For a long time, there's been a kind of tension between traditional BDSM/femdom people and the findoms and their fans.

I started out as a traditional person, and over the years I've moved to the findom side. I don't feel like that's been a positive thing, and I don't mean to defend that scene here. But it seems to me that we're talking about two fairly different things.

Because on one hand, the traditional femdom scene is rooted, at bottom, in actual face to face interactions. That's what prodommes do. Sites like this one and the hang were based on the idea that there is a community of people who want those face to face interactions, and who want a web site that can help them do that.

The other side of it is very much rooted in online and video interactions. They're not really even interactions, because it's one sided -- women who sell clips to lots of different men probably don't even know that most of their customers exist, or what their names are. Even fairly large findom tributes are fairly anonymized in many instances.

The themes on the findom side have shifted in directions that makes the difference between that scene and traditional femdom more pronounced. One woman who makes videos talks about "pornsexuality" -- the idea that there are men whose natural sexual orientation is with porn, rather than with people. It's very common for POV videos to talk about the viewer as someone who can't have relationships with real people, who prefers the virtual relationship with the porn performer who doesn't even know they exist.

For a long time, we've talked about things as if there's one big scene, and within that scene there are people who are ethical and people who are unethical. Another way of putting that would be to say that there's a single scene, and a right way to do it, and the people from the findom part of it aren't really doing it the right and ethical way.

But it seems to me that as the two parts of it drift further and further apart, they seem to have less and less to do with one another. The experience and meaning of each is quite different, and I believe there's very little overlap between the people who do one versus the other.

I used to be a very enthusiastic client for face to face sessions, but over the years my social anxiety and bad feelings have gotten the better of me, and I am now quite firmly ensconced in the other camp. I wish I were less stuck in it than I am, and do not feel particularly good about it right now, so I'm not trying to argue that people should accept it. But to a certain extent, it is what it is.

What I am saying, I guess, is that over the course of my life I've done both, and I don't really think the two things have that much to do with one another. They seem fairly different to me. And so, I think it probably makes sense for people to start using different names for each of them, and to start operating with the understanding that they are separate and distinct communities.

This would be helpful, and is perhaps even necessary to defend the integrity of the people who do face to face BDSM, given the somewhat toxic nature of what happens on the other side.