I've skimmed this thread (It's LONG and I'm time-pressed!) so my apologies in advance if I reiterate points already made.

I am not new to the concept of bondage, power-play, control and all that - most of my fantasies since almost childhood have involved either doing or having done to me something that involves something from those categories. Very much as with the moment I finally understood that I was bisexual, there was no grand epiphany for me; no anxiety or existential crisis as I struggle to redefine myself. It was simply a case of my thinking "Ooooh, that's what that is!" and carrying on.

My first experience came with a friend I was madly attracted to online. Now I read back the transcripts it becomes apparent that we'd been circling (ever-so-coolly) toward intimacy almost form the start. However, while I'd found sites like hogtied.com and stuff fascinating, I'd never pictured myself in those ropes. Until DTB (Dom to be) turned up. Pretty fast we were in an online partnership which I explored (and still explore) to the full. But more than that, it's about the dynamic; the trust at the time (I know... online shenanigans; entirely different topic. But, briefly, I'll just say that if you give yourself to the moment, it really doesn't matter where it happens) and the way we talked about it - and each other - after.

In life, I've always been a fairly assertive, dominant person. That's partly through character and partly through the fact that I'm a 6' tall woman with Amazonian build: when people defer to you constantly, you tend to expect them to. I tend to be independent, willful, decisive and resentful of compromise: these are all dominant traits.

So the fact that I found myself so utterly taken by these new ideas was, perhaps, the greatest surprise of all.

As I mentioned before, I am still new to the scene and my exact classification or label is yet undetermined; I deeply enjoy subbing for DTB, and for a while I wondered whether it wasn't the relinquishing of control itself that was the taboo for me; the pitch-and-roll of the excitement.

But the more I think about it and explore the scene in general; the more I talk to other people and discuss it with DTB it strikes me that, actually, that's not it at all. I still do want to domme; I still want to assert myself sexually - and now I think about it, I've been trying to do that for years with various partners who, while aroused by my commands and demands, were also somewhat bewildered by them. This bemusement held me back from both exploring my impulses more profoundly and trying to identify what it was they were pointing to.

Now, however, the cat is out of the bag and I am free to roam. And roam I shall!

This notion of "switching" feels uncomfortable to me. The anxiety we have to give ourselves an easy-to-read label strikes me as somewhat ironic (if not at times blatantly hypocritical) in a group of people as apparently open-minded and exploratory as we are. Fine, we need to know where we stand when we mix, but I am still left in the dark about why such rigid standards should exist at all. Let alone as to why people who straddle both sides of the line are - once again - talked about as if it's a lack of commitment or an inability to choose that finds them in such a position.

In this there are [i]clear[i] parallels to be made with the LGBT community - another group of people who strive for equality and acceptance and yet, even within their own grouping, manage to treat those who are neither one thing nor the other as if they are somehow "less than". I've always said "When I'm with a girl, I'm gay; when I'm with a guy, I'm straight. And when I'm with both, I'm fucking delirious."

That is to say that I don't get down and dirty with a woman and find myself wishing she had a cock. Nor do I get into things with a man and wished that his kiss was softer or that his hips were rounder or any of the other stuff I love about girls. It's not a lack of commitment or an inability to choose on my part; I like both - why should I have to choose at all?

I have had but a single experience as a domme. And it was enough to make it clear that, yes, this is something I really ought to be playing with, too. Not because I feel that to be a better sub I need to understand how it feels to dominate; not because I need to balance my powerlessness with one person with a sense of power with someone else but because I believe that I can bring peace, pleasure and compassion to someone by doing it, and by doing so, enjoy it myself.

And as with sleeping with men or women, I didn't find myself wishing that she would fight back or whatever, just as I don't hope for the chance to make choices or pick the pace when I'm a sub. As I said before, it's not an inability to choose; I've made my choice; I enjoy both. And perhaps coming to understand both will ultimately heighten my own experience as well as those that I play with in the future, but that's really beside the point.

Because the point here, really, should be that our preferences for domming, subbing or switching should absolutely never be used to define our status within the wider community. We're all so proud of our acceptance of other people's quirks here, all so eager to welcome in new people and "show them the ropes". Until it's discovered that said newbie is a switch. And then, and I'm afraid it's happened to me already (twice!), the cold shoulders are turned and the sneers are carefully hidden, but still apparent.

It's unacceptable and it's surely completely against what the BDSM community is meant to be about. To expect people to be one or the other is as relevant to things as someone's rope colour preferences; that is, not at all.