Where are all the "Real Subs"?

It happens at least once a week.

You can almost smell it coming from the email or post title.

Someone got his head turned by a pretty young thing, and then got disappointed, and spouts off at all submissives everywhere: “Where are all the Real Subs?”

I almost laugh now when I read these. I never get offended anymore by them; more often than not, I feel a great deal of empathy for the author who, while acting like an ass, is really more hurt than anything else.

But no really – where are all the “Real Subs”?

First, I dislike the abbreviation for submissive, be that sub or the dreaded “subbie”. I’m not a phallic shaped piece of tin that floats at the bottom of the ocean for god’s sakes, I’m a woman. Secondly, I rarely use the mirror abbreviation for dominant either. Whether that’s because it makes the whole thing seem to casual, or if I’m just a formality whore I don’t know. But using those shortened words typically will put me on a different path from where I’d be if you used the extra couple of keystrokes.

When I first started exploring this lifestyle (another phrase I’m not fond of, but am forced to use upon occasion) 14 years ago in an AOL Chat room, I realized that this is what I’d been doing for most of my adult life. I just hadn’t had a name for it. There weren’t many of us them, maybe 100 in total that frequented the couple of rooms on AOL (and a smaller set on Prodigy and one on Compuserve as well). The online d/s community was in its toddler stage, having started on bulletin board systems on the east and west coast. Finally, us Midwesterners had a place to call home, too.

Now days, the online community is hundreds or even thousands of times bigger than it was then. For out of those 100 people then, there were some that could be called special cases. The married-but-looking people. The curious-but-not-ready people. The pretentious-with-no-experience people. Their numbers were small then. But when you multiply them by the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of current participants, you can see where the math is going to end up.

If there were 5 marrieds then, then are 50,000 marrieds now. 10 curious then, 100,000 curious now. See where I’m going?

The percentages haven’t gone up, but the numbers certainly have. And their voices have gotten louder with that rise.

I don’t call myself a “Real Sub(missive)”. I call myself Jill. I know what I want out of a relationship, and out of my life. I know what fulfills me and what gets me off. The words “real” and “true” when applied to any aspect of the BDSM lifestyle do nothing but isolate and anger people, me included. When I see an angry dominant (or on occasion and angry submissive) spout off about how all the people he or she meets online are fakes or wannabees, I just want to ask them ---

“What does it say about your choice of people to approach if all you’re finding are the rotten eggs?”