A review by harri_w
Playing Well with Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and Bdsm Communities by Lee Harrington, Mollena Williams

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

My main takeaway is that the book has some pretty solid things to say about interpersonal skills and self-knowledge, and encourages people to think critically and not make assumptions. However I wouldn’t suggest it as a point of reference for what you might find when venturing into the ‘community/ies’, in 2024, particularly not in the UK or without other frames of reference. There’s a significant focus on conferences (not just explaining them, but also using them as a framing context for discussions of preparation and planning), and of course a lot of the information about being online is somewhat out of date. 

I enjoyed that the book included discussion, and encouragement, of different types and amounts of involvement in communities and events, and that it made it clear that this doesn’t reflect how kinky or how knowledgeable/experienced someone is, and I also thought there was some good mythbusting.

I had some real questions about the choice to use ‘slave’ and ‘tribe’ without any contextualising notes and right off the bat (particularly while insisting on sidebar-ing ‘pervert’ and in a book full of sidebars). It feels careless and out of step with the stated ethos of the book. As I progressed through the book I also found law enforcement listed alongside event planner, rock climber, nurse, massage therapist and carpenter as examples of reasons that you might have transferable skills, again without context. I might *just* have let it slide if the authors had least made it clear that a cop’s knowledge about how to keep cops out of a space/your business might be useful, but who knows what transferable skills they meant?!

Distinctions made between poly and ethically non-monogamous made no sense to me, trans people are spoken about in ways that are at the least out of date, and whatever they think they mean by ‘unstable personalities’, it shouldn’t be included in the list of ‘bad eggs’ on page 169. I only scanned the Appendices, but I’d say take/leave them as feels useful to you. Which, to their credit, is how the authors present the whole book. 

Read with an existing knowledge of the communities in question, and with a clear sense of your own politics, this is generally an interesting and useful book. I won’t be going around recommending it, but if you want to read it and chat about it, I’d be up for that. 

As a side point: when discussing what to wear at different events, the answer given is almost always ‘jeans and a tshirt’ or ‘black’, which (as a queer, trans, Femme), I found incredibly boring and actually unhelpful.