Shibaricon marked the first BDSM Convention for which I’d made multiple play-dates, all of which I initiated. I’ve spent the past year-and-a-half of so building up my kink résumé with many events, cons and classes: and all but a handful of them were out of state. I haven’t played much locally of late, and I have a very particular approach to letting people cane, slap, punch, whip, bind, beat and abuse me. Call me picky but the way I need to play, if I’m gonna fucking do it, requires people with a certain level of skill, compassion, emotional and physical attractiveness that is a rare fucking thing to find in mutuality.
As it happens, my travels have allowed me the privilege of meeting and mixing with kinksters from coast-to coast and, in my crazybrave mode, I managed to get up the nerve to actually ask for play-dates with several people I’d admired for varying lengths of time. Some I’d admired from afar for years, and some people I’d only recently met, but felt that easy bond of trust and friendship I think of as “Spiritual Family.” Shibaricon turned out to be stellar when it came to that type of connection, and I am still mulling how wonderfully the stars aligned to make that experience as unique as it was.
One of the high points, for me, was the opportunity to not only spend time with but also play with a woman I’ve admired since before I even had my first taste of real-time BDSM. That is Lolita Wolf. She is someone whose name I’d run across in my exhaustive year of pre-scene research: this being the soul-crunching time I spent before going real-time in the scene. Reading books, lurking on mailing lists, websites, et al. There aren’t many women I’d found whose opinions seemed straightforward, stripped of gloss, faux mystique and the veneer that made so many people talking about kink seem, to me, “personalities” rather than “people.” Lolita walked the walk, talked the talk and was so down to earth I felt like I knew her before I met her, several years later, at a local BDSM event.
Fast forward to today, when our social circles overlap and we now run into one another at kink events now and then. And finally I worked up the nerve to ask for a play-date. Admittedly, it was a bit of a roundabout “ask.” Over diner with friends at the Sex 2.0 Conference, there was a lighthearted discussion about Lolita’s”100 Diva’s” list, and how one became eligible, and I waved my hand in the air like a kid in the back row who really had to pee and asked if I might be a candidate to be one of the 100. Not that I consider myself a “Diva,” as I am far too dorky, but it was as good an “in” as any, right?
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