Read Online The (New and Improved) Loving Dominant by John Warren, Libby Warren - Free Book Online Page A

realized I needed to take a piss. At first, it enraged me that so physical a feeling should be intruding on the depth of despair I was feeling. But, then I really, really needed to take a piss. It hurt. Suddenly, I realized just how shallow a person I was to let a thing like a full bladder encroach on a moment of metaphysical torment. I broke out laughing, I pissed, and I went on with my life.
    Contact at a distance
    This is the section of Loving Dominant which has undergone the most “sea changes” as one edition follows another. Part of the changes have been due to advances in technology. When the first edition was being written, the Internet was still mostly a thing of corporations, universities and governments. Most people who had online lives did so with thirty-baud dial-up modems and connected directly to bulletin board systems, which could be as huge as Prodigy or CompuServe or as small as a home computer in someone’s spare room. Now, high speed lines connect homes to an information superhighway, and the web’s potential has increased exponentially. But one thing remains the same. People want to meet people, and computers provide powerful tools to do so.
    Before the Internet, magazine and newspaper advertisements were the preferred way to cast a wide, but impersonal, net over a large population. There were kink- dedicated, kink-friendly publications like Latent Image, or swinging magazines where you could spell out exactly what you wanted. More difficult were vanilla publications where a kind of code was prevalent. Submissives would talk about “wanting to surrender to an assertive man/ woman” or “give up control.” Dominants would mention seeking someone “restrained” or “passive.” Often, literary references supplied the clues. “I loved reading Exit to Eden/Story of 0/ Venus in Furs”… with the writer hoping the minimum-wage toiler on the advertising desk wouldn’t be able to pick up the reference.
    It is interesting that this same sort of subterfuge was necessary on some online systems in the early days. Prodigy, for one, was initially very anti-BDSM and would refuse to post messages referring to any sort of scene play. The kinky folks quickly found that they could gather in the literature section and post comments about Anne Rice’s Beauty books that were, in reality, thinly disguised description of their interests and activities.
    Now most of these magazines are things of the past, and computers are the modern way to meet others who share your interests. During a class at The Boston Dungeon Society, one female instructor casually commented, “I don’t know how anyone can be serious about their sex life if they don’t have a computer.” It got a big laugh, but the point was serious. As the computer came of age, people realized that they had a very powerful tool for communicating as well as calculating. By linking the computers to other computers, people have created thousands of networks both large and small, which can help people of similar interests find each other.
    One of the most attractive facets of most computer systems is anonymity. Most systems allow you to choose a name that serves as both an identification and as a mailing address. Your true name is a closely guarded secret.
    This is both a positive and a negative thing.
    The anonymity permits you and the other people to have frank, honest discussions on subjects which might be impossible to broach if your true identity were online. Many, dominant and submissive, male and female, feel they might be in danger of social condemnation if our vanilla friends and colleagues learned of kinky interests. Online, we can let our hair down and be ourselves, protected by the shield of anonymity.
    The dark side of the “cyber mask” is that it plays into the hands of those whom believe “honesty” is just a word in the dictionary.
    If you spend any significant amount of time in the scene, particularly online, you will encounter