They say BDSM is an adult attitude, and surely its true. But what is so adult in exhibiting? What's so adult in hiding in the dungeons and under the leather masks to avoid social judgment? Is it so adult to look for play partners focusing on our own fantasy?

There is a very peculiar phenomenon growing up in our days, regarding the media and their attitude toward BDSM and alternative sexuality. The weird paradoxes of communications acted by the media have been signaled from many sides, but what is going on about kink lifestyle is something really special. First thing everyone notice, media are in love with BDSM. Seems that magazines and newspaper cannot spend a week without highlighting one or another fetish or BDSM black chronicle event. Same thing about movies: you can't find a movie without a good touch of fetish - BDSM - submission scene. Even BatMan suits in PVC and Catwoman in latex drives around her whip - not to say what the Gurka likes to do with Candy in Highlander or remembering the Gimp fully wrapped in leather in the basement of a shop in Pulp Fiction. This same passion shows its power with commercials. No matter if you have to sell perfumes, washing machines, silicone or liquorice candies: seems the best way is always to put some fetish or BDSM scene in the spot. The result is that people have daily the chance to face its own - often unconscious - BDSM passions and desires. But then, after fueling those desires, the media turn the pan and show another "truth": both in talk shows and cultural programs, BDSMers are treated either as stereotyped , grotesque clichés or as sick persons in need of mental assistance. First the media fuel those desires and push them out of subconscious, then gives those two choices to live them: sick or grotesque.

So, how people may react to this schizophrenic treatment? Its easy to understand that desires, once raised, are not plainly gonna get back to our subconscious and get to sleep. So people react as they can: they have to admit they desire those things, but they also want to be "normal", so they look for ways to live their dreams "out of normal life". It is the reason why most BDSMers hide their desire to friends and acquaintances, and try to keep separated their "normal" partners and their "kink" partners. That's where clubbing comes in the picture: let me pay to quiet my conscience, give me the latex catsuit, the leather boots, whips and collars and a perfect stranger to whip or adore all night long. I'll be the utter slave or the ultra Master all night, living my orgy of desires and fantasies that would evaporate at the light of day. In the morning I'll take off those dresses and I'll be once again "mr. normality."

This mechanism let the fueled fantasy of BDSM desires come out and be expressed, even exploding in a sort of emotional orgy. But at the same time follows the media definition, driving people to live their BDSM experiences inside the stereotype shape of the roles - precisely as they were suggested first.
Even when they protest to be finally free to express their desires - and they feel they are so intensely doing so - they still are bind in the media, hypocrite, scheme.

Funny, for sure. But something is missing in this count: BDSM is an adult thing. This behavior is all but adult.

"There are lots of good things in being adult," said a teenager to a peer: "you can go to porn movies, for instance." True, and sad at the same time. Being adult means to be able to act like child, in such case? As adults, we have full rights to live our sexuality in the way we find more suitable. So to speak, we can lick shoes and beg for whippings, or tie the partner and pee on him. But what's the news then? We can do all we want, but we still feel ashamed of our own desires. It happens because we are not yet recognizing them in a psychologically adult and socially responsible view.

As we know, there are phases about sex. Everyone have been a child, and started fantasizing and developing its desires. Then come the time to start experimenting, and this golden period is what we call being a teenager. There people have fun, try to measure themselves, try to experiment and is more interested in quantity then in quality. Here stand the exhibitionism and the race, the signs on the diary on "how many" and the need to show and provoke and measure our own personalities. It's the time to face who we are and who we want to be, the time to go for extreme situations and to try all the funny and crazy things.

Then comes adulthood, and sex become something different. Comes time to deepen, to perceive it as something delicate, intimate, precious. Not anymore something to show, but something to let grow and to know better. Something to share with more attention and importance. And the need to measure ourselves, the urge to be appreciated that makes some girls give away their intimacy and the urge to show we have a dick that makes guys run after every female like dogs in heat slowly calm down and is replaced by a more profound feeling of intimacy.
This step is what is lacking about BDSM.

I am not talking about personal positions. Everyone of us may live it as he prefer, of course. I am talking about the so-called scene. All we have are the clubs, where BDSM is lived in this teenaging way, split from "normal life" and populated by grotesque expressions of ourselves. Characters acting in the more childish and stereotyped possible way. And it is all a response to the already described schizophrenic impulse treatment by media that makes people desire and then shame what they desire. It is time to break such schizophrenia. It is time to exit the dungeons and go for the adult phase of the scene.

Gaining this phase does not mean to become cerebral beings who consider books before giving a kiss to a feet or pinching a nipple. Nor it means to become puritans or moralists. All the contrary, in fact. Gaining BDSM adulthood means to stop this schizophrenic attitude to show show show - only in the dark or hidden under masks and virtual places. It means to start considering BDSM as something deserving dignity, attention, importance. Gaining adulthood means to stop leaning on exhibitionism and leaving this urge to show others how good we are at whipping or being trampled on. Gaining BDSM adulthood means to grow up and out of characters like the utter slave or the infallible Dom and learning to be just persons who appreciate and live BDSM. Gaining BDSM adulthood means to consider artistic expressions of alternative sexuality, gain knowledge of related philosophic theories, consider its cultural aspects; it means to deepen and seriously discuss the subject and do not let others treat it like a freaky matter. Gaining BDSM adulthood is finally the chance to give our lifestyle a more private, dignified shape and to defend it from those who try to make it a circus for their own business or due to social hypocrisy.
And when a TV interviewer asks you what are you used to do with the whip in your BDSM sessions, you shall ask him in return what is he used to do with his partner in its bedroom, or plainly tell him to mind his own business.