A vanila's search for questions (by Estos)

Mirjam's post of 'love the questions' put me off the post was going to write.

She seems to know way too much - but if you ever met her in SL, you'd not immediately get that impression, shes so humble.

So, not despite but because of the 'love the questions' I'm going to introduce you to the questions that define my inner self:

I'm vanilla in RL but am I happy?

Since a small child I have been fantasizing about damsels in distress - of course as soon as I could, I started seeking out TV programs late at night.  But, I realised no one else (that I knew) had this interest, so it was clearly something I should be guilty about;  this secret excitement.   I tied my first  girl friend up, but she didn't enjoy it.  And there ended my delusions that girls in bondage was something I could experience in RL, and I retreated to my fantasies.

But fantasies are so fleeting, so hard to pin down, so difficult to develop the characters, add flesh to the environment.  So eventually I started to commit my fantasies to paper. But these wordings of dreams were compiled under the cloaks of greatest secrecy, for this was my guilty secret - the guilt of my fantasies that only me and, perhaps a handful of other people I would never find, shared.

For 10 years I wrote my stories, all the time, tentatively keeping my ear to the ground - there clearly were people into bondage (as this is what I discovered the technical name was for what I fantasised about)  But they seemed to be hard core - there were BDSM clubs, people who were into pain and torture, leather and dungeons and whips and chains.  I wasn't interested in any of that!  I just liked the idea of pretty damsel in distress!  A damsel tied to a tree, awaiting the arrival of a dragon, the pretty girl chained to the rock, struggling to escape before the monster arrived.  The private investigator caught, and tied to the chair, with the ticking bomb.  Each girl was in jeopardy, struggling to escape.  And in my fantasies, they did. Every one of them - and with all their clothes intact.  This wasn't  what happened in BDSM clubs.  Damn it...where were the people like me?

At last, in the late 00's I discovered love bondage sites, like loreili's and Red's realm of romantic restraint.  At last I had discovered people like me (all be it in America, 3000 miles away)  My inner-self was sated.  I could sleep easy, couldn't I?

But with this answer, I found NEW questions.  And where to find these answers?  Could I find them in other people's stories?  Pictures or 4 minute movies in 240 x 320 resolution?

How did the people who shared these guilty, kinky, deviant, underground thoughts experience them?  What part of their life did these thoughts play?

In 2006 I read an article in the Times about a research project into male fantasies - it provided a link - I followed and filled it in. http://www.independent.ie/unsorted/features/how-often-do-men-really-think-about-sex-111075.html

In 2008 I eventually found that the research had been finished but I never found the results damn it!  What I did find, was a reference to an online game called SL.  Apparently people explore their kinky sides in Second Life.  Anonymously of course.  Perfect!  I could talk to my fellow kinksters! 

WOW, there were a lot of kinky people in SL. FANTASTIC! I forget about about asking questions, and dove right in.  I set myself up with a nice girly avie, and put her in jeopardy.. now I was the star of someone else s damsel in distress story.  Great displacement activity - and not without it's own problems (gosh, roleplay - that's a subject all of it's own :) )  But I still had questions, even more now.  Where could I find the answers?

Where do you find answers to complex problems?  A school - with teachers.  >_<

Teachers who knew what they were talking about :)

And so I found myself on Freedom Continent, and A.C.E.S., D/s Academy, Blacksilk, the Gateway group, Empowered submissives...

A new question materialized out of of this muddy soup:
Where was the school to become a great Dom?  To be a superlative Sub?   Which was I? Perpetrator or Victim?