While no doubt there are those who are indeed discriminated against and yet practice their own brand of intolerance. However, reconizing sites of oppression as part of a wider pattern of those with priveledge and those without is also a practice you can find in almost any group. If ‘human nature’ makes us intolerant, then I guess people who practice antioppression aren’t human.

Maybe you happened to find the intolerant corner of your BDSM community, and online it’s pretty rampant regardless of what the topic. As to a definition, an alternative lifestyle can be anything from a husband who loves to have his back scratched deeply by his wife during sex to that 3 way, one master two slave, complete lifestyle relationship. What qualifies as BDSM is up to the participants. An alternative lifestyle is just that, not the norm. Where it falls after that is up to the people involved in defining it. The only hard and fast definition of BDSM is that it’s safe, sane and consentual. Beyond that, *shrugs*

I think it depends where you go as for how accepting people are of other kinks that aren’t their own. Online is notorious for intolerance of kinks that aren’t your own, but some areas are better than others for it offline. I live in Washington DC, and whereas I’ve found this area to be rather straightlaced and stuffshirt and the dyke community to be cliquish and closed off to people who are different, I’ve found that the BDSM community here is more openminded, kink-wise, than other places. Here, we have a sizeable human pony scene and a sizeable Adult Baby/Littles/Diaper Lover scene and our clubs and dungeons welcome them with open arms. Even the people that don’t get it at very least don’t judge them for their kinks. It’s only talking to other people that I find that other places around the country are very suspicious and wary and even intolerant of the human ponies and the ABs. I was quite surprised when I found this out, only having the experience of the DC BDSM scene.

If we’re talking about people being intolerant of other’s kinks, I think it comes from needing someone to hate, someone to blame. To be able to say “Well, at least I don’t do _______. I’m a perfectly normal noodle fetishist, but what they do is sick!”

If we’re talking about people being intolerant of vanilla love, I think it’s because kinksters think that vanilla people are parochial and conservative and if they’d just “loosen up” and “get over themselves”, they’d be kinky. (Not realizing, of course, that just as some people can’t help being kinky, others can’t help being vanilla… they’re just not into it. Some have even tried and it’s just not their thing.)