Odder still to an outsider would be the experience of attending an S/M seminar at QSM's San Francisco warehouse, where a room full of well-dressed people in orderly rows of folding chairs watch politely as a well-known "dominant" demonstrates how to torture nipples correctly and why it's important to employ bondage devices that won't cause nerve damage. To avoid appearing "unsafe," players plan their taboo violations and transgressions to a 'T.' It can be too much -- Joe, a member of the coordinating committee for the Third Annual Leather Leadership Conference, notes ruefully that "the S/M community is, at times, overwhelmingly geeky. Players will spend hours and days debating finer points of flogging safety instead of just getting together and having fun."

Given the lack of law-breaking and general air of wholesomeness in the S/M scene, it's no wonder that Jack and Jill Suburb have come to join the fun. The question is, what gets lost in the translation when S/M values begin to percolate into the white-picket-fence world of middle America?

Outside the community, S/M has become what SOJ orientation director Maryann Brown jokingly calls "stand and model." There are vinyl bodices and soft purple floggers for frustrated housewives, nipple clamps for uptight businessmen and leather-and-studs erotica for teenagers who have read all the romance novels at B. Dalton. People are dressing up and acting out, some say, but they aren't really freeing themselves or challenging the social norms that say sex should be labeled, contained and neutralized. Put another way, the mainstream offers S/M practice without S/M theory.

Why can't S/M theories of power and consent catch on in the same way that latex skirts and spiked collars have? Because real inquiries into power might well lead one to question authority outside the bedroom. Newly acquainted with the liberating notion of consent, people may balk in situations where theirs is not given. Workers familiar with S/M theory, for example, might suddenly yell "red!" and walk off the job when their bosses force them to engage in labor they did not consent to perform. Ideally, power in the S/M community is given consensually, not taken by force. When power and consent go hand in hand, people are far less likely to sit back and accept what the powers that be tell them to do.

But gentrification has taken the social challenge out of S/M. And many S/M community leaders like Elizabeth worry that shopping-mall S/M will actually result in dangerous sexual de-skilling: people buying toys that they don't know how to use and injuring themselves or their partners. Or worse, people could attempt sex games they've read about, but, without the ability to communicate consent, end up reproducing all the ugly realities of a sexual culture still based on coercion, secrecy and shame.

For those who delve into the S/M community to learn sexual theories as well as where to buy some hot cock shackles, there's much more to S/M than sex. It's about forming a community where bourgeois prudery doesn't rule all, and sexual expression is articulate, graceful and consensual. Ruth, a player in the scene for roughly four years, confirms that "there's more to the scene than play. These are people with whom I can be myself. I don't have to worry that talking about sex will offend them. I don't have to be afraid to hug them. I have much better friends now than I ever did before."

Sexuality is, finally, about forging community and cementing human connections through pleasure. Maybe in S/M theory -- which has not yet been completely gentrified -- we discover that human relationships are really the point. And that's why power must be used so carefully.

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