Wrestling and model trains.

Last night Rowdy and Sprite and I went to a class on takedown and restraint--basically, how to use wrestling moves (and institutional restraint methods that, hilariously, I already knew from work) to take someone down and hold them down with your bare hands.

It was stupidly fun. Some in the kinky "now we could torment you or fuck you and what could you do?" sense, and some just in the "fun play wrestling" sense. A lot of kink has that overlap for me, between what's a hot sticky turn-on and what's just fun. Even if I had no intrinsic desire for violent sex, I'd still want a partner I could wrassle with on occasion.

But if I weren't a pervert, I wouldn't have been in that class in the first place. The class was organized by a kinky group, advertised on a kinky website, taught by a kinkster, and held in a kinky playspace. It would be damn difficult for a vanilla person to find out that class existed. Vanilla couples who wish to wrestle each other--and they do, right?--must do it without the benefit of professional instruction on how to to the Sexy Full Nelson and Sexy Armbar. (And yes, the Sexy CPI Control Position.)

It all reminds me of Bruno's spectacularly on-the-money quote about model trains:
Kinky sex is a hobby like model train building -- people labor for years in their basements to get good at it, and though most people don't want to hear about it, other aficionados happily visit to check out their work. Vanilla sex is like running -- it doesn't take much equipment, it's supposed to come naturally, it gets harder as we age, and it's socially approved, but few people really work at it.

Where do people who don't have any freaky fetishes go for sexual education and community? I guess the answer really is, nowhere. (I guess swingers' clubs come close, but they're focused on non-monogamy, not just sex in general.) If you're an ordinary average person, you don't really have a venue for talking about sex the way kinksters do. It's just sort of taken for granted.

I guess the problem is that it's hard to organize a club that could include practically everyone. It's like trying to hold a meeting of the People With Feet Society. If you're unlucky some hardcore foot freaks show up first and scare off everyone else; if you're lucky you just have a giant unruly mob with little in common and no set agenda. Most attempts at sexual community centers seem to be unlucky, and they become de facto kinky community centers.

I would like to teach ordinary people how to sexy-wrestle. I think they'd enjoy it, and it would make their home sexy-wrestling safer and more creative. But I don't know where to advertise the class and I don't know where to hold it.

Then again, I would also like to teach ordinary people how to use a singletail and how to do suspension bondage, because I really honestly think they'd enjoy it how could anyone not? so maybe my concept of "ordinary" needs work.