Why I Hate Clichés...

I've attempted to write this post 10 times and deleted it every time... it ends up being too negative and ranty.  I hate not writing for long stretches so I may as well just unleash it in a more focused form.

Over the past few months I've been interacting with quite a few people that are newer to the BDSM scene (less than a year experience).  I really enjoy helping people who have a genuine interest to learn.  I find it very rewarding to connect with someone and be able to teach them about topics or ideas that have aspects about them that fall below the surface and aren't necessarily evident when they are presented to people for the first time.

I have also found myself following a lot more blogs, mostly on Wordpress.  I'm reading a lot more M/f blogs now than ever before and again I am reminded at just how much more attention is paid to those blogs than male sub authored F/m blogs.

Seeing a much larger volume of comments on the blogs that I post reminded me about something.  I hate cliches.  It's not that I dislike what is said in a cliche or its meanings... I dislike that cliches steal from active thought.  In BDSM, cliches are drilled into newcomers to the scene and nearly anyone who takes part in a local or online BDSM community can probably recite all of them on cue.  It brings me back to the days of memorizing multiplication tables.  We don't need to know how they work, we just memorize the answers.  While some may take the time to get into it and seek the answers of how and why, eventually the words become law and anything that violates the law is considered taboo.

Granted, a lot of the reasons behind cliches often fall into the realm of common sense, but this is kink, which commonly causes large numbers of people to lose half their brain when they think about it.  Every day you will read blog posts explaining why the cliches are necessary.

Over time, cliches too often end up being the Swiss Army knife of fixes.  Have a problem?  Spout a cliche.  Need help understanding something?  Spout a cliche.  Something doesn't feel right?  Spout a cliche.  When I see the run of cliches I start wondering if people have actually made any effort to understand the person enough to, you know, give them an applicable and personal response.  It's much easier to spout a cliche... because it doesn't require you to know someone or understand their situation at all.  Is that a good thing?

At other times cliches lead to interesting scenarios when they begin to conflict with one another.  Think of how many kinksters you hear use the phrase "there is no one true way."  It ends up being the view of well over half of the people who post anything BDSM-related anywhere on the internet.  This becomes their mantra until confronted with something that violates another cliche.
"There is no one true way... except all of the following must be true:
-trust cliche.
-communication cliche.
-consent cliche.
-safety cliche.
-limits cliche.
-generic BDSM-oriented cliche.
Failure to comply will lead to ridicule and shame."

When this happens it seems so strange that it looks a lot like they believe there is one true way.

I'm going to cut the rant off here.

I hope you have a good weekend.