This year, I hope we can all learn how to take too long breaths, so that we might engage one another with more civility, grace, and benefit of the doubt. I’d particularly like to see this online, because virtual resources and online communities are great, especially for those in remote areas or who want to learn about kink on their own and at their own pace, but we all know the ugly sides of FetLife, KinkTok, etc.: Strong emotions can flare up quickly and, while when we’re face-to-face with another human being most of us can and downgrade those heated reactions, when we’re facing a screen spewing out that hot gut reaction feels somehow “good.” (Most of us know that it’s not actually good—but we fall for the allure of that feeling anyway.)
Communication is difficult. We’re often misunderstood. We often fail to explain ourselves. And we often forget to think of the impacts and outcomes of our attempts at communicating. So when we encounter something that pushes that deliciously toxic “outrage” button in us—when we feel that heat rise and our body react to it in a flash—we need to get in a habit of taking two breaths. I hope we can be kinder to each other, so that we can enjoy the good sort of being mean and nasty.
I also hope that this year we can all learn more about the history of kink and BDSM, and the heroes of our recent past, because a lot happened just before the internet boom that set the ground for how we practice kink—and for privileges that it’s so easy to take for granted today. These things get forgotten, like the fact that the phrase “safe, sane, and consensual” was developed in the 1980s by gay and lesbian Leather folk as a political slogan to take up space against the respectability politics prevalent in certain sectors of the gay rights movement. There’s so much about the history of kink that I don’t know as well… but you get the idea.