheet for Beginners – A practical guide, amazingly concise and comprehensive.

And that’s the essentials covered. See you next week!

Still here? Good for you.

First, caveats. Please don’t try to get your basic introduction from this blog – that’s not what I do. Also, the following recommendations are in draft form – when I’m more sure of them I’ll turn them into a post.

Ahem.

Further reading

If you’re ready to educate yourself a bit more seriously, you’ll find that the Internet is strangely patchy. There is no substitute for a book.

These are the classics. Unfortunately, I have issues with all those that I’ve read. My grounds are fluff, one-true-way-ism, or insufficient ethical humility. (I know, who’s talking about humility?)

• SM 101 by Jay Wiseman (1996) – not for me
• Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns (1995) – not for me
• Sensuous Magic by Pat Califia (1998) – haven’t read
• The Loving Dominant (2000, 2013) – not for me
• The Bottoming Book (1998, 2001) – not for me
• The Topping Book (1998, 2011) – not for me
• Miss Abernathy’s Concise Slave Training Manual (1996) – not for everyone

The good news is that we are experiencing a great flowering of kinky publishing. I have minor issues with these two new books, but they are really good on the whole.

• The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge edited by Tristan Taormino (2012) – Essays by experts, covering both technique and headspace.
• Playing Well With Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Navigating and Exploring the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities by Lee Harrington and Mollena Williams (2013) – An introduction to kink culture.

As a second-best option, you can pick up a lot in passing from these websites:

• My blogging community – They take it to the next level. But for a more practical and education-oriented approach, try Dominant Guide and Submissive Guide instead.
• FetLife.com – Facebook for kinksters. Free membership gives you access to everything except videos. There are discussion groups where subs, doms, veterans and medical types will answer your questions (not always accurately or politely). For privacy, you can input your birthday as 1921 and your location as Antarctica. See also the Safety section below.

Ready for real live people?

Everyone recommends munches (no-pressure, no-kink gatherings). Find one at Findamunch.com or FetLife.com > Events > Near Me. Then learn your munch etiquette. See also the Safety section below.

Safety

• Read this free self-defence guide and/or The Gift of Fear.
• Face-to-face: Have your first meetings in public settings. Consider these early-warning signs, and tell your date in advance that you’re setting up a safe call. Scare the bad guys off before they scare you.
• Online: If you don’t want to be outed, don’t reuse images linked to your vanilla identity. In fact, consider Googling yourself by first name, username, profession, hobbies and location before deciding how much information to use in the scene.
• Vetting potential partners: The Predator Alert Tool for FetLife is no longer functioning, but you can view the database directly. More recently, the Share, Care, Act Project has been collecting consent violation stories. You can email them to ask if a potential partner has a bad record. These sources are both very very incomplete, so ask your local old-timers the right questions.

If you’re trying to convert a loved one, see if these look helpful:

• Making Him the Dom of Your Dreams – Advice on working with the man you have (sorry, it is gender-specific).
• When Someone You Love is Kinky by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt (2000) – Some people seem really annoyed by this, but it does seem to try to be non-threatening and start from basics.

Have fun, never give up on yourself, and don’t do anything you don’t want to!