Wedding for some BDSMers!

So the other weekend my one (straight) BDSM friend came back into town for a wedding and was scheduling all his friends in to hang out, and since we were going to hang out the day of the wedding, he asked me to me to be his Platonic date for it, which I of course did.

There, my schtick was, when the other guests asked me how I knew the bride and groom, I’d be like, “I don’t, I’m just [my (straight) BDSM friend’s first and last name]’s arm candy.”

Even before that, in the lead-up to the wedding once I knew I was going, I just couldn’t stop thinking about jokes.

Like, they cut the cake, and then they cut the bride.

Or wedding party favors are engraved handcuffs.

Or, as my one friend texted, they use the garter to tie people up – to which I replied that whichever guy catches it, the maid-of-honor uses it on him for cock-and-ball-torture!

(“That’d be perfect for that,” my one [straight] BDSM friend actually was like, when I told him that when we met up to take the subway out to the hotel where the wedding was at.)

Overall, I was hoping too that people would ask me how the BDSM wedding was, so I could just say, “Oddly restrained.”

Anyhow, before the ceremony started, I ran into the one BDSM guy who was guest speaker at my sex class and his wife.

He totally had a fun time speaking to my class and would do it again, and his wife had recently started a feminism group at the dungeon where they have chats and guest speakers and read books and stuff.

“No shit,” I was like

“That’s right,” she was like, “It is a no-shitting event.”

The ceremony was cute, and since the bride and groom were both nerds, at the pre-dinner cocktails then dinner they had lots of “props” set out like you’d see at a Fantasy Fan Convention.

The Captain America mask was oddly comfortable, and it was pretty easy to have the shield on your arm and still hold a drink at the same time, unlike the Sonic Screwdriver, which looked nice, but you always had to hold on to.

They also had a gigantic very distinctive looking sword, and when I asked someone which character’s it was, they were like, “It’s Cloud’s.”

“Isn’t that Final Fantasy?”, I was like.

“Yes,” the woman replied.  “Seven.”

Each table had a fantasy or sci-fi theme too with magnets as take-home favors for guests, and so I made sure to try to get a few Dr. Who magnets for a friend who’s a big fan.  Only, since I don’t know Dr. Who all that well and neither did the people at the table, I selected a few magnets with people who the wedding guests at that table thought were Dr. Who and then had to go find people in the know who could verify.

“Hey, is this Dr. Who?”, I asked the one BDSM guy who spoke at my class.

“Yes,” he was like.  “Number Four.”

He then verified that the other magnet was Dr. Who Number Eleven.

Interestingly, some of the people you could pick out as kinksters from them having dyed hair and from them being body non-normative and whatnot, but others weren’t so clear, and then there were a lot of relatives too.

Because of that, pretty much every time you asked a somewhat (young) person how they knew the bride or groom, you’d get bland and somewhat evasively vanilla answers like I heard my one (straight) BDSM friend give, like, “We met through mutual friends and stayed in touch since we’re both in the same line of work.”

Later, as I was chit-chatting with someone by the dance floor and my one (straight) BDSM friend kept drinking and drinking, he stumbled up and joined the convo.  

Shortly after the woman I was talking to left, he was like, “See [guy’s first name] over there,” and tipped his head across the room at this short lawyer guy in his early 40s, who was laughing and chatting with his slightly younger wife, a thin (white) thing in a pseudo-Victorian black dress with a little too much lace around the collar

“It’s just great to see a submissive male end up in a long-term relationship like that, that almost never happens.”

Then, after a pause, he was like, “You know, it gives you hope!”.

Later, he dropped that of the bride and groom, the groom was dominant, and he also clarified that the BDSM guy who spoke in my class wasn’t *really* a submissive even though he has led a support group for submissive males, since he would top his wife on occasion and “they really switch it up a lot.”

Later, I chatted with his wife out in the hallway.

She has been to a legendary women-only festival a few states over, and though she found it very powerful to get into the wilderness and menstruate with thousands upon thousands of women at once, she felt very strongly that trans*women should be allowed in, and that people can work around issues like seeing an occasional penis in the group showers.

She also thought that people at the women’s only festival were “soft” on women’s violent behavior directed towards men.

She then told the story of how since there weren’t enough women workers available to pump the portapotties, the festival organizers arranged to have male workers come in in the middle of the night to do that.  Although a cadre of women surrounded them and shouted “Men on the grounds!  Men on the grounds!” to warn away any women who might not want to see them, even then a lot of people threw wet toilet paper at them, and sometimes even bottles.

“And they were just there to help them and pump out their shit from the ground,” she was like.  “That is just an awful way to treat someone.  I'm sorry if that makes me less of a feminist somehow, but I see that as just wrong.”