To munch or not to munch?
Featured, Kink Diary — By Adele on 4 October, 2011 10:14 pm
We know how the standard advice to spanking and BDSM newbies goes, right? To meet people to play with, get thee to a munch. It doesn’t matter if you’re shy, antisocial, poor or privacy-conscious: in order to dip your toes into the local scene, you must consume a certain amount of alcohol in the company of other perverts. It’s the only way. Off to a munch with you.
Now, from the snark quotient in the paragraph above you may conclude that I don’t like the idea of munches. No, no, I do. They obviously work really well, or there wouldn’t be so bloody many of them. I want to be one of the people for whom munches work so well. I long to love munches.
They don’t love me, though.
Here’s the sad, twisted story of my unrequited love affair with munches.
My first one was a spanking munch in a small town near where I used to live in the North-East. Let me list the grand-total of all attendees at that one, other than Mr Haze and I: the organiser, an I’m-sure-he’s-not-always-that-boring older gent, and the latter’s I’m-sure-she’s-fascinating-if-she’d-only-bloody-ever-speak wife. That was it. The conversation was so painfully strained, I was longing to safe-word my way out of it. Not that it would have helped, because a couple of months later it turned out that the organiser of the munch had a history of not respecting women’s safewords. And here was me, trying not to be sniffy about his dirty mac.
Then there was a general BDSM munch in a bigger city quite a drive away. This was well-attended, well-organised and clearly well-loved by the locals, judging by the fact that everybody bloody knew each other by this point, and you know how much fun it is to be in a room of 70 people who know one another, with an occasional newcomer here and there. There was a party game, oh yes: each person was supposed to write down a yet unfulfilled fantasy and throw the piece of paper into a hat, and then everybody in the room was supposed to guess whose fantasy this was. Have a guess at how much of a chance I stood of guessing secret fantasies of complete bloody strangers, or for them to guess mine.
Then there was a lovely spanking munch in Scotland. This was small enough to be manageable, yet big enough to have plenty of interesting people in it. Everybody was great. I knew several people from spanking forums, and had looked forward to meeting them. What a shame, then, that I sat at the end of the table, and the only person whose conversation I could hear over the pub music was one of the friends I’d come with in the first place. (Who also kept calling me by my real name: something guaranteed to send me into a killing rage.)
Skip several years, during which the only way to get me to a munch would have been to invite the munch into my living-room. In the meantime, I somehow managed to make lots of new scene friends, none of whom seemed to mind that we hadn’t met in a pub to start with. Funny how that worked.
Anyway, a group of girlfriends lured me to this supposedly wonderful BDSM munch in London that they all went to all the time. Well, call it a glitch, but this particular time it turned out mind-crushingly boring. Pretty much all of the painfully cool people around the big table were into all sorts of arcane fetishes and practices none of us knew anything about, and nobody at all wanted to talk about spanking. The four of us bailed after an hour, and instead went to one of the girls’ house, where her husband generously spanked us all. That was much better.
You may have guessed where this post is leading. I’m actually contemplating going to a munch again. Not even contemplating, really: I’ve definitely decided I’m going. The London Under35 Kinky Drinkies has an excellent reputation, and I know a couple of people who go, so I’m guaranteed to have at least two conversations over the course of the evening. (More if I manage to sweet-talk some friends into coming with me.) Anyway, I’m older and wiser now, and I’m definitely due a positive munch experience.
I think.
I hope.
Yes, definitely.
Tags: meeting people, munches
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9 Comments
I’m going to come along if
a) I go to the gym during the day (which I failed to do today thanks to software being hateful) and
b) I do the political research I’m meant to be doing during the day too.
Otherwise I’ll spend the evening doing the above instead.
I’m currently trying not to be put off by the fact that the first FIVE sentences in the fetlife description end in an exclamation mark. Not a good sign…
I’ve been to maybe two munches, and those were lead-ups to parties. The rule for the local group was that you had to go to a munch so that they meet you first before you could go to your first party. We tend to have them in restaurants, and depending on how crowded the place is, we might not even get to talk about spanking much. They’re also during the day on the weekend, so they’re not in loud bars, which is good.
I haven’t had much luck with munches either. Although I’ve fortunately never had to guess anyone’s fantasy, I’ve been stuck in the corner of a pub with a lemonless gin and tonic, listening to the sexual history of a stranger, more than once. And there was the time someone who’d asked me out online several times, and been refused, saw I was intending to go to one and turned up to pester me, that made for a lovely afternoon.
If it’s any encouragement, though, the only one I’ve ever found useful was an Under 35’s. I hope you have a tolerable time.
In my (considerable) experience, munches are exactly like every other social encounter with groups of mostly strangers.
Meeting people is a numbers game: there are no hidden caches of great folk just waiting for you to burst through the doors. So I have to say that my response to your account of your last three munches is… what did you expect? It’s only once you begin to know people that their strengths (and weaknesses) start to appear, and any event full of strangers is bound to be less satisfying than one full of acquaintances and indeed friends.
As I suggested, I’ve been to a great many munches (including the oldest, being the one started because someone couldn’t make it to the original BurgerMunch). I’ve co-founded one, too. Some have been dire — typically, those are the ones where many of the attendees are petrified that someone might find out they’re kinky — while others have been exactly like a party of 30 or 40 mates down the pub (which it basically was, which is why we started it).
In short, play the numbers; go to several munches, go repeatedly, persevere. If nothing else, there are large chunks of “the London scene” that need a dose of reality, and you seem eminently suited to deliver!
P.s. the Richmond munch sounds like a good bash, too. If you make it to that one, I believe the organizer is a chap called Tim, and Zille & I would appreciate it if you’d tell him “hi” from us!
I haven’t been to any munches (here in the US they’re less about drinks and more about, well, munching) but like you have heard both good and ill. It’s something I’m always meaning to do but never seem to get around to it.
Hope you let us know how it goes, whatever you discover. :)
I went to a few munches when I lived in Washington, DC but I was never very impressed. I never really found a group that I clicked with. I always found the fellow attendants to be just a little too weird for me.
I’d be more interested in attending now that I live in Europe but I’ve yet to actually find any groups.
Go with people you know. Who you have spoken with recently. Who have chosen the venue. Decided where to go (and what to do) afterwards. You know who your friends are. Don’t underestimate being older and wiser. Have fun.
I’ve even had fairly good experiences with munches, and I’m still frustrated that they’re considered the be-all end-all entry to the kink community. With how much time we spend talking about how your kink may not be my kink but your kink is okay, you’d think we’d have an easier time accepting that not everyone can go to a munch, and not everyone will have fun once they’re there.
You’re much more likely to enjoy something mutually esoteric within a social group of people with similar creative interests, it could be Shakespeare, a choir, painting or dancing, where you feel comfortable and welcomed, than the other way around: such as going to a munch, were SM is the only common denominator and you’re surrounded (from your POV) by a bunch of people whose only other links could well be the constraints of their socio-economic backgrounds and their football team. E.g. in painting, many of the motives expressed by the pre-Raphaëlites and subsequent romantic Victorian painters (Alma-Tadema, Leighton, J W Waterhouse, Bougereau) are downright saucy and invite questions such as, “What do you think might have going on in the head of that girl/soldier/sailor/caliph/goddess/slave?”, “Do you think Venus could have chastised cupid differently?” [Falconet – Wallace Collection London] or simply, “What do you think is going to happen now?” I don’t think you’d be surprised, Adele, what such conversations might reveal. Of course there are more direct approaches such as the Barbican’s 2008 “Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now” or Tracy Emin’s RA curation.
Pudding proof: A couple of years ago, a close friend and I found ourselves at a party among renowned scientists. I think there’d been an item in the news, and one of them started a round-the-table A-Z game of sex acts, e.g. A is for anal sex, and B is for buggery etc. were contributions from some of the most eminent minds in that congregation. “F is for flagellation” did not come from our lips. I’m not surprised that they turned out to be a sexually open bunch. Incidentally, I dislike the scene use of the word ‘vanilla’ intensely.
Perhaps some kink/scene people put up a wall of exclusivity; kink/vanilla, us/them. Maybe, because it is all they have. That’s sad, because it’s how we enjoy our psychosexual dreams and derive and create scenarios for our sexual fantasies from all of our abilities that make us interesting to ourselves and each other. Now Beardsley, Rabelais, Swinburne, Donne, and Gesualdo among many others are swimming into mind. Back to fun.
R