Free The (New and Improved) Loving Dominant by John Warren, Libby Warren

numbing of the American mind has made this a vanishing breed, except when political figures and socialites are the targets. If you don’t fit into either category, you probably have little to fear. In more than forty years in the scene, every single one of the “blackmail” efforts with which I’ve come in contact has been a byproduct of a personal dispute within the scene. Most have come out of divorces where one spouse tries to paint the other as some kind of a perverted monster either for custody reasons or to gain a monetary advantage. Less often, they have been like the flake whose loony behavior in a private club got him banned and set him on a letter writing campaign to get “even” with the club.
    These scoundrels generally constitute a minor threat. However, you run a much, much greater risk going online from the place where you work. Many people have gotten used to running quick web searches and even making online purchases on company time without a problem, and this emboldens them to do other, personal things when they are at work. The logic is, “If the company hasn’t blocked the website or mentioned the other stuff, they must not be watching.” That may not be true.
    Many companies monitor which websites their computers access. Some go further and watch each keystroke made on all the company computers. However, bosses are human and likely to ignore minor infractions of the rules as long as the work flow isn’t interfered with. They may ignore an occasional purchase or visit to a joke web-site, but things can get very different when sex is involved. Even if the boss is willing to let things slide, do you really want some pimple-faced IT drone looking electronically over your shoulder while you type? A good rule-of-thumb is, keep it at home and on your personal computer.
    Like anonymity, the Internet’s international reach is both a positive and a negative thing. It’s positive because you can be in contact with literally thousands of people, which significantly increases the chances of your finding a perfect match. On the other hand, your perfect match could be 3,000 miles away.
    When this book came out, I tried to provide a comprehensive list of websites. At the time it seemed doable. Now, with hindsight, it was like trying to count the snowflakes while standing in the middle of the damned blizzard.
    While I was rewriting this section of Loving Dominant, I did a few quick Google and Yahoo searches just on BDSM. They both returned more than twenty two million hits. That’s no longer a blizzard — that’s an ice age.
    You know how to conduct a web search, but I’ll just add a few hints. Because the search engines use information from inside the web-site, there isn’t a perfect formula for finding anything. Just try to think up terms that you think would be in the kind of page you are looking for and experiment, experiment, experiment. For example, if I were looking for a BDSM group in south Florida I might offer “BDSM,” “group” and “southeast Florida,” and I might get some hits.
    Or I might not, because a lot of sites don’t have “southeast Florida” specifically in their description. I could go wider and look for “BDSM” “group” and “Florida.” This would yield a lot more sites, but many that would be too far away to be of interest. Another approach would be to try “BDSM” “group” and “Boynton Beach,” “BDSM” “group” and “Delray Beach” or “BDSM” “group” and “Palm Beach.” There would be fewer hits, but the ones I got should be more likely to be of interest.
    Some websites are purely one way. They have information that you can see. These are the books and the advertisements of the Internet, but other sites allow you to interact with other viewers. Message areas allow you to leave a message, much like pinning a note up on a wall. Anyone who comes by can read it, and if they want, comment on it by adding other messages linked to it. Chat