A few highlights from this New York Times article (listed under Fashion):

On the 10th anniversary of the fair, Folsom Street East brought together thousands of men and women (and men who formerly were women) for the sort of gathering that, once upon a time, rarely took place in the full light of day.

There was a time when people whose erotic rituals ran to whips and chains and latex and highly complex protocols of dominance and submission were confined to the cultural shadows. But that was before Madonna turned bondage into a concert party trick, before the Gap ran ads with a tongue-in-cheek S-M tagline ("Everybody in leather!"), before Altoids and Svedka vodka purloined imagery from "Venus in Furs" for their ad campaigns and well before Victoria's Secret mainstreamed the bondage pinup queen Bettie Page.

"The whole leather fetish look has been around since at least the 1920's," said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "But from the moment it started to come out of the closet following the sexual and gay liberation movements, it was already influencing popular culture, with guys walking down Castro Street in leather and people wearing it in friendly little swingers clubs in suburbia."

"So much of this world used to be swept into dark corners or alleys or basements," Mr. Weis said. Images and acts, he added, that might once have been shocking now barely merit a yawn.

"It's really just fashion, no different from shopping in Barneys or Bergdorf's," said Gregory Bunch, a salesman at the Chelsea fetish shop, the Noose. "You buy key pieces that are the best you can afford and that provide the most utility. Then you accessorize."

The key pieces this summer, Mr. Bunch said, are leather shorts and a harness. Actually, those are the key pieces every year. "It's too hot now for chaps," said Mr. Bunch, who bears a tattoo on his right bicep that reads SLAVE. "If shorts are too hot, you can always wear a studded leather codpiece jock."

Of course you can. Or you can wear, as many did, a latex singlet or bleach-mottled skinhead denims or neoprene jerkins reminiscent of Nicolas Ghesquiere's designs for Balenciaga, or close-cropped mohawks or abraded jeans left half-open or dog collars and leather hoods with zippered mouth and eyeholes and with little puppy ears attached.

"It's a way to express the feelings and emotions of your inner canine," explained Steve Birko, who calls himself Puppy Diesel when dabbling in the burgeoning sphere of what in kink circles is called human animal training, an elaborate form of role play in which the end point is basically sit and stay.

If there was a single dominant (pardon the term) fashion theme of the day, it was takeoffs on the traditional Scottish form of masculine dress; dozens of the men and women (and men who formerly were women) chose to wear kilts to the fair. Among them was a buff shirtless man who wears an altogether different kind of gear for his day job as a Protestant cleric.

I've long held the belief that BDSM fetish gear was creeping into mainstream fashion. I have seen young girls, who were not yet in their teens, wearing leather boots with three inch heels with miniskirts. I sat next to a 12 year-old girl on a recent plane trip who wore a shirt that was ripped across her chest revealing her barely-there cleavage. And pierced nipples are no longer a shocking thing. My SCUBA instructor sported pierced nipples in teaching my college gym class.

I think relationships in which one person seeks to control the mind or body of another can never truly be loving because it is an affection for power, control, and a desire to stroke one's ego. Even as a submissive this holds true for you derive pleasure from being made into a sexual object. Though the role is subservient it is a special role and involves being in the spotlight, even though it is a light shining on a stage of degradation.

BDSM culture is not really so shocking once you take procreation and mutual loving and self-giving out of the act of intercourse. Once you start treating your spouse/partner/whatever as a sexual object from which you seek to derive pleasure then why not use bondage, why not treat one another as dogs, dolls, or any other animal or object? Why not do this all the time and make a "lifestyle" out of it?

It is, to use the cliché, a slippery-slope. It starts when we teach our young girls to view themselves to be vain and immodest, when we teach them that it is good to attract the eyes and attention of others, and that they should earn compliments like they do good grades. It starts when we teach our boys to look at women this way, telling them that girls like to be treated this way. It becomes inevitable and embedded in mainstream culture when we teach that it is permissive to enjoy sex, our own bodies, and those of others, at any age given that you take the appropriate measures. Girls learn to objectify not only themselves but one another. Boys are learning to do the same.

Given that the above is the present reality of our culture should we really be shocked when men parade their "dogs" on the street as a source of pride and pastors revel in their leather kilts?