Posted by DR on May 19, 2005 at 00:53 [67.83.76.91]
In Reply to: Re: Please any help posted by Brian on May 06, 2005 at 22:26
Hi Brian,
"By the way - your 'well-regarded DOM,' or however you phrased it - is he peer-reviewed?"
The well-regarded Dom I spoke of was a 17-year board member of a highly-respected, large BDSM organization who, among his list of credits, founded and hosts a special interest group for Dominant Men/submissive women for over 15 years. Of his former submissives that I know, all of them speak incredibly highly of him. Its also no secret that he's had a lot of submissive women in his day. And he loves to say, "there are a LOT of submissive women out there."
Based on my experience, I agree with him completely. Your conclusions Brian, that the male-to-female ratio is skewed highly towards men, are incorrectly based on Internet representativeness without context. But in fact, there are likely as many women into LG/diaper play as there are men into those same kinks. Consider:
1) Women tread more cautiously into sexual forums than do men. Women are simply socialized this way in most cultures. Many more women than men remain silent in sexual forums to avoid embarassment, to avoid being labeled as "loose" and to avoid unwanted advances and/or harassment.
2) In its early history, diaper kink groups were marketed exclusively for men, by men. Years later, when women finally broke into the "club" (like DPF) they were already at a gender disadvantage -- leading to further silence. Consider that DPF's was founded in 1980, but was called the "Diaper Pail Fraternity" until 1993 when the moniker was changed to "Diaper Pail Friends."
3) BDSM groups experienced this same gender disparity in their early years, but after thirty years of real-time mingling and building trust, most BDSM groups can boast that half of their membership tallies are women.
4) Regarding diaper play - most information and/or content on the web is written by men, for men, and marketed to men. But in the future, as web content is designed for women, women will come out in greater and greater numbers.
5) Finally, I'll note that when Thomas John Speaker wrote his thesis on infantilism in 1986, based on DPF's then-roster, he concluded that over 99% of all infantilists were men. Yet today, DPF's roster is almost 10% female. Year-over-year, the number of women on DPF's roster as a proportion of the total roster membership has been increasing. Even after correcting for the fraudulent roster entries, women's numbers are gaining year-over-year.
All of these reasons suggest that the number of women into *our kinks* rival that of the men. Internet representativeness is simply not a reliable tool, particularly with so little data available to us at such an early hour.
Brian, your conclusions are like that of a person who flips a fair coin three times, receives three heads, and thus concludes that the coin will deliver only heads. The public history of our kink is simply too short and too limited to conclude a strong male bias. In fifty years, perhaps fewer, I'm confident the observable male-to-female ratio will be very different from what it is today.
But I will offer one seminal thought -- the length of time it takes to reach that gender parity will be a function of the strength and quality of our real-time age-play groups and diaper kink groups. The Internet breeds anonymity and mistrust, which hinders women's development in this community. For women to grow effectively in this community, our real-time groups must be plentiful, and must take an active interest in marketing to, and promoting the values of women.