On the Concept of "Newbie" on the Kink Scene

Usual definition

We call “newbie” someone new to the BDSM Scene, even if they’ve practiced kink at home or been a swinger for a decade before coming to their first munch. There are a set of social norms and practices on the Scene that do differ from the vanilla world (e.g. we don’t ask someone what their job is unless we know them reasonably well, if ever), so amount of time spent on the Scene tends to be the metric by which we most commonly understand the concept of “being new”. It is used as a substitute for “does someone behave in ways that make it look like they’re inexperienced?”, which can be a plethora of things, but the equivalence of time on the Scene = experience exists on the Scene in much the same way we equivocate age with maturity more generally.

It is often assumed that those new to the BDSM Scene (“newbies” by the above definition) will have fewer communication and conflict-resolution skills, less knowledge of what they like or are into, a more rudimentary understanding of risk, as well as less developed practical skills (we will examine how accurate these assumptions are later). By virtue of these assumptions, most “newbies” will receive more leeway when it comes to social faux-pas than someone who “should know better” (The guy who you’ve seen at every party for 5 years hitting on every youngish feminine person at an event is going to be forgiven a lot less quickly than the 20-something guy who showed up last week and whose only experience of BDSM is Fetlife). This, in general, is a good thing: you can’t learn if you’re never made aware that there is something to be learnt.

Concurrently, the way I most often see “experience” denoted on the Scene is in terms of time spent on the kink Scene in general, independent of locality, involvement in education, or skills (technical or interpersonal).

Limitations of a one-dimensional assessment of experience

The definitions above and the way they operate view experience one axis only: the axis of time.

They do not account for people who have been on the Scene for a long time but have never engaged with education, or those who aren’t new to the Scene but are new to practicing a specific kink, or those who have been attending online classes and practicing with a partner at home for years before venturing out to a munch. There are a lot of scenarios in which the single-axis view of experience fails to convey a full picture of someone’s involvement in and engagement with BDSM. This means that we fail to take into account a person’s exposure to BDSM via the Internet (forums, Fetlife, Instagram, etc.), their prior experience navigating interest-based groups, their training in specific topics relating to kink (some medical or anatomical knowledge is useful for a lot of different BDSM activities, so a nurse or other medical practitioner may have prior knowledge that makes them more experienced in certain areas of BDSM than, say, an accountant), and various other life experiences that may contribute to how they engage with the Scene regardless of how recently they came onto it.

Furthermore, someone might have been on the kink scene for 10 years but has primarily engaged with impact play for pickup but has never been in or sought out a power-exchange dynamic. This might make them very experienced with impact play, but a complete novice in dynamics. Now, if they never have any desire to change that, that’s absolutely fine, but I would take any opinions they have on 24/7 power exchange with a heavy pinch of salt – no matter how long they’ve been kicking about.

How to conceptualise newness instead

General social experience

Social skills are what I categorise as what enables you to converse and engage with a variety of people on a variety of topics. It’s usually how you first start making friends, and it’s exactly the same social skills as anywhere else in life. Yay for transferable skills!

Social skills include communication, conflict resolution, small talk, and general ability to navigate a range of social situations. Experience is going to be heavily informed by life experience and varies hugely person to person, so amount of time on the scene means very little here.

“Social experience” is also context-dependent: this can be due to different (dis)abilities (I struggle more in loud environments due to audio processing issues and being highly prone to distraction, but tend to be much more engaging and confident in smaller-group settings), or simply different life experience in terms of how you socialise and who with, as well as your experience with group dynamics vs. 1-to-1 friendships. For example, a younger, newly out trans person is likely to be used to engaging with other trans people (often online, but not necessarily) but may not have much experience interacting with cis people in mixed social spaces – which makes them differently experienced in “social interaction” depending on context.

Familiarity with cultural norms

This is social experience, but on a more specific axis to that explored above. It’s your ability to navigate the scene (or other space) in ways that do not come into conflict with the social norms and scene culture that you’re stepping into. This comes with time, but also with conscious engagement with events and people on the scene. My point here I think is best explained via an example:

If you have spent a few years on the swinger scene before coming over to the BDSM scene, you likely have been to swinger parties where the cultural norm is that people at the party are open to being touched and consent is closer to “it’s a yes until it’s a no” than the “it’s a no unless it’s an explicit yes” you will encounter on the kink/BDSM scene. This is something that no-one ever explicitly tells you when you first foray into BDSM parties, but you’ll likely creep some people out if you don’t ask them before you move their kit bag. Approaches to consent more broadly differ quite a lot between these two scenes, although you will encounter different social norms in the way people engage with kink in different BDSM-adjacent spaces (the way Leather scenes engage in BDSM is different to the mixed kink scene, which is also different to the swinger scene).

Specific scene-related etiquette skills are some that mostly get learned by spending time on the scene and is often implied within the “usual definition” of a newbie. This is part of the reason we tend to give people who have only been to one munch more leeway if they don’t yet know that here, it’s not okay to move someone’s possessions out the way without checking first.

Engagement with educational resources

A lot can be learned practically for BDSM, and not everyone has to be a sex-nerd (although those types tend to be my favourite people – I just like someone who can talk for 3 hours straight about the pros and cons of Somerville Bowlines, or dissect the many ways in which potato-based snackronyms fail to do what they’re supposed to – sue me), but I do think that a willingness to learn and a concept of “perpetual learning” is important, not least because sometimes we discover new kinks as we spend more time around perverts, which means more things to learn about!

This learning does not always have to be in formal workshop formats: learning and practicing skills happens in many ways and I do not want to be prescriptive on this point. Besides, as I mentioned at the start, a medical practitioner will probably have quite a bit of transferable knowledge on things like sterilisation/sanitation and safer fluid sharing practices before they step foot in a dungeon. The salient point is that we can add an axis of “engagement in education” to our newness diagram.

Scene management skills, or "soft" BDSM skills

When I say “soft skills” in BDSM, I am talking about things like negotiation, handling physical, emotional and interpersonal effects of a scene going wrong, knowing our preferences for pick-up vs pre-planned play, etc. Broadly, it’s taking responsibility for our actions, risks we take during play and the consequences thereof.

This is harder to suss out without seeing someone play or playing with them directly, but I think it’s a useful axis of experience. One of my friends said once that they only desire to play with people who they trust can handle a scene going wrong (by no-one's fault) without reaching for someone or something to blame. I think this succinctly illustrates what I’m getting at with this axis.

“hard” BDSM skills

This is what we often mean when we say someone is a skilled player: it’s how they handle whips, canes, building intensity, knowledge of harnesses and body handling, their ability to say just the thing to turn someone into an embarrassed puddle, etc.

This could be multiple axes in and of itself: which skills specifically we are talking about when we say someone is a skilled BDSM practitioner is completely context-dependent, and is often more relevant to tops than to bottoms (at least, in the ways it’s most commonly talked about – knowing how to whip someone and knowing how to process pain well are both hard skills that can fall under the “whipping” category, but when we hear “whip skills” we’re much more likely to be talking about the former). For conciseness’s sake, I will not go into detail on metrics for any specific kink or fetish, but will stick to a broad “skill” axis and you can supplant any relevant skill to the conversation you’re in.

Conclusions

Whilst the term “newbie” can be a useful shorthand to denote someone’s time spent on the Scene, the set of assumptions that sit beneath it (and in parallel, the assumptions that underlie the notion of “experienced” Scene-goers) oversimplifies the concept to a point where we equate “new” with “inexperienced in all aspects of the Scene, kink, and BDSM”. This assumption is sometimes true, especially in the case of people in their early years of adulthood – it was certainly true of me when I joined my local kink scene at 19 years of age – but more often than not fails to account for the many facets of “experience” in BDSM. I also think it contributes somewhat to a reluctance of “old hands” to go to 101-level workshops because they don’t conceptualise themselves as “being inexperienced” so don’t require an entry-level class, and newer people as “knowing nothing” – neither of which is particularly helpful.

Moving towards a more specific and detailed conversation around the types of experience one can gain by engaging with the Scene and the things that surround it (both in person and online) would, in my view, help us move towards a more nuanced understanding of any given person’s skills, knowledge and abilities – as well as reduce the (sometimes harmful) assumptions that someone with more seniority automatically has more “advanced” knowledge and opinions. Viewing “experience” more explicitly as a multi-faceted thing and placing it within social and experiential context is hopefully a useful tool in engaging more meaningfully with BDSM and each other.