Recently on the kinky social networking site Fetlife, I was alerted to a discussion on how on might go about confirming the existence of so-called ancient European houses of SM, one of the more persistent cultural myths of our community. I thought I might make it clear, again, why people spend so much time and energy in propagating this myth, and this was my response. For further discussion, see my rant titled “Still Unsafe at Any Speed, but Making Good Time.”

When I have gone traveling in GB and Europe, I always make it a point to ask around. The universal response has been, "Why do people believe in that shit?"

Part of the reason is that despite the oft-claimed "we are the loners, the rebels, the outsiders, the one-percenters!" people in minority populations desperately want to belong to something. And once belonging, they want to feel that they now represent the best of their small community. That requires that they also, in some way, be discriminating and/or specially endowed with knowledge, skills or status which are not available to someone else.

For most people, this is fairly simple and innocuous. You join the local Spanking Society, and you get a membership pin. You get to go to the Spanking Soirees. You learn why glycerin is so important. You go on with your life.

But for some, the fact that *anyone* can join the Spanking Society means they are not special enough. So, they come up with the bogus history of the Secret Spanking Society, which is older and far more restrictive in membership than the current, new-age Spanking Society. In fact, it's SO secret, no one else has ever heard of it!

Or, perhaps with a slightly stronger grasp on reality and just the slightest tendency to exaggerate, they remember their early days as a young spanker and, well, sort of suggest that their High School relationship with someone they did some spanking with was a formal master/apprentice relationship, now long hidden in the smog of history and of course they can't mention names.

But for some, the fact that *anyone* can join the Spanking Society means they are not special enough. So, they come up with the bogus history of the Secret Spanking Society, which is older and far more restrictive in membership than the current, new-age Spanking Society. In fact, it's SO secret, no one else has ever heard of it!

Or, perhaps with a slightly stronger grasp on reality and just the slightest tendency to exaggerate, they remember their early days as a young spanker and, well, sort of suggest that their High School relationship with someone they did some spanking with was a formal master/apprentice relationship, now long hidden in the smog of history and of course they can't mention names.

Placing their Secret Spanking Society in Europe is, for Americans, the next step in making sure someone doesn't just look you up on Classmates.com or Facebook and send some pointed notes to people who knew where you were at age 16 when you claim you were being forced to learn the Seventy-seven Secret Spanking Styles while hooded and being serenaded by the other chanting novices.

And really, the issue is not how we'd spend time to discover if something existed; it's whether the sources of this information have any validity. When a five-year-old tells me there are monsters in the closet, I don't need to call the Animal Control people; I need to deal with the child. When someone on the internet reveals to an audience of complete strangers the details of their super secret organization and says they can't tell anything except they are a member? Puh-lease. Don't call the FBI. Don't gather a budget. The honest choice is to either confront or humor. These days I tend to smile blankly, turn away, roll my eyes and make the "loser" sign to anyone else standing near.

Perhaps my favorite media showing how I feel about this came on TV, in the show "Bones." One season was concerned with finding a strange serial killer who thought that secret societies were a bane on humanity and therefore killed and ate people who were members. (Which seems reasonable, really.) He was supposed to truly believe that all the secret social groups, ranging from guilds to Masons to the Trilateral Commission were evil, and that he was chosen, as part of an ancient club, (snicker) to do away with them. Anyhoo, after much drama and interesting forensics and some wild-ass theorizing, they find the dude. (I hope this is not a spoiler. They pretty much always find the dude.) And at the end, someone asks the FBI agent, who was this guy we've been chasing for a year??

"Nobody," he says. "He was nobody."

Exactly.