![]() ![]() “I got a really long message that was someone basically telling me what was wrong with Black people and that me wanting to be part of the BDSM community was me wanting to be back in slave days, and that we should all get on board with that being what we really want.” “I’ve been called n-word bitch, ‘you’re going to suck my white cock’…just this tirade of a bunch of racist things,” she said. I’ve talked to people from small towns, where there’s not a fetish club, and their only connection is talking to people on FetLife.”Īlthough she still maintains a FetLife profile, Lola visits the site less frequently now, due in part to the unmoderated racism she has experienced on the platform. “For some people, this is the only place that they can go to talk about their kinks. It’s an important resource for a lot of people,” she told me in an interview in late September. “When I first started out, that’s where I was. "I do not believe that this should be viewed as a punishment for being kinky but as protection against tyranny and close minded individuals that refuse to see This Thing We Do as the beautiful and healthy thing that it can be.Dirty Lola, a 39-year-old queer Black sex educator based in New York City, joined FetLife in 2012 in an effort to expand her network of kinky people in her personal and professional life. "For many kinksters, as we call ourselves, FetLife is one of the only modalities we have for staying in touch with like-minded individuals near and far. "While I may not like losing groups or fetish list choices, I'd much rather have to lose some of the aspects of website that I am accustomed to then having to lose my community connection altogether," says BDSM blogger Autumn Lokerson. Other kinksters are broadly supportive of FetLife's decision. "Perhaps if they had done as I had suggested years ago and self-policed the hate speech and harassment, this wouldn't have happened."įetLife did not respond to requests for comment. ![]() "FetLife often protected people who egged on rapists, racists, and abusers, so I can't really find it in me to feel that sorry for them here," she adds. "I'm amazed that I'm on the side of capitalism," Stryker writes over email to Broadly, "but enforced censorship by credit card processors has done more to clean up the garbage on Fetlife than years of activism has!" One of the first people to criticize FetLife publicly was kink activist Kitty Stryker. The site has been accused by some of protecting abusers and shaming those who speak out. ![]() But not everyone in the BDSM scene is a fan of the social network. Undoubtedly, it's a rough time for aficionados of rough sex. They interpret our consensual kinks as non-consensual because of the words we use and the way the images look, and they've acted to keep us from talking and showing these things on FetLife."įor More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter "Due to recent events, FetLife is being persecuted by people who don't understand us. "Kink is usually the first target," Susan Wright of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom writes in support of FetLife in a blog post. It seems that FetLife has been caught up in a global anti-kink morality panic. Trump's choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wants to revive the defunct Obscenity Prosecution Task Force and attack adult pornographers with Orwellian verve and McCarthy-era vigor. In the UK, the Digital Economy Bill criminalizes a range of consensual adult practices and puts small-scale feminist pornographers out of business. Recent months have seen a concerted attack on the global kink community. Baku said that FetLife received a notification that one of their merchant accounts was being shut down. Alongside ad sales, the website is dependent on the revenue from these credit card payments to stay operational-revenue that is processed using a merchant account. On FetLife, members pay to access premium features on the website. Founder John Baku explained in an apologetic and occasionally rambling blog post that the site was forced to delete hundreds of groups and thousands of fetishes in order to maintain their merchant accounts. The site has been invite-only since July 2016, but FetLife's new decision to self-censor has been motivated by financial necessity. Read more: How to Get the Kind of Rough Sex You Want Strip either out, and there's not a whole lot left. The BDSM scene is premised on consensual non-consent it's one of their core beliefs, just like how modern-day Republicanism is based on a rabid hatred of female bodily autonomy. Banning the latter from FetLife deals a body blow to the kink community who flock to the site. ![]()
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