Dear FetLife (And Other Kinky People): You Don’t Have The Luxury Of Being Apolitical Anymore.

(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 9.648% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)

New rule: if you have spent more time complaining about FetLife’s new bans on FetLife than you have spent time complaining to your politicians, you probably deserve to lose access to FetLife.

And you might.

If you haven’t been paying attention, FetLife founder John Baku has explained why he’s going to have to ban a host of  topics on FetLife – including non-consensual consent, hypnosis, raceplay, incest, and anything involving drugs and alcohol. Hint: It’s not because he wants to.

It’s because political issues and lawsuits are in very serious danger of shutting FetLife down.

And I hear people saying “Well, we’ll just go somewhere else!” – not realizing that there are whole swathes of society that are out to shut down kink everywhere. If you don’t fight for FetLife now, whatever kinky website you go to will be closed down next, or will be so overlookable that nobody else will be be there. (Mainly because PayPal and credit card companies are ensuring that porn and porn providers cannot get paid. No money for webservers == no internet porn for you.)

And that may not be just FetLife. It may also apply to those happy local kink clubs you’ve watched grow over the last decade or so. People wanna shut them down, and unfortunately, those people are in power. Read @Zetsu’s discussion on how Trump’s Attorney General’s #1 priority is stamping out porn. Read @NCD’s post on what happened to porn providers during the Reagan years. This isn’t just in America – England’s pondering new laws, Germany is, all around the world the tide is turning.

Look. A lot of you – perhaps the majority – have said, “I don’t wanna talk about boring old politics! I go to kinky websites to get away from all that crap.”

And that might have passed in years where politicians weren’t necessarily in favor of kinky shit happening, but at least they weren’t actively out to shut it down.

Unfortunately for you, everything you do is a political act, whether you realize it or not. You may have thought that swooning over The Wolf’s erotic adventures was a nonpolitical act, but unfortunately helping to popularize the guy is putting FetLife in the sight of lawsuits now that he’s been arrested for rape. You may have thought that jerking off to hot porn was a nonpolitical act, but that porn involves the dynamics of who gets paid to make it, and how, and whether they’re in danger of getting thrown in jail. (Even if it’s written porn.)

Everything you do is a political act. Even if you choose not to participate in politics, your non-participation is a big rubber stamp to the Powers That Be that says, “Yes, please, keep doing that.”

Which, as noted, might have flown in an age kinder to kink. But the pendulum is swinging back – not just in America, but all over the globe – and now your abstaining vote is saying, “Yes, please, keep working to eradicate kink.”

…and possibly eradicate your job, should you choose to keep participating in kink. The legal protections for kinky people will dry up unless we speak up.

Look. This isn’t a conservatives vs liberals sort of thing. If you’re a conservative, please remember that you don’t have to vote in lockstep with your party line, just as I’ve complained about Obama’s heavy usage of drone strikes. We’re actually all in this together, because frankly, the one thing we have in common is this kinkiness that we know, and love.

You can call your Senators and your local government to tell them what you want, and what you don’t want. (As I noted in my post on calling to save the Affordable Health Care act, “calling your local official” is the one thing they really can’t ignore.) You can, as John Baku has suggested, to support the National Coalition For Sexual Freedom by visiting their site and possibly donating your time and/or money and/or both.

But unfortunately, kink is now fighting a rearguard position. (I hope that’s your kink.) And your previous position of “I just want to see my porn and not think about all this stuff” means you’re not going to see nearly as much porn as you did before.

That’s not a hypothesis. That’s already happened. Look at the list of everything John Baku is going to have to take down from this FetLife in order to keep it functioning.

That list of things you can watch is going to shrink more unless you speak up.

7 Comments

  1. LS Fayne
    Jan 20, 2017

    Very Good! It made me listen and Act. Eloise

  2. Michael
    Jan 20, 2017

    I hope this doesn’t happen fetlife is about the bdsm community and education about bdsm it all so helps connect the local kink community

  3. Tib
    Jan 20, 2017

    If I may make one nit-pick comment, order of operation matters for a few things. Specifically something like consent.

    IE:

    non-consensual consent – made to consent to something under duress.

    Consensual non-consent – the play style in kink where someone voluntarily agrees to be involved in play that later appears to be non-consensual.

  4. TJ
    Jan 21, 2017

    Wow. I didn’t realize. I haven’t been on in a while now. What am I supposed to say? Hey I want my kink and stop trying to take away what is to some people a religion we live everyday? This is absurd. ;(

  5. Simon
    Jan 23, 2017

    I DO NOT WANT Anybody depriving me of MY choice in literature/ video/ websites/ photos etc, Especially if it has been consensually produced!
    I choose subject matter that is MY kink, NOT someone else’s and find it EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE that somebody is telling me what I should or should not be able to access!
    Such actions will end up driving personal choice Underground where it can’t be safely managed or accessed.
    Grrrrrr!

  6. bev richardson
    Jan 24, 2017

    the erosion of freedom of sexual and sensual expression between consenting adults is an attack on the freedom of us all
    today kink tomorrow gay day after that who knows only that every one will lose by this..
    so yes time to act to speak out without fear to make a stand for what we believe is right for each of us … blessed be well

  7. Bill Herrin
    Jan 26, 2017

    Living in a modern society is like owning a dog, you are always training it whether you intend to or not. By not constantly pushing for kinky sexual rights, not having been pushing for job, housing and acceptance rights for those of us with kinky lives we have told government, politicians, the general public etc that we don’t care and it’s ok to take away what few rights we have. Like your dog, when he sees what he can get away with. he will.

    We may be the spear point in a bigger movement, the Dominionist movement is marching ahead right not with a true goal of creating a Christian Theocracy in the US and then the world. The easiest targets to start are those of us in the country who have non traditional sex lives. The push is going to be against LGBT, BDSM, Swingers etc who are a small enough segment of the population that most Americans won’t feel threatened (because they aren’t thinking).

    The time to act has passed, now we are in a time of fighting for our rights and lives. It’s going to be difficult for the half of us who consider ourselves ‘conservatives’ or Republicans because that’s the group that is attacking us even if they are being driven by a minority of their ‘organization’. It’s hard to change our thinking about long held loyalties but the bottom line is we need EVERYONE in our lifestyle to join the fight or we will lose. If we lose I believe the whole country could well be lost in an amazingly short period of time.

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