BDSM also has a large network of education, advocacy, and community groups. They push negotiated practice, set rules, and give people a place to talk. Most social clubs control who gets in. A new member often has to sit through an orientation, learn the rules, and get screened. The screen is meant to keep out people whose interest is professional, such as journalists or law enforcement, and people who are obviously unsafe, so the room is for people who actually came to take part. Groups near universities are for adult students, not for minors. Where a group limits membership by gender or sexual orientation in its own materials, that limit is noted below.
Europe
In Europe the map runs from national education networks to spaces organized around gender. SMil in Denmark is a national community group for education and social contact among practitioners. Germany has a tighter association structure: Böse Buben, Bundesvereinigung Sadomasochismus, and SMJG give SM practitioners a standing community base. In the Netherlands, SamariuM and VSSM are club-level and federation-level SM organizations.
The Spanner Trust in the United Kingdom is a legal-advocacy group. After the Operation Spanner prosecutions, it worked on the legality of consensual SM and on civil liberties. In the Czech Republic, Other World Kingdom is a private destination project built around female supremacy and femdom.
North America
North American organizing runs from campus groups to large public events. In New York City, The Eulenspiegel Society is a long-running pansexual BDSM educational society. Lesbian Sex Mafia is for lesbians and bisexual women. Conversio Virium (CV), tied to Columbia University, offers BDSM education for adult students in the city. Black Rose in Washington, D.C., focuses on education and social contact. In Seattle, the Center for Sex Positive Culture, also called The Wet Spot, runs kink programming out of a sex-positive center.
San Francisco has Society of Janus, a long-standing pansexual education group on the West Coast, and Samois, a lesbian-only BDSM organization active from the late 1970s into the 1980s. Folsom Street Events runs the Folsom Street Fair and related public leather and kink events, which puts the community in front of a wider public. Nationally, National Leather Association International is a network for leather and SM education and activism. National Coalition for Sexual Freedom is an advocacy group on BDSM and on consensual adult sexual expression.
Glossaries, topic maps, and lists of universities that have clubs sit next to these groups. They are part of how adult readers find the organizations and read what they are for.
