BDSM Reimagined: Navigating the Kink Landscape in a Post-COVID World
Exploring the fusion of online and in-person networking
In response to the COVID pandemic, which practically shut down in-person gatherings overnight, members of the BDSM community have begun using innovative new ways to connect with one another.
Be it via online searches, listening to podcasts, delving into various assortment of subreddits, or good, old-fashioned networking; they’ve discovered new—often high-tech, sometimes low-tech–methods to find friends, support, partners, or playmates.
In a similar vein, fetish-themed adult entertainment venues are using a combination of tried-and-true as well as out-of-the-box techniques to appeal to kinksters worldwide.
Working together—kinksters seeking to find others like them and organizers trying to get the word out about their events—these and other innovative social and technological developments could be giving us a glimpse of BDSM’s future.
The world is a kinky oyster
While certain things have changed, like how local munches—a non-sexual gathering of community members wanting to socialize—feel like they’re increasingly hard to find, larger BDSM conventions can often still be found on kink-related online spaces and sites, like the kink-related social network, Fetlife, Discord, Reddit and even Eventbrite.
Other high-tech ways kinksters are linking up include specific kink and fetish dating sites, like ALT, Fetish.com, BDSM.com, or subreddits such as r/BDSMpersonals.
Suppose your idea of playing includes games as well as BDSM scenes. In that case, there’s a host of immersive titles to choose from, many of which have proven to be great places to connect with playmates in the real world as well, such as 3D SexVilla, IMVU, Yareel, and others we’ve previously previewed.
Though frequently not as popular as non-kinky dating apps, there’s a steadily rising number of Android and iOS ones specifically made for the BDSM community, including Kinkoo, Kink D, FET, Whiplr, and Feter.
Getting the word out
On the other side of the fence, as in venues and events trying to reach the kink community, I asked Megan A, Liquid Red Las Vegas’ fetish party producer, to share how she gets the word out for her almost monthly shows, “I post on my event websites liquidredlv.com and liquidreddetroit.com, as well as Facebook events, Fetlife events, all of my social media channels and groups that I am involved with.”
She added how good old-fashioned email works as well, “Having a go-to email list is also necessary, and I feel like a lot of people start to think they’re outdated, but I still find them useful. I also still use printed posters and flyers because some people still find my events that way as well.”
Although it’s obvious blogs, press releases, and online posts remain effective at getting the word out, producers like Megan A also need to know that where and when a show takes place will always play a vital role in how to promote their events successfully.
Take Sin City, for example, a town replete with adult entertainment venues, many of which operate seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.
“For Las Vegas, and the museum even more specifically, the larger the lead time one leaves to advertise an event or show could signal the death knell of attendance,” Dr. Victoria Hartmann, director of Las Vegas’s Erotic Heritage Museum, told me.
“People come to Las Vegas for a few days, pick what they might go to see when they are here; there’s a lot of options in this town. We’ve learned unless it is a residency show like our ‘Puppetry Of The Penis’, inundating a potential customer with news of an event weeks before doesn’t bring us a big audience. In fact, the opposite is true.”
In short, the best press coverage in the world, in print, online, or featured on a local news broadcast, won’t have much of an impact if not timed correctly, especially in bustling entertainment hubs like Vegas.
Still room for print?
Designer/Producer James Dury, head of PictureRama Publishing, has been putting out the UK-based Fetish Map for a decade.
In this day and age of apps and online searches, his map stands out, as much for featuring kinky retail establishments, service providers, upcoming events in and around the London area, as well as it’s an actual, printed-on-paper map.
Dury explained to me, “During lockdown, we conducted a survey amongst our readers and subscribers. ‘What is your fetish? We want to know all about it. We got a good response ranging from one-liners right up to full-length essays, going into great detail about what our readers are interested in and how they play that out. This allowed us to go in search of businesses/events/teachers/providers that/who cover all those requirements.”
As Dury’s Fetish Map shows, there remain plenty of ways, from online to good old-fashioned paper maps or in-person networking, for kinksters to find what and who they’re looking for.
Nothing’s gonna stop us now—
Portuguese writer José de Sousa Saramago imagined a terrifying pandemic in his novel Blindness. But not even a Nobel Prize recipient couldn’t have imagined what COVID would end up putting most of society through.
It’s also why professional as well as amateur futurists have often failed to predict what the world would be like when we could step out of our houses once again—or share a meal (or more) with a friend.
Not to be undone, what could tomorrow’s BDSM networking, dating, or attending in-person events look like?
Megan A. postulated, “I think people are mainly back to wanting to get out and see other people. At this point, very few people have hang-ups about events. Only a few older people I know still worry about crowds.”
So it’s pretty safe to say we’ll likely see a preponderance of online-only performances, meet-and-greets, and virtual play parties, many perhaps aided by virtual reality, augmented reality, or artificial intelligence technologies.
Another off-base speculation? Hardly, as in fact, these and other online-only social events were popular before the onset of the pandemic.
Leading to the bigger question: will in-person kink play remain popular, or will the scene be someday replaced by digital BDSM experiences?
Meeting in the middle
It’ll likely be a little from column A and a little from column B: a combination of the real and the unreal that’ll make finding a kinky partner, or two or three or more as easy as snapping your flesh-and-blood or virtual fingers or—as we’re talking BDSM after all—cracking a whip.
Image Sources: Depositphotos
