I think when we get into discussions about how we ought to communicate, we end up forgetting that there are usually actual serious issues getting ironed out.
One of the many has been the whole notion that there is one way of doing butch or femme. That explodes periodically, as it should.
New folk end up accidentally -- or not -- swatting a beehive now and then -- meaning one of our simmering issues. And then all hell breaks loose. It's not necessarily about the person who is getting dogpiled -- if that is part of it. It's that there is a tension under the surface, and the person has said just the right thing to cause an eruption.
We had a guy and his wife a while back who were truly into male superiority -- not just as gender play -- but as a way of life. I felt bad for them in that they were basically run off the site. I don't mean moderated. I don't recall that they were. I imagine so. I don't recall. In any case, they had few allies. Theirs was an extreme position, and it received an extreme reaction. But some of the intensity wasn't about them. It was about the fact that there is a milder form of their belief among us that is supported and practiced fairly commonly. The extreme version looked pretty ugly, and most people were shocked. But a lot of the energy behind the reaction was because we do have a "lite" version of that in our midst. I think the people who find it disturbing were ready to react. And the folks who actually had something in common with them were looking for a way of distancing themselves from that unabashed version of their gender dynamics. So the couple couldn't win.
I think they -- the couple -- were shocked by the reaction. I don't think they saw themselves as that different from many others here. (I don't know this. I am surmising.) Point is that it was a line this community drew. It was less about who these two people were as individuals -- or about anybody's communication style -- than it was that this was an issue that the community was ready to react to. And react we did.
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