A reader was kind enough to send me a link to just the sort of Fetlife thread that I like to rant about, so here goes. That thread is here, but I’ll summarize it quickly for people who don’t do Fetlife: some schlub is convinced that the answer to all of our female dom/male sub prayers is to make ourselves identifiable by, uh, putting paperclips on our shirt collars. Because getting shitty one-line messages from random asshats isn’t annoying enough, apparently I need to conveniently tag myself for further harassment in real life, waste my time making up excuses for why I’m wearing a paperclip, and run the risk of some total asshole outing me while I’m having lunch with my coworkers.

Shockingly enough, he didn’t react particularly well when people told him they didn’t like his idea, and started whining about how he has freedom of speech and everyone who exercised their own freedom of speech to tell him why his idea didn’t appeal to them is apparently a great big meaniepants mcpoopyhead. I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but it always hurts my brain a little to see how fast men who supposedly worship women change their tune when women disagree with them. And for extra irony points, as far as I know everyone who said they didn’t like his idea was relatively polite about it and he still started whining and crying about what horrible people the supposed “haters” are.

I do want to acknowledge the one thing this guy didn’t get totally wrong, though. Usually when men complain about not being able to find dominant women to pester they don’t have any sort of suggestion to fix it. Mr Paperclips had a shitty suggestion, but at least he had one and I’m sad to say I’ve heard far worse. I may be in no hurry to explain why I’ve got a paperclip on my shirt over and over, but at least it’s less obvious than wearing handcuff jewelry or a t-shirt with a kinky slogan.

The part that makes me want to flip tables and set them on fire is the whining about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is immensely important, I’m not denying that. However, Mr Paperclips’ freedom of speech was never under debate and never attacked in any way. Literally zero people said he didn’t have the right to talk about his idea, just that it was a crappy idea and they weren’t going to participate. What I truly wish the freedom of speech!!!11!!! whiners understood is that freedom of speech is for everyone. You get to have your opinion and so do I. I might even, horror of horrors, have opinions about your opinion, which I have just as much right to talk about as you do.

That kind of behaviour makes me seriously doubt that the freedom of speech whiners actually care about freedom of speech at all. If you even vaguely understand the concept, then it’s obvious it has to apply to everyone equally. Trying to shut down other people’s freedom of speech tells me that what you actually want is total freedom of speech for yourself and people who agree with you, and no freedom at all for people who disagree with you. We can all agree that’s shitty and hypocritical, right?

It would also make me really happy if people understood that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. That is, while I don’t think people should be jailed or face criminal charges if they’re not making threats or spewing hate speech, they should understand that acting like an asshole means that people might somehow get the idea that they’re an asshole and ban them from their group/forum/blog/website or otherwise choose not to interact with them.

And finally, I’m going to quote an xkcd comic that I think perfectly sums up the “freedom of speech!!111!!!” argument:

I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

Not so long ago the creator of Submissive Guy Comics asked readers to ask him questions on Tumblr. Ferns asked an especially interesting question about organic power (the power someone has outside of a d/s relationship) vs d/s power (the power someone has over another person because they’ve talked it out and agreed to it). Ferns also has some interesting commentary on SGC’s answer, as well as a whole post of her own about traditional power signifiers and d/s, all of which you should probably skim if you want to make any sense of the rambling that’s coming 🙂

Balancing organic/societal power and d/s power in a relationship can be pretty tricky. Personally, I need someone to have a certain level of organic power before I’m even interested in dominating them. Submission is only meaningful to the extent that it’s freely chosen, so I really need someone who can say no when he needs to. I get that it can be really hard to say no sometimes (god knows I’m not always good at it myself) and that low self-esteem is a sadly common thing, but I personally find the inability to say (to quote Ferns’ delightful post about “protection” and big bad doms)  ‘No thank you’ or ‘I’m not interested, strange shouty lady who is ordering me about’ or ‘Are you insane?!’ or ‘Piss off’ an instant interest killer. I want someone who can say no and chooses not to because that makes me happy, not someone who just can’t say no.

On the other hand, too much of an imbalance of power in the sub’s favour would probably just make me all twitchy and insecure and that’s no fun for anyone. On a fantasy level I love the idea of dominating someone much more powerful than I am, but in practice I’d probably spend a lot of time being anxious about whether he sincerely respected me or whether he was just getting off on how humiliating it was to submit to someone he saw as lesser than he was. To be clear that second scenario would be totally humiliating for me and if someone did that to me I’d never acknowledge his existence ever again. Things would probably also get weird if I tried to have a d/s relationship with someone smarter than I was. Being a woman in a male-dominated field gives me a gigantic chip on my shoulder when it comes to men assuming they’re smarter than I am, plus I’m generally insecure about being smart enough, so to have a d/s relationship with a particularly academically clever man (I’d be fine with someone who was a genius painter or composer or anything that’s totally unrelated to my field, that most likely wouldn’t set me off) I’d have to absolutely trust him never ever to treat me like I was stupid or tell me how to do things.

Like SGC says in his answer, power imbalances can certainly be worked around, but they have to be understood first. I’d probably have an easier time having a d/s relationship with someone who had tremendous advantages but understood that the deck was stacked in his favour than the type of person described in the Barry Switzer quote “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple” even if we were otherwise fairly equal in terms of organic power. If you’re just oblivious to the advantages you have, whether that’s access to education or physical beauty, then no amount of conversation is likely to make a d/s relationship work for me simply because we can’t talk about power if one of us sticks his fingers in his ears and yells “La la la I can’t hear you” whenever I bring it up.

Readers, how do you think differences in organic power affect d/s relationships?

I have a nasty cold but thanks to the magic of DayQuil I can at least give you a few links to funny videos.

My Drunk Kitchen, episode one:

Hannah Harto is an absolute genius at comedic timing. An incredible amount of work must go into editing these videos.

Jenna Marbles, Bounce That Dick:

Yes it’s three years old. It’s still funny.

zefrank, True Facts about the Owl:

There’s a whole series of these, they’re all pretty great.

Jake Jacobson III, Ylvis vs. Drowning Pool – Let the Foxes Hit the Floor

Not so much a video but you can’t tell me this isn’t funny 🙂

Henry Edmonds (animation),  Robert Clouth (music) – Boots and Cats

This will now be stuck in your head forever. If I were a better person I’d feel bad about that.

Mr Weebl – Badgers:

Electric 6 – Gay Bar:

Duck Sauce – Barbra Streisand:

Us vs Th3m – You can’t simple maths under pressure. A game, not a video, but it has a horribly catchy theme song that gets stuck in my head for hours

And if that doesn’t keep you entertained, there’s always Khan Academy. If you’re bored, why not go learn a thing?

It’s sadly common for the ageist dicks of the world to tell younger doms that they’re too young to be dominant, as if age has anything to do with it.

First of all, being dominant is an identity, not an achievement. If it was an achievement, there would be an agreed upon test to take or a panel of judges who could decide whether or not to bestow true domhood upon you. Tests and judges only make sense when you have something concrete to test, like the ability to play pierce someone without cross contaminating anything. Domination (and submission!) are so subjective that testing how good a dom someone is would be as relevant and useful as testing how good a romantic partner someone is. There is no “good partner,” only the person who is right for you. Dominance is an identity like nerd is an identity – it’s certainly related to things you do, but only you get to decide whether or not you’re a nerd and it has nothing to do with how old you are.

If the people who shit on younger doms were being logical about it, they would also have to shit on older doms who are new to the scene. Age does limit the amount of experience you could possibly have, but if you’ve ever spent any time at any kink events, online or off, you’ll know that it’s not exactly uncommon for people not to figure out they’re kinky or not feel comfortable exploring it until later in life. So why don’t older newbies get more shit? My theory is that they don’t scare the douchebags of the scene because they aren’t walking threats to the idea that domination is this extraordinarily difficult thing that requires years of intense study and only the most extraordinary, experienced, and educated person could possibly call themselves a dom. Basically, these people are so insecure that they freak out when some kid shows up and proves that anybody can be a good dom to the right partner. We can all agree that’s blatant douchebaggery, right?

On the subject of douchebaggery, how exactly are people who are “too young to be doms” supposed to get the experience that would get these assclowns off their backs? Oh, that’s right, they’re not. They’re supposed to quietly slink away from the scene and not provide any competition for the hot young submissives. If you know you can’t compete with a young, inexperienced dom in a subculture that fetishizes experience in doms (god forbid submissives be experienced, but that’s a separate post), I know where the problem is and it’s not with your competition.

Life experience does count, of course, but it’s hardly the be-all end-all of skill as a dom. There’s no shortage of people with decades more life experience than I have making complete asses of themselves on Fetlife, after all. Now, it would take a pretty exceptional 20 year old dom to convince a 25 year old to submit to them, but why couldn’t they be a perfectly good dom for another 20 year old?

I used to have trouble taking younger doms seriously, but I think that was because I a) bought into the myth in the scene that you can’t possibly be a good dom without lots of life experience, and b) was insecure about my own level of experience so I was kind of a dick about people even younger than I was. Fortunately, I’ve grown up since then and now understand that it’s pretty cool if people are figuring out what they really want younger than I did.

And finally, if age is so important how come nobody gets told they’re too young to be submissive?

I came across this tumblr post by Abby and it made me think about how some people talk about respect in the scene:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

I’m really suspicious that the doms who keep talking about how respect is so important and they deserve to be respected and how terrible it is that submissives these days have no respect aren’t using the word respect the way I do. The people most likely to be disrespected are submissive or assumed to be submissive. Doms, particularly male doms, have very little to complain about in terms of being respected (younger doms, even male ones, do get a certain amount of shit from ageist dicks, but that’s a separate blog post).

Given that male dominants generally are respected in the scene, I have to assume that when they say respect and I say respect we’re actually talking about different things. What would make the whining I’ve seen make some sort of sense is if these guys (let’s be honest, they’re mostly men, although I have seen female doms pull some ridiculous bullshit too) are actually talking about wanting to be treated like an authority by everyone they run into, whether or not they’ve ever done anything to earn it.

Fuck that. Deciding to call yourself a dom in no way makes you an authority. Literally anyone can do that, no matter how inexperienced or ignorant they are. Treating every dom like an authority would require everyone else in the scene to completely ignore basic common sense and their own ability to judge whether someone is worth taking seriously. Not only is that never going to happen, but that sort of “respect” is worthless. Why would I care whether someone with such terrible judgement that they’ll fawn over every so-called dominant they meet fawns over me too? That’s not even about me as a person, it’s about their fantasy of how they should act around doms. I really don’t care to be used as part of someone’s fantasy without them even asking if I wanted a cameo in the J. Random Sub Show.

Real authority is earned. If you’re that invested in being treated like an authority, get really good at something and share your knowledge. Unless that’s too much work for you, in which case keep whining and crying about how everyone you meet is an asshole because they won’t act like their mission in life is to prop up your oh-so-fragile ego. That will totally make people respect you.

The only respect people in the scene are automatically due is being treated like people. It should but sadly does not go without saying that subs are people too and are entitled to the exact same level of respect that doms are until they’ve specifically negotiated other arrangements with a particular person. We are all just people with an unusual hobby until we make other agreements with someone, calling myself dominant doesn’t make me any more or any less than anyone else in the scene, no matter how they identify. I’m fine with that because I’m a fucking grownup. If you’re not, I recommend taking a long hard look at yourself.

To quote my search terms: what happens if you’re a dominant woman who enjoys penetration?

Well, your partner better penetrate you if he doesn’t want you to find a new one 🙂

More seriously, it’s really common for kinky people to believe that some actions are inherently dominant and some are inherently submissive, as ridiculous as that idea is when you actually think about it. Because it’s such a common belief, even if you don’t think that way yourself you’re likely to run into people who do, which makes it pretty hard to avoid worrying about whether the thing you want to do might be completely misinterpreted.

For example, it’s pretty common for people to assume that being penetrated is a submissive action. That’s ridiculous, actions aren’t inherently anything. Lending a friend money might be a good thing, unless that money helps them to stay in denial about their addiction. Punching someone in the face might be a bad thing, unless they’re learning a martial art and need to experience getting hit in a safe environment in case they ever get hit for real. It’s the context that matters, that’s what gives an action meaning.

So in the context of a dominant woman telling her submissive partner to penetrate her, to do it the way she likes, and to keep it up until she’s good and done, it’s pretty clear that she’s not doing anything remotely submissive. Performing a particular action in no way changes the fact that she’s calling all of the shots. By the same token, performing a particular action in no way makes the submissive man doing the penetrating dominant. He’s still following orders and he’s still doing it to make their dominant happy.

Where things get messy is that even if our hypothetical dom knows perfectly well that telling someone to penetrate her doesn’t make her submissive, her partner might still have the idea that some actions are fundamentally submissive. Now she has to worry about how he’s going to react and face the possibility that their relationship might end if he can’t get over the idea that an action is fundamentally submissive. That’s pretty fucking scary, especially if you’re new to domination and deep down you’re still scared you really aren’t dominant enough (that goes away eventually, right?)

The possibility of being told you’re not good enough or losing your relationship sucks, but if someone thinks he can tell you what kind of sex you’re allowed to want he’s not very fucking submissive now is he? It may take a while to find him, but I guarantee there is someone out there who cares more about who you actually are than who he thinks you should be.

Also, the idea that letting other people decide what kind of sex I have could possibly be anything but submissive irritates the shit out of me. Am I seriously supposed to prove how dominant I am by doing what I’m told? I hate to break it to those assholes, but that’s not how domination works.

If you’re dominant and you like penetration, go for it! Anyone who says that means you’re not really dominant is too stupid to listen to.

We all understand that if a dominant top doesn’t like the way their scene is going it’s on them to steer it in a direction that makes them (and obviously everyone they’re playing with) happier, right? They’re the one running the show, it would be ridiculous for them to blame the sub for not magically knowing what they wanted, wouldn’t it? And if they did, the sub would probably not bother speaking to them again because they’re obviously a complete fucking tool.

So why do we let dominant bottoms get away with blaming their partners because they’re incompetent at running a scene? Okay, stupid question. We let them get away with it because so few dominant bottoms are self aware enough to know they’re dominant and it’s so easy for women in particular to be manipulated into thinking it’s our fault when things go wrong. Maybe I’ll reach douchebag dominant bottoms with this post and maybe I won’t, but I’m hoping this will at least be comforting to the tops who are being blamed for not dominating “correctly” when the problem is the supposed “submissive” doesn’t actually want to be dominated at all.

Dominant bottoms have no one to blame but themselves if the scene doesn’t go the way they were hoping. You’re the fucking dom. If the scene isn’t doing it for you, learn to fucking steer. Making your sub (let’s be honest, if you want to run the scene to your exact specifications you need a submissive partner or a very well paid professional) try to read your mind is mean, lazy, and setting them up for failure in the non-fun way. This is what I mean by “incompetent at running a scene.” I’ll freely admit that steering a scene while making it look like you’re not in control is more complicated that simple domination from the top, but you still don’t get to blame other people for your failings.

On the upside, the fact that it’s your fault your scenes aren’t working the way you’d like means you have the power to fix it. First of all, you have to admit that expecting someone to read your mind is total douchebag behaviour. If having a scene play out the exact way you fantasized about is really important to you, write it down and give your partner the fucking script ahead of time. I am absolutely serious: write it down, give your partner the script, and rehearse (and, uh, date a theatre geek if at all possible). While you’re writing down that script and rehearsing it, you might also spare just a second or two to think about how much work you’re asking your partner to do and how utterly unreasonable it would be to expect them to magically intuit the pages and pages of dialog and actions that they’re trying to memorize.

If you’re not as attached to acting out a pre-scripted fantasy, you can teach your partner to read you/which types of interactions do it for you/what sort of persona does it for you. This will be a lot of work for both of you and you’ll probably have to spend huge amounts of time talking out what worked and what didn’t, but working with your partner to teach them how to play their role in a way that works for you is pretty much the only way you’re going to get what you want. I mean, you can hold out for the woman who, by some amazing coincidence, just happens to like topping in the exact way you like, but that’s about as likely to work as planning to retire by winning the lottery.

Sure, this all goes against the fantasy that you’re actually submissive, but do you want to cling to the fantasy or do you want to have scenes that you really enjoy? This actually isn’t that different from what people who are actually submissive go through when they negotiate a higher-risk scene like a take-down. Any responsible dom will insist on very thorough negotiation before doing anything that could go horribly wrong, even up to the point where the submissive starts worrying that they’re dictating exactly what the dom is going to do. If submissive people can negotiate a scene that works for them, you can goddamn well do it too.

The one thing I really want to say to unaware dominant bottoms is stop fucking blaming the sub when you didn’t teach them how to please you! If you can’t have fun unless things are going your way (which is totally normal, I’m a control freak too), then it’s your job to make things go your way. It’s not exactly unheard of for people to enjoy getting a reaction out of their play partner – if you can tell them exactly how to get that reaction, you’re actually saving them a lot of stumbling around in the dark. You do need someone who’s willing to take orders, but I hear there are a few of those people in the kink community 🙂

For people who are trying to make an unaware dominant bottom happy, the one thing I really want you to know is it’s not your fault. You’re not a bad top, you’re not stupid, you’re not doing it wrong. If your partner isn’t fully honest with you about what they want, how the fuck are you supposed to give it to them?

First of all, I’m by no means a security expert. For advice from an actual expert who did actual research, you should really buy a book like Violet Blue’s The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy. That said, I’m going to talk about some simple safety stuff and why it’s important, and you can decide whether or not I’m full of shit.

1. Username/handle/profile name – particularly on Fetlife, this should not be a name that you use anywhere else. Using the same name in more places makes you easier to google. Being easier to google makes you easier to find in real life. Also, the more places you use that name, the more chances you have to slip up and attach identifiable information to it. Taking myself for example, given my age, location, and the fact that I’ve mentioned being a programmer on this blog, there are only so many people I could possibly be. Fortunately for me odds are good that my boss wouldn’t give a shit if someone outed me, but people who can’t afford to get outed need to be more careful than I am about what personal details they share.

2. Pictures: like your username, any pictures you put on your Fetlife profile should not be used anywhere else. It’s very easy to take an image (even on Fetlife, sure they’ve disabled right click save but that doesn’t actually accomplish much), plug it into Google’s reverse image search or TinEye, and find everywhere else that image exists. Those are really handy tools if you’ve been talking with someone online and have doubts that their photos are really of them, but they can get you in trouble if you use the same images on Fetlife and in any place attached to your real name.

Pictures on Fetlife are simply not secure. Pictures anywhere on the internet are simply not secure. If it can be viewed, it can be saved and posted elsewhere or shared in ways you didn’t intend. You can make it a pain in the ass to steal photos or videos, but you can’t make it impossible. Even if it were possible to keep people from saving an image on the internet to their computer (that’s not even slightly possible and never will be), it will never be possible to prevent someone from viewing an image anywhere on the internet and taking a picture of it with a camera. If you can see it with your eyeballs, the camera can see it too. Now your ‘it’s safe if it’s on Fetlife’ image can be posted anywhere. Sure, you have to log in to see the images so you can steal them, but it takes maybe a minute to create a new Fetlife account, and still less than five minutes if you create a new email address to go with it.

3. Email addresses: the email your Fetlife profile is attached to should not be used for anything else. This makes it easier to keep everything separate and make sure you never reply from the wrong address, it makes it easier to keep things private even if you check your main email where other people can see you, and it makes you harder to google. If you’ve ever posted that email address anywhere else, that might come up if someone googles your address.

4. Real name: don’t use it anywhere in connection with a profile you don’t want connected with your real name. All sorts of sites, from twitter to Fetlife, will ask you for a name. Don’t give your real one. They will never know. Make up something plausible sounding if you like, but unless you’re paying for something online and need to give a name that will match the name on your card, there’s no reason you have to give your real name anywhere online. This may sound obvious, but people have gotten burned by not realizing that twitter displays both your “name” and your handle on every tweet you make.

5. Personal details: people can track you down with surprisingly few details. Be careful how much you talk about your hobbies, or what you do for a living, or where you live. Even if you’re just talking about the weather, that can help people start narrowing down where you are. Like I mentioned earlier, knowing that I’m a female programmer means there are only so many people I couild possibly be. Knowing that I like whisky means there are certain events I’m likely to be at. Knowing that I’m a gamer means there are other events I’m likely to be at. Knowing both of those things means you can look at members of different groups and see which ones appear in both groups.

6. Location: you don’t have to share this either. Many many people on Fetlife list themselves as being from Antarctica to obscure where they actually life. Even if you list yourself as being from Antarctica, be aware that you can still be tracked by which groups you’re a member of or where you post regularly. Your recent activity is very easy to find – it’s at the bottom of your Fetlife profile. If you frequently post in the Fargo Moorhead Fetlifers group, for example, it’s not going to be hard to figure out roughly where you live. If you can’t risk being found, stick with groups that are for certain topics, not particular locations.

7. Public wifi: don’t do anything sensitive on public wifi. You don’t know whether the network was set up correctly, you don’t know who else is on there, you don’t know whether the network itself has been compromised. It’s not at all difficult to see all the traffic on a network, not just the stuff that’s intended for your device. Fetlife keeps everything encrypted now, but they didn’t always. Other sites may not encrypt anything at all – if you don’t see the padlock icon (in chrome it’s at the left side of the url/search bar), don’t do anything you wouldn’t want other people to be able to see.

8. Browsers: if anyone else uses your computer and you want to keep things private, you need to clear your cache, not bookmark anything sensitive, and not allow your browser to save passwords for anything sensitive. Chrome, for example, will only allow you to view the actual password if you enter the password you logged into your computer with, but you still don’t want it to save passwords because you can see the name of the site and the username without having to enter a password. If you don’t want people to know you use Fetlife, you can’t let your browser keep a record of you having a Fetlife password.

9. Passwords: don’t reuse them, have a strong password, make it hard to guess, etc, etc. This is all stuff you’ve probably heard before. I recommend using a password store like KeePass or LastPass. If you use one of those, you only have to remember one password, no one else can even see which sites you have passwords for, and you can use extremely strong passwords or ideally pass phrases (instead of a single word, use a sentence) without having to put a huge amount of effort into memorizing them. Strong passwords are important because they make it much harder to bruteforce your password. It would take a human ages and ages to type in every possible combination for a six character password that’s only letters, but a computer can do that in no time flat. If your password is long enough and has enough different characters, it becomes more and more work to generate and test all the possibilities.

Readers, do you have any other safety tips?

In case you haven’t already heard, some worthless goatfelcher created a script to pull information off of Fetlife and used it to make a searchable database of Fetlife members. Specifically Fetlife members who are female and under the age of 30. Not their real names or non-Fetlife contact information, to be clear, but it’s still creepy as fuck. This shitstain, to quote What the Fetlife Meatlist tells us about BDSM Culture:

claims that he is motivated by the altruistic goal of pressuring Bitlove (the creators of Fetlife) into implementing security fixes to prevent these sort of attacks happening in the future.

Which is obviously a blatant lie. Someone who was not a total cumgolem and actually was interested solely in pressuring Fetlife to improve their security would have created a list of dominant men over 55, or people whose usernames start with Q, or people who listed their role as “Daddy”, or literally anything other than a list of young women. This wankstain has absolutely no altruistic motive, he just enjoys feeling clever and making women feel afraid and exposed. That is literally the only reason to publish women’s information in a way that makes it trivial for creeps to find and harass them. Any and all attempts to defend this obviously reprehensible behaviour in the comments anywhere on my blog will be deleted and banned, don’t go crying that I didn’t warn you. It’s probably a terrible idea to enable comments on this post at all, but I want people to be able to ask questions about internet safety, which I will be talking about next. Actually, fuck it. The internet safety bit will be in the next post and there will be no comments on this one.

Frisky Fairy has also written a post about this issue titled Not Meat, Not Quite a Person: How Fetlife Failed Women Under 30, Mr Pent has one called The Fetlife Meatlist Scandal from a Security Perspective, Shadow-girl has one titled My thoughts on the “Meat List”, just to give a few examples.

If you are under 30 and female, it’s now easier for creepers to find your profile and harass you, but you haven’t necessarily been outed (unless your real name is in your Fetlife handle, which I can’t imagine is common for people who aren’t already out). Your pictures aren’t available outside of Fetlife (well, they’re no more available outside of Fetlife than they are usually), the list doesn’t contain your real name or your phone number or anything. This sucks, it’s obviously not okay and is just one more example of how much many men despise women, but you’re probably not going to end up having an incredibly awkward conversation about you kink with your boss or your family.

Another thing to keep in mind is that bullshit like this is in fact largely preventable. I say largely because a motivated enough attacker is going to be able to get their hands on whatever information they want, but there are a great many things Fetlife could do to make the jizzpaintings of the world work a lot harder to shit on people, and to handle it better when it does happen. For starters, Fetlife’s user ids are sequential, which makes it really easy to run through all of the profiles on the site. As a business, Bitlove (the company that runs Fetlife), may or may not have the time and money to fix their shit, but anyone who says it just isn’t technically possible is completely full of shit.