Pick apart Tourguide's posts day? Yeesh. Cut me some slack, people. I'm entitled to form opinions and make mistakes, too, ya know?

The simple fact is, BDSM is illegal in parts of the world. Don't believe me? Try to import a flogger from the USA to Canada and mark the box "adult toy product" and see how that goes.

Whether our responses are learned or not is a nevereneding debate and one which has been covered on many lists and groups and will probably never be answered until some scientist sometime, but not in our lifetime, makes the amazing discovery about how the human mind works.

The fact of the matter is: ALL our behaviours are learned. We are born with the instincts to curl our toes, grab things with our hands, respond to stimuli, suckle, root and cry when we are uncomfortable. As we develop, we form more and more responses, but these are learned. We learn to smile at what we see as funny. We learn to talk based upon listening to the people around us. We learn to read because our parents or someone shows us worss in books and explains them to us. We learn to be sexually active, because our bodies begin to mature and we learn that we have sexual feeling and urges. We suspect we would like to be tied up and spanked, because something we have learned in the past tells us that might be kind of fun or some outside source, like a book, might show these practices to be favorable and desirable.

That is how we grow. We learn. So, yes, you can pull the nature vs. nurture argument all you want. The simple fact is that we learn from both. Biologically, we are animals. Left to our own devices, without teaching, without technology and without nurturing influences, we would revert to a wild and feral state. We would become neanderthals again. It is only through what we have learned that we have become so "civilized."