Working for AFF, you'd expect that I'm a person who embraces the ideas that it's okay and healthy for adults to meet for consensual sex and to enjoy interacting in a non-judgmental meeting environment. One of our other sites (ALT.com) advances the ideas that we all have (at least) a little bit of "freak" in us, and that it's okay and healthy to explore the ways in which your sexuality may be, shall we say, more COMPLEX than just the 4 basic "off-the-shelf" sexual orientations -- straight male, straight female, gay male, gay female.
Consider the diagram below, which offers a visual representation of the 4 "primary" sexual orientations, with a thin slice in the middle to allow for bisexuality, as most non-bisexuals conceive of it -- that is, an equal degree of attraction for both men and women.
http://home.att.net/~mardack/ffstuff/Chart1.gif
This is the way most people would describe the sexual orientation make-up of the human species. What I would like to suggest to you, and what ALT.com reflects in its tone and philosophy is an idea that's much more radical, much more (I certainly believe) progressive, and, ultimately, ACCURATE -- that human beings are NOT born into 1 of 4 discrete sexual "camps", and that bisexuals are NOT aberrant and marginal.
Well, you might be wondering what these notions about the nature of bisexuality have to do with Fetish and BDSM activities or with a site that caters to its practitioners. A great deal, I believe. Here's why: When folks make a conscious decision to break away from the mainstream, to exercise a self-aware individuality in the pursuit of their own definition of sex, all kinds of boundaries may suddenly dissolve.
The truth is, most people never really have the opportunity to discover their TRUE sexual individuality, in all it's potential subtlety, complexity and richness. Society, though certainly more tolerant of difference (in some places more than others -- LOL), still pressures young people to choose a team and to stick with that team for the rest of their lives. In this respect, I don't see how having 4 teams to choose from, instead of just 2, is all that much better -- at least for those who still have to give-up some aspects of themselves in order to be in compliance with the "rules of the team".
Consider this diagram:
http://home.att.net/~mardack/ffstuff/Chart2.gif
Rather than force folks into discrete teams (and then lock them up inside there with all kinds of taboo-boundaries and intolerance keeping them in), I'd love to see human sexuality arranged along a continuous spectrum -- with people with a preference for dick on one side and people with a preference for pussy on the other. This way, being gay or straight or bi- is meaningless as a definitive condition, and becomes more about the things two adults might decide they'd like to do together, on a case-by-case basis. This doesn't mean that peoople who had previously thought of themselves as straight will run wild on the streets looking for some hot same-sex action. It means there would be a new way of thinking, a way in which having a preference for pussy, if you are a man for example, becomes a matter of statistical likelihood, rather than binary possibility. A "straight guy", for example, might be a guy who would have to meet 1 million other guys before he would come across one he might like to get it on with. A gay guy might need to meet just one -- LOL.
You see what I'm getting at. The important thing is that we stop thinking of ourselves as divided by the particulars of our sexuality, and begin to think of ourselves as united in a continuum of normal, healthy possibilities. Each of us should be free to explore, discover and play, without having to worry about what side of some arbitrary fence we're sitting on.
I'm looking ahead to a future in which the democratizing power of the Internet (that stems from making every individual a potential publisher) has fully extended into the realm of sexual expression. Already we can see that things are changing -- look at content, for example. Not only are niches proliferating, but I see more important changes -- I see that women are being better respected and better represented; I see that individuality ("quirkiness", if you like) is gaining in its appeal; basically, I see that people are getting more courageous when they ask themselves the questions: who am I and what turns me on?
j-
