First, the backstory. Maymay created a tool to help people who use OKCupid to keep themselves safer. For those who may not know, OKCupid is a dating site where you can answer all kinds of questions (and add new ones), which allows the site to compare your answers to other user’s answers and give you a match score. What maymay’s predator alert tool does is flags (here’s an example) people who’ve answered certain questions in potentially concerning ways. Sadly, those questions don’t even have to be subtle. It turns out that rapists will straight out tell you they’re rapists if you just avoid using the word “rape”. The predator alert tool is a super awesome idea and if you use OKCupid you should absolutely install it (there’s a slightly different version for Fetlife, too).

You wouldn’t think there’d be much to complain about there. It’s your choice to answer a question like “Do you feel there are any circumstances in which a person is obligated to have sex with you?” with “Yes”, so there’s not a lot of room for whining about false accusations or having your answers taken out of context.

Sadly, some people have such terrible tunnel vision that they’ve been whining and crying about some of the questions the predator alert tool will warn you about, specifically this one “Have you ever choked someone who you were in some kind of intimate relationship with (e.g., you wrapped your hands or some object around their throat)?“. Apparently it’s a terrible injustice to flag consensual and non-consensual chokers the same way. Unquietpirate has already posted a response to that pointless fucking whining, but I think the whole conversation needs more rage.

First of all, as I understand it the tool doesn’t block red-flagged users, all it does is display a list of the questions and answers you may want to be concerned about. Kinky people who want to be choked aren’t going to skip red-flagged profiles entirely. They’re going to have a look, see the explanation the user gave for answering yes to the choking question (if you didn’t add an explanation about how you would never ever choke a person without their enthusiastic consent, stop fucking whining and fix that shit), and go “sweet, nothing to worry about”. People who are freaked out by the idea of even perfectly consensual choking are going to be a bad match for you, so why would you even bother whining about those people skipping over your profile? This is a non-issue, you stupid fucks.

Second, by saying that not flagging a consensual kinkster as a potential predator matters more than getting as much information as possible into the hands of people who need it, you’re really saying that your poor, delicate ego is more important than other people’s physical safety. Their physical fucking safety! If you really believe that, you haven’t been mis-flagged. You are dangerously self-absorbed, if not outright predatory, and people are absolutely right to fear and avoid you.

Finally, it is in no way unjust to flag kinky people as potential abusers. According to a survey the NCSF did, 30% of respondents had their consent violated in some way. 30 fucking percent! That’s actually worse than the already dismal statistic of nearly 1 in 5 women experiencing rape at some point in their lives. When people stop getting abused in the kink scene, you can complain about how it’s not fair to lump us in with vanilla abusers. Until then, shut the fuck up.