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IC : Weblogs : Tanos : "New York Part III: TES meeting"
 New York Part III: TES meeting
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Posted by Tanos  on Wed 10 Aug 05, 12:29 AM
I've already written two posts about going to New York: first about
Gloria Brame's talk at Paddles
and then about New York shops and the
Leather Pride weekend. This is the last of the three topics I'd planned to
write about, and has taken the longest because of the knotty subject matter - Soulhuntre's "Punishment as a Science" talk - so it's ended up
in two halves itself.
On the Tuesday after the Leather Pride weekend, lili and I went to a meeting
of The Eulenspiegel Society (TES), which is the
oldest BDSM society in the world - older even than the Society of Janus in
San Francisco. The main subject for the meeting was
Soulhuntre's talk, but I'll get on to that in a separate post.
It was a warm, fine evening, so we ended up walking down to the place where
TES meets: in one of New York's office/appartment buildings, and it turned
out to be a hired room in a small dance studio. So one wall all mirrors,
theatre lighting from the ceiling, temperamental air conditioning units
near the windows and stackable chairs arranged in rows facing the front.
The meeting got started properly at half seven and Soulhuntre spoke for a
bit more than an hour, including a couple of questions during the talk and a
good 20 minutes of them at the end. I must admit I found it fascinating to watch
the dynamics of the meeting, since Soulhuntre at the front and his friend
Flagg, sat in the back row, were pretty much able to present their highly
controversial position without much challenge from the local TES members at least.
After the main talk there was a break, and then we reassembled for "The
TES Circle", in which the chairs were arranged in a big circle and everyone
got to introduce themselves, AA style, and say why they were there. First
timers who lived in/near New York got a round of applause, but I mentioned
I was here on "vacation" with lili and so didn't use the magic "this is my
first time at TES" phrase and missed out 
Quite a lot of the discussion followed on from Soulhuntre's talk, but
people also raised other things that were on their mind in quite a natural
and fluid way. (We should do more of this in the UK.) This was the point
at which people did start to disagree with each other, but it took the
form of talking past each other rather than going as far as saying "I
disagree" or something so direct. I don't know whether this is something
that has built up over time as a survival strategy for TES, or whether
it's just part of the "have a nice day!" temperament, but I must admit,
there was also a marked reluctance to disagree with Soulhuntre or Flagg.
The meeting was officially wound up at about 10:30, so we stacked some
of the chairs and then drifted off into the night, talking about the
things that had been discussed all the way back to our hotel. I'm saving that for another post though, since the full implications of my "but if you look at the way the brain actually works ..." question are quite involved Edited Thu 17 Aug 06, 12:26 AM by Tanos
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