cymbidia

Face Pictures

I'm not going to send you a picture of me that shows my face, kinky or not.  This has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not i deem you a trustworthy person. 

My job is such that i must be discreet about who i really am as a fully sexual adult.  Know right off the bat, please, that i cannot foresee a time when i will be free to let my freak flag fly, so to speak.  At least not out in public, not in my own backyard.  It won't happen anytime in the next 10 years, certainly.

That's not to say i don't have a freak flag.  Oh yes, darlin', i can hang with the big dogs in the matter of kinkiness.  It's just that i've learned some self control and discretion regarding where, when and with whom my amazing technicolor freak flag is unfurled.  I have learned to be exceedingly discriminatory with respect to who gets a look at what lies below my oh-so-societally proper exterior.

If you don't know, all public school teachers sign a yearly contract that allows them to teach thier subjects at a particular school which is part of a particular school district or other organization (jails, juvenile halls, etc). In return for that signature we get a yearly salary and the chance to 'touch the future', as teacher/astronaut Christa McAuliffe said.

That contract is a standard bit of business and is the same for all the teachers in the district, and much the same for all teachers everywhere.  They contain an astounding excess of tiny words, like most contracts.  Hidden within the depths of those tiny words--in all teacher's contracts in the United States (i think)--are a whole slough of words devoted to acceptable morality. 

These words offer, clearly, the warning that if i--a classroom teacher--violate the spirit or letter of the societally approved mores as they are laid down in the contract, i can be terminated immediately and even have my profession license revoked.

We've seen this happen with teachers who crossed every line there is and had sexual relationship with their students.  That's been splashed all over the news.  What most people haven't seen, don't know, is that teachers are still, routinely, dismissed from teaching for being gay/lesbians.  I know for certain such a dismissal has happened to teachers for being kinked, too.

A couple years ago someone somewhere else on the net threatened to out me as a player in the BDSM sandbox.  The threat was specific: i was going to be outed to my principal, my school district and the licensing body in my state for being kinky. Did i really think those who hired me, worked with me and paid my salary would want or allow a pervert like me to be allowed to be around kids?

I freaked.  I panicked.  I did all i could to stop the anonmyous coward responsible but i still felt hideously exposed and endangered.  The threat ended up going nowhere that i ever found out--but it manage to do a really ugly job on my head. 

It scared me.  I droped offline so quickly i had sentences in response to different fora posts that were left uncompleted.  I immediately backed away from all my real, everyday life kinky friends.  I passed on play parties.  I stopped going to munches.  I stayed at home a lot for a long time and i stayed offline for almost two years, just poking my nose back in to say hello to friends on occasion.
 
Through that experience, i learned a hard lesson about being too open in a kinky milieu regarding who i am in my everyday life.  I learned that i really truly don't know who is on the other side of the keyboard.  I've learned that, to me, someone isn't really real (as the Skinhorse was and the Velveteen Rabbit so wanted to be) until i can see the color of their eyes from across the table.

After i see the color of your eyes across the table and hear the timbre of your voice pitched low sor only my ears, then and only then, will i be willing to give you a picture that shows my face.

And if you need a picture of me in order to decide if you'd be interested in meeting me for coffee somewhere in person then sadly you and i probably don't share enough in terms of bdsm values and needs to make it worth our while in the first place. 

As always, dissenting opinions are welcome and valued.

Be well,
barb