Standard Blog Warning: This is going to be a LONG one.  🙂  I have a LOT on my mind on this topic, so I’m gonna earn my “Tolstoy” moniker with this one.  Fair Warning.  🙂

After a year layoff, another Bondage Awards ceremony has come and gone…and I did fairly well this time, winning a prize or two. The Awards were nowhere near perfect, quality-wise, generally large mistakes were made in the process…but it seemed to be a fairly run competition, and for a 1st time administration behind it, they did a fairly good job.  Definitely room for improvement…but a fun contest.  BUT…to our Industry at large, I submit the following statement, to be read by my Blog viewers with a mega-fcukton of sarcasm attached:  I humbly apologize to any I may have offended by winning these prizes.  :/

FFS, man!  Where does this attitude of mine come from?  Twitter.  Ah, Twitter…fastly becoming mega-popular amongst the social media masses…and also fastly becoming popular for being the cesspool of the Internet.  On what do I base this?  Oh, come on…you’ve seen it yourself, you HAVE to…Twitter is a world-wide pissing ground for everybody with a cell phone or a computer to piss on everybody else.  You’ve seen it…Pop stars pissing on Pop stars, Sports stars pissing on Sports stars, Actors pissing on Actors, Politicians with ironic names passing their dicks around…you’ve seen it; Twitter is the ultimate piss parade these days, and the Bondage Industry hopped on board a few nights ago and the “pissed upon” was the Bondage Awards.

I was made privvy to a Twitter conversation between several Industry professionals mocking the Bondage Awards.  Why wasn’t this person nominated?  Why didn’t that person win?  These Awards are a joke because so and so didn’t win!  Nobody knew about these Awards…they don’t matter. And look at who DID win…who are these people? (To that, I say, I’m TolstoyTony; been working the career for 6 years now…lol.)  The one thing that I took away from their conversation was that they couldn’t be further away from the point and spirit of these Awards if they tried…it was truly sad to watch.  🙁

As one who won a few things, I don’t know if my voice on the subject bears any merit (it’s easy to talk from the top of the mountain, after all), but here’s my thoughts.  The conversation seemed to take the opinion that the Bondage Awards saw themselves as the be all-end all Awards of our field and who was nominated and who won didn’t live up to that; and that’s where, in my eyes, is the primary missing of the point. The Bondage Awards  are meant to be our field’s “People’s Choice Awards”…not the “Oscars”.

Where does the distinction lie?  The Oscars, as I understand them, are picked by a panel of Industry Professionals…the people who’re in the business choosing the elite of their own; The People’s Choice Awards are decided BY THE PEOPLE…and that’s my argument in a nutshell.  The Bondage Awards never passed itself off as anything more than an Internet voting situation for Fans to speak their minds and tell the Pros they thought we did a good job.  And to answer that line of, “Why wasn’t this person nominated?”…why didn’t YOU nominate them?  :/  I don’t know about my fellows, but I still have a GREAT degree of “Fan” in me…there’s MANY people who’s work I admire (and am even jealous of…I admit it), and these Awards were a chance for me to say that.  I voted for a lot of people…Lew Reubens got my constant vote for Best Suspension, Lew and Drea Morgan for Best Bondage Couple, the Yahoo Group “Rope_Dreams” for Best Free Website and Best Bondage Message Board…the list goes on.

My point is this: if you felt that this person or that person should have been nominated, then next year NOMINATE them!  Get them involved…motivate their fanbase to come out and vote…that’s what I did.  And as far as the Awards being so small…maybe if more of us took an interest in them, there’d be a bigger turnout.  If these people who were mocking were instead motivating their fans…meh, moot point.  These Awards held no credibility for them, after all.  From the Awards’ own site:

Contestant FAQ

How do I get people to vote for me, where do I start?

Since all votes come from the public, start with enticing the public to vote for you. Placing banner ads and mentioning the awards on your website or blog is a good start.

“ALL VOTES COME FROM THE PUBLIC.”  Honestly, I did that.  Posted here MULTIPLE times, didn’t I?  Told you all to come out and give me a nod…and vote for people you think deserve an Award, me or others, right?  These Awards are FAN DRIVEN…if so and such deserves it, motivate so and such’s fans!  Until the day we as an Industry get together and decide who should be on a Panel to decide who “deserves” to be awarded, fans are going to be the driving force behind any Awards given out…and because of that, there’s always going to be skeptics of the process…”so and so” may get missed because that person’s fans may not be involved.  Not doing so is almost like the person who bitches about our Country being in crap shape because of the President…yet when asked, that person says that he or she couldn’t be bothered to Vote in the Election.  :/  I look on this with that level of skepticism.

To that “Panel” of us Pros being picked for an Annual Award?  I’m for that.  I’d like to see it happen, honestly, and I support it.  I know I’d prolly never win one because I’m relatively new and there’s others who deserve the accolade of the upper echelon of the field more than I do (read that with sarcasm…), but I’d love to see that happen.  🙂  I even have a name for it…”The John Willie Awards”; because, really…didn’t he start us all?

Overall, the thing that depressed me the most and the most negative thing I took away from the conversation was the pros who said that the Awards didn’t matter because they were “fan driven”.  Pray thee tell…if that’s so, what does that say about your attitude towards your fans, then?

I’ll leave it on that…those’re my thoughts on the thing.  🙂

Tolstoy