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Software Development as Direct Action, by maymay (slides + voiceover)

See also: Rape is exceedingly common in the BDSM scene (according to the BDSM community’s own lobbying groups).

Rape is exceedingly common in the BDSM scene. In fact, even the community’s own lobbying groups such as the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom—one of their board members doubled as FetLife’s community manager, by the way—admit to a 50% higher occurrence of consent violations among BDSM practitioners than the general populace. That’s nearly as bad as police officers, who statistically speaking are also twice as likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence. The BDSM scene has a self-delusional belief that they are “all about consent,” but in reality, they are at least as bad with sexual consent as everybody else, and likely a lot worse given their penchant for eroticizing abuse. Many women and Submissive-identified people within that community, including myself, had been saying this for a long time, but had been routinely ignored. Even during the height of these national debates about “the BDSM community’s consent crisis,” the Consent Culture working groups were pitifully meek. They had collectively decided that “something must be done,” but what they chose to “do” was make a petition calling for the removal of the clause in FetLife’s Terms of Use that the site’s management was using as justification for censoring rape survivors. But as is often the case, when you must beg for something from a master, you find that they will not grant your request. Three years later, FetLife has still refused to change their policy and is still censoring rape survivors—unless those survivors use the Predator Alert Tool. In October 2012, I realized that the root cause of the FetLife problem was simply that site management got to control what users saw when they browsed the site. But the Internet, which was made famous by mashups, allowed a unique opportunity to route around FetLife’s censorship in a way FetLife could not control. I wrote a simple mashup between a public Google Spreadsheet and FetLife that enabled anyone to report a negative experience with a FetLife member. With a mere 260 lines of JavaScript, that information could then be overlaid directly on FetLife.com. With Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, the problem of FetLife’s censorship all but vanished: FetLife users could now warn other FetLife users about predatory behavior, and FetLife’s site management was powerless to stop it. Just a few weeks ago, we met a woman right here in Albuquerque who had used the tool to alert others about a local “Master” violating her consent. Users of the tool then began asking for a similar capability on other sites, like OkCupid and Facebook. There are now seven variations of the Predator Alert Tool browser add-on, each designed to work with a particular social network or dating site. Importantly, none of these tools has been developed in collaboration with the social network in question. Most sites have refused to acknowledge the tool, despite inquiries from journalists and community members. Some sites are actively hostile, sending DMCA takedown notices and even threatening to ban Predator Alert Tool users. Meanwhile, the already overwhelming positive response from the user community continues to grow. Predator Alert Tool arose directly from the needs of the community that it serves. It enabled the user community to do exactly what the authorities at FetLife didn’t want done, or what OkCupid and Facebook don’t want users thinking too critically about. And it accomplished this by just implementing that capability rather than waiting for permission to do so. Its impact was immediate and disruptive—on purpose. These characteristics are indicative of all direct action software development projects. Today in 2015 the petition proposed by the “Consent Culture” working groups has still not achieved its goal of stopping FetLife from silencing rape survivors. Predator Alert Tool was able to accomplish that goal in one night of coding, with these 260 lines of code, three years ago.

Software Development as Direct Action, by maymay

Resources:

How to help Predator Alert Tool

BDSM community groups admit to 50% more consent violations than the general population

Families of police officers twice as likely to be victims of domestic violence than the general populace

8 colorful Venn diagrams that show why “BDSM is not abuse” is a lie

(via maymay)

maymay

R. Foxtale has a new blog post up discussing some interesting meta points related to rolequeer theory and, specifically, the methodology behind its own theorizing:

We’re not professional academics, not professional activists, not professional writers, nothing – nor do we aspire to any of those positions of authority. We are kids on the Internet trying to make the world better ASA fucking P. And this means getting our ideas out of our heads, and into the hands of more people who might be able to use and improve them, as fast as we can. Even if we don’t look good doing it. Our priority is to be memetic, not to be impressive. This is an explicitly rolequeer ethic.

We’ve taken to using the shorthand phrase “Iteration Not Concentration” to refer to this way of being in constant flux in relationship to our own theorizing. Mimesis, not attribution, has always been more important to us—and has historically always been more impactful.

Between the two of us, however, R. foxtale is the “educated” one, a trained academician and researcher, whose been unlearning academia:

I came up in an academic milieu where my intellect (and self-esteem) were defined by my ability to make a logically-sound philosophical argument, extra bonus points if it was painstakingly articulated and rhetorically elegant, even if that meant moving the conversation forward so fractionally as to be effectively meaningless, or even just reiterating stuff other people already said 300 years ago. It’s been HARD work for me to unlearn the deeply-internalized programming that tells me publishing ideas before they’re perfected makes me “intellectually lazy.” I’m still working on it.

I’m the hothead, the middle-school drop out, the impatient one. We make a good pair. :)

All ideas, or at least all good ones, go through a kind of neonatal, bisociative, “see what sticks” stage in which the thinker is just lumping random shit together because it sounds good, or they’re curious what will happen if they try this chord instead of that one, or if they add cumin and bananas to this stir-fry. This is often thought of as a sort of drafting/note-taking/raw processing/experimental stage and it’s fine to do, and to do messily and poorly, as long as you mostly do it in private and don’t go serving your paying customers banana and cumin stir-fry.

What rolequeers do, however, is that we tend to “publish” our work (aka be like, “You have to try this thing I made!”) at a MUCH earlier stage of development than is generally considered “professional.” This is because we are not professionals.

But, as I said above, this is an explicitly rolequeer ethic. Behaving in a maximally transparent and generative way, if doing so has even the tiniest potential to shift our collective theoretical consciousness towards disrupting oppression, has a clear ethical priority over appearing smart, cool, consistent, or even correct.

I’ve pointed this out many times before, too, but it’s worth emphasizing that there’s a gigantic difference between a professional activist and someone who actually makes meaningful change. We’re not the only ones making these anti-institutional arguments, of course. Another good primer is William Gillis’s “Organizations versus Getting Shit Done,” which may be easier to understand because it discusses institutions in the more traditional sense, whereas I defined and discuss “professional activist” as an institution in the sociological role sense (because the context is rolequeer theory, of course).

This is not to say that rolequeer thinkers never do any pre-processing. Maymay and I have hours of conversation that never make it to paper. We try out ideas, throw away bad ones, and even (gasp!) disagree. There are a handful of private threads and other little forums scattered about the Internet where various rolequeer folks are working through concepts that are still a bit too unarticulated (or incendiary) for public consumption…yet. But our threshold for releasing idea-seeds into the wild is FAR lower than almost any other strain of political theory I’m aware of. […] And we do this on purpose, because we believe that the Internet as a collective effort is infinitely more intelligent, creative, and visionary than even the brightest individual one of us could possibly be.

Furthermore, there is some strategy around packaging these probably-mostly-wrong proto-ideas in rhetoric that invites people to really argue with us about them i.e. by stating them as if they are simply factual rather than just wrapping them in, “Oh, I’m just thinking aloud here. I’m probably wrong. Don’t mind me.” Because we tend to engage quite politely with ideas sandwiched between caveats but, ultimately, people who tell me I’m fucking wrong and then tell me exactly why are going to move my intellectual process forward much faster than people who give me polite “constructive criticism” or none at all — even though receiving the former genuinely hurts WAY worse than receiving the latter.

And finally, the thing about being consistently, embarrassingly wrong in public is that it is fantastic insurance against becoming an authority figure. I never want people to consider me an authority on rolequeerness, because with authority comes the power to coercively impose your ideas on others’ minds. With that power comes the responsibility to slow way down and be much more careful about where, when, how, and with what degree of completeness you share your thoughts. And with that slowness comes the continued rape, violence, and oppression of vulnerable people who might’ve otherwise been protected from or avoided a dangerous situation if they’d only just seen the word “rolequeer” come across their dash a little earlier and had the opportunity to think for themselves about what it might mean.

This, too, is an explictly rolequeer ethos: understand that rejecting authority offers concrete, tangible benefits, not only to oneself, but also to others whose freedoms your non-cooperation with (active resistance against) said authorities inevitably supports.

I’ve been seeing R. Foxtale mull this post over for a while. Check it out in full on her blog. It’s nice to see the whole thing published, perfection be damned. ;)

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maymay

So, this has been available for quite a while, but now that FetLife is actively removing links to it from venues they control (according to this tweet, which was part of this conversation, anyway), I figured it’s time to spread more links to it. :) Try it out:

Log out of your FetLife account (if you have one and are logged in).

Go to this page.

Do a search! (This GIF screencast shows a demo.)

To reiterate, you do not need a FetLife account to use this search tool, though you do need one to “Send username a message on FetLife” (obviously?). It’s like your very own FetLife Meatlist. :)

Notice that you can search and filter profiles by pretty much any field, including their website lists (to easily limit your search to users with Twitter or Facebook profiles, for example), their “About Me” bio description, and how many photos or friends they have. Excluding profiles with no friends makes it easy to weed out sock puppets. :)

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. By clicking the “Find username on other social networks” button, you can do a search on Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and about a dozen other sites for the same user profile. The “Find username‘s profile pic on other sites” button makes it easy to do a reverse-image search for a person’s profile photo across the entire Internet. Finally, the “Report username for predatory behavior” button makes it easy to file a statement about that person in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife. Again, since you don’t need to have a FetLife account to perform a search or to file a statement about a FetLife user in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, this is a very handy way of finding people to report even if you’re not on the fetish dating site yourself.

If you do have an account on FetLife, though, you can just install this tool directly into the site. That way, you can access the search form with the click of a button, directly next to FetLife’s own search bar. Simply follow these instructions. :)

For those who are wondering, “Hey, I thought FetLife was private and secure!” this is probably a rude awakening. Turns out you’ve been bamboozled. I know, I know, you (and the FetLife “Carebears”) are probably “shocked, SHOCKED!” that this was even possible in the first place.

Fact is, this was all made possible because FetLife has a financial incentive to erode user privacy, to ensure that it is very poor. Everyone who’s bothered to do a Google search on the matter knows this, because it’s been written about many times for many years now. In plainer words: FetLife doesn’t want to enhance user privacy because doing so directly conflicts with FetLife’s business model. That’s why, despite saying they’re improving security, what FetLife is actually doing is, well, nothing at all, and sometimes making it much, much worse.

Thanks for the insecurity, FetLife. I’m looking forward to your next frivolous copyright takedown notice now. ;) Let me know if you’ll ever paying the $2,000+ invoice you owe me from 2012, eh?

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maymay

Rolequeerness and Felt-Consent have escaped the filter bubble

R. Foxtale found the loveliest thing! :)

In a /r/Anarchism discussion of Liberating Ourselves in the Boudoir: An Anarcha-Feminist Perspective Against BDSM, user ErnieMaclan put together this fabulous overview of some key ideas in rolequeer theory, with excerpts and everything

I’ve already covered how the ideas in one of our earliest essays, consent as a felt sense, have already worked their way into avenues of progressive discourse that you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to, like music fan forums. This kind of fast, memetic spread of ideas speaks to the immediate value, importance, and resonance of what we’ve been saying. Also, spreading ideas in plain language outside of activist circles is what’s required for any actual social change to happen. Most Social Justice Warriors™ aren’t serious about actually enacting social change, though, so the focus of their efforts is to bounce ideas around in a filter bubble, an echo chamber, where they can accrue reputation points (popularity) without the hassle of actually, y’know, doing or saying anything significant, meaningful, or important. (*cough*ozy*cough*)

Meanwhile, what other rolequeers and I have been theorizing and documenting and sharing and writing about and doing in our personal lives and our work has continued to spread beyond the narrow confines of the Internet social justice circle-jerk in-crowd. In addition to the music forums mentioned earlier, the anarchist discussion spaces R. Foxtale mentions, and many kinds of sex advice forums, rolequeerness and consent as a felt sense are both now being discussed (and supported!) on parenting boards, particularly among mothers. The latest citing is on Mumsnet, a site “for parents by parents” where user almondcakes drops some knowledge in an advice thread:

I mean, we can all hum and ha about why people might be sexually interested in the subordination of women. Surely the most likely reason is that women are subordinated and we all grow up and see that every day. People are also often interested in the subordination of black people.

So it could be quite difficult to suddenly become the dominant person in bed when that is totally at odds with the group you are in in society, and why would you want to pretend to be part of the dominant group or play at equality if it isn’t real to you?

You are currently eroticising the power and oppression that exists in society. If you are now thinking about liberation in society, can you eroticise liberation from subordination instead?

And read up on rolequeer for a far better explanation.

And then later, in response to some of the more predictable derailments that come from the pro-rape brainwashing most people are still conditioned with, namely the “bedroom fallacy,” almondcakes responded:

The whole point of subdom is that it is political. That is entirely what it is.

Politics is about how power operates in society.

Sub dom is the eroticisation of power, and it is a specific form of the eroticisation of power in that it recreates oppressive situations without eroticising liberation from them.

Very many people are to some extent submissive and subordinate, and there is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

The problem is that our society, and BDSM culture in particular, has put together a set of cultural conventions about what people with sub tendencies should and should not be doing to be emotionally and sexually satisfied, and what dominant people should be doing to them.

So there are all these sayings put out there about how in BDSM the power is all with the sub, that a sub needs a dom, that subs’ boundaries should be pushed and so on. Many subs disagree with all of this.

I would say that anyone who is a sub and is uncomfortable with the kind of sex they are having should go and get/read advice written by subs who have exited BDSM and found ways of exploring being a sub in other ways. And that involves thinking about the precise specifics of what you like and just making tiny shifts in the dynamic so that you are comfortable with yourself.

And you can’t get that from people who are invested in that BDSM mindset, particularly if they are doms, because they have a vested interest in making you believe there is only one way of being a sub – acting out BDSM scenarios that mimic abuse.

When I first started writing about rolequeerness publicly, the immediacy of BDSM’ers’s attempts to shut us up made it clear to me that we were on to something really important. Now, the relevance and importance of rolequeerness, and its felt-consent ethos is even clearer—especially now that the white cis L and G betrayal of queer B and T resistance to marriage and its shitty heteronormativity is complete. We are the next wave queer resistance.

Meanwhile, I’m confident that the rape apologetic delusions festering at the core of pro-BDSM and sex-positive/liberal feminists (*cough*ozy*cough*)—delusions like “BDSM is not abuse!!!1!eleventy!!!“—will spur those SJW morons to continue constructing rolequeer strawpeople in an effort designed to make themselves appear and feel relevant, even though they’re obviously not. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the conversation expand even further. It is so awesome to see our ideas about rolequeerness and its application to personal liberation really resonate, and resonate so strongly that its escaped the strangling filter bubble of the social justice world lunatic fringe into so many other forums of discussion. :)

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sinshine-deactivated20160121

This is a story of false promises, dubious legal claims, two lists, and a social network for kinky people called Fetlife.

“We — the female-identified users, and especially those of us who are submission-oriented — are FetLife’s meat. We’ve always been FetLife’s meat.”

“Analyzing 15,495 premium FetLife accounts — that is, the network’s paying customers — maymay discovered that 73 percent are men. As has been pointed out, this stands in contrast to trends on social networks, where women tend to dominate, but is more in line with porn sites, where one third of users or less are women.

Of these male users, the majority (42 percent) identify with a dominant type of sexual role (daddy, dom, master, sadist, and top), compared to 11 percent who identify with submissive roles (babygirl, bottom, brat, kajira, pet, slave, sub). Only 18 percent of all paid users identify with a submissive type of sexual role.

Suddenly, it makes sense that Kinky & Popular would be dominated by imagery of sexualized, submissive women.”

“Paid users make roughly over one percent of total users on FetLife, but they make up 13 percent of alleged abusers. Of these, over 60 percent were male-identified, with the most likely roles for abusers being “dom,” “sadist” and “switch” (someone who alternates roles between dominance and submission).

“If you ever wanted a clear idea of why FetLife.com [ … ] continues to insist on the protection of rapists time and time and time again ad nauseum, here’s a big clue…”

malesubmissionart

#follow-the-money-honey

maymay

Last week, Mikandi, the third-party app store entirely devoted to porn apps, published a feature article titled “The FetLife Meatlist: How A Social Network Failed Its Users” detailing the continued regular releases of installments of Mircea Popescu’s infamous catalog of FetLife profiles of young women. This marks the third feature article in a mainstream online media outlet discussing how “FetLife failed its users” in as many months. The first two were the Atlantic’s piece titled “How Kink’s Largest Social-Networking Site Fails Its Users,” on March 3rd, and the DailyDot’s article on April 28th, with its Lifestyle section editor EJ Dickson tweeting:

We went deep inside FetLife, the Facebook for the BDSM community, and how it’s failing its users: http://t.co/Iwi3snSmS6 via @AlanaMassey

— EJ Dickson (@ejdickson) April 28, 2015

The latest feature was written by AV Flox, a far more rigorous writer than many others with a similar beat. As a result, her article is thorough, well-researched, and far less fluffy than the first two. She’s also the only one who addresses FetLife’s continued abuse of copyright law, the only one to put this issue into a meaningful historical context with regards to FetLife’s many prior failings, and the only author of the three to point out why and how the feminist blogosphere’s own shortsighted reaction contributes to the sexual commodification of young women—exactly the same thing as what the Meat List intentionally does and what these so-called “Social Justice” bloggers say they are trying to avoid.

Here’s a slightly edited excerpt from Flox’s feature:

Clearly there’s a difference between a person who shares a piece of media of their own free will with a site and a person who is exposed without their consent. But the difference begins to shrink as one enumerates the ways that FetLife has failed users: by creating a false sense of security, by using their media as a commercial incentive by default, and by failing to fully delete their media when users try to take it down.

We — the female-identified users, and especially those of us who are submission-oriented — are FetLife’s meat. We’ve always been FetLife’s meat.

The History

Hacking is like breaking and entering. What Popescu did wasn’t even trespassing. The truth is that users are so easy to enumerate on FetLife, it’s almost as though FetLife was designed for data mining.

And this isn’t the first time it’s happened, either.

In 2012, I covered a number of security and safety issues on FetLife, explicitly mentioning the ease with which the network could be mined. John Baku, the social network’s founder, responded to the piece, saying, “With respect to your technical concerns… I am not sure where you got your facts from but this is not the case. Though, if you can prove us wrong then we would for sure fix the problem.”

Baku had to deflect. Three weeks before my piece, a FetLife user and hacktivist by the name of maymay had, in fact, illustrated just how easily profile information could be mined and exposed outside the walls of FetLife with a simple bit of code that remains available.

FetLife refused to admit it had failed its users. Baku labeled that incident an “ill-intentioned attack” and spun it as a one-time situation — the work of a malicious hacker that FetLife bravely thwarted.

“Within an hour of being notified of this tool we blocked it,” Baku wrote in a post that announced the network’s response to the crisis.

It was a lie that it was an attack. It was a lie that the tool had been blocked — the single server that had been running the code was blocked, not the ability for this or any other bit of code to easily mine everything on FetLife. This has been illustrated twice since: last year, when a site called FetLifeSearcher made it possible for anyone to search through FetLife profiles, and again, with the release of the Meatlist.

It’s not lost on me that maymay’s illustration of this issue didn’t get the media attention that the Meatlist has generated: maymay’s code exposed the profile information of FetLife users in positions of power and overwhelmingly male, rather than focusing exclusively on potentially vulnerable women under the age of 30. If we, the female-identified users on Fetlife, are the meat, then we, the media, are actively contributing to the consumption of female-identified bodies, even as we set out to raise awareness about what this “blatant case of misogyny and predation,” as the Meatlist has been described, says about BDSM culture.

The Other List

By mid-April Popescu’s Meatlist had transcended discussions among users and begun to draw media attention. That’s around the time that an e-mail from maymay landed in my inbox: “[The data mined from FetLife] can be cross-referenced with the database [detailing reports of abuse among FetLife users] collected by Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, and can thus be used to answer questions like, ‘What is the most known dangerous city for submissive-identified women?’, ‘what is the average age of an accused male dom?’ and so on.”

The first thing maymay did with the mined data was release a collection of all dominant, male-identified users with paid accounts on FetLife under the name “The FetLife Creeplist.” The second thing maymay did was put the information to work.

Analyzing 15,495 premium FetLife accounts — that is, the network’s paying customers — maymay discovered that 73 percent are men. As has been pointed out, this stands in contrast to trends on social networks, where women tend to dominate, but is more in line with porn sites, where one third of users or less are women.

Suddenly, it makes sense that Kinky & Popular would be dominated by imagery of sexualized, submissive women.

Next, maymay looked over data collected by the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, an add-on independent of the social network that users can install to read and report consent violations while browsing FetLife. This add-on came into being following a 2012 campaign by FetLife to silence victims of sexual assault; it’s been available for almost three years and holds reports on 652 individual FetLife users.

Paid users make roughly over one percent of total users on FetLife, but they make up 13 percent of alleged abusers. Of these, over 60 percent were male-identified, with the most likely roles for abusers being “dom,” “sadist” and “switch” (someone who alternates roles between dominance and submission).

“If you ever wanted a clear idea of why FetLife.com [ … ] continues to insist on the protection of rapists time and time and time again ad nauseum, here’s a big clue,” maymay wrote, referring to FetLife’s policy of removing posts that accuse people — by username — of sexual assault or other types of consent violation.

[…]

The Nonsense[, The Abuse, and The Aftermath]

When it learned of the Meatlist, FetLife did the same thing it did when it became aware of FetLifeSearcher and maymay’s 2012 so-called “attack”: it issued a copyright takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to Popescu’s host and other online service providers. […] FetLife uses the DMCA process in lieu of real security mechanisms because it’s very easy to abuse it. To avoid liability, the host of the content that receives a DMCA takedown notice may disrupt access to the content, pending a response from the person alleged to be infringing copyright. For users who are unfamiliar with the DMCA process, the disruption of service often intimidates them into backing down — even in cases where takedowns are fraudulent or the work said to be infringing is protected by fair use.

[…]

After BitLove issued its DMCA notice, Popescu took down the Meatlist and sent a counternotice. BitLove’s next move would have been to file a lawsuit against Popescu to keep the content offline, but the legally-mandated 14-day window in which BitLove could have brought legal action came and went and Popescu made the Meatlist available once again.

The lack of legal action on BitLove’s part is telling, as are the FetLife content guidelines that illustrate that BitLove’s officers have at least a basic understanding of how the DMCA process works. Nevertheless, almost two months after failing to file a suit against Popescu, BitLove issued a takedown notice to maymay’s host, which took the post down pending maymay’s counter-notice and the expiration of the 14-day window for BitLove to file a lawsuit.

Two days after Popescu published the eleventh installment of the Meatlist last week, FetLife’s founder John Baku [claimed] in a podcast interview […] to have no knowledge of the Creeplist or the Predator Alert Tool for Fetlife.

Today, Mircea Popescu published the twelfth installment of his list of FetLife women under 30. The Creeplist will be legally clear to return to maymay’s blog this week as well — but then, the Creeplist never left the internet. In a clear illustration of how inadequate the DMCA takedown process is as a security mechanism, someone captured the contents of the Creeplist with a internet archiving tool before the post was taken down. This capture was almost immediately indexed by Google, meaning everything on the list has remained only a search away despite BitLove’s legal maneuvers, and very well could remain available, even if maymay decided not to republish the post.

As Flox predicted, the FetLife Creep List is indeed back up on my blog following my own successful DMCA counter-notice against FetLife’s frivolous takedowns (something I’ve gotten quite practiced at over the years). Of course, the Creep List is also still up at the half dozen or so other archiving sites where it was copied. Moreover, I’ve written a summary of the preliminary data analysis I’ve done on the more than 1.5 million FetLife user account records that were mined, for those who want more hard numbers, whose key conclusions are that FetLife is a porn site, not a social network, and that FetLife customers are 13 times more sexually predatory than the porn site’s non-paying users.

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maymay

According to their customer records, FetLife is a porn site, not a social network, whose paying customers are 13 times more likely to be rapists than non-paying users

There was a predictable outcry from pro-BDSM bloggers like Rebecca Hiles when the “FetLife Meat List,” a simple spreadsheet cataloging the FetLife usernames and basic profile info of 30,000 users who identified themselves as female and under 30 years old, was released. But as usual, all Social Justice Warrior rhetoric condemning the list was shortsighted at best, though most of it was downright moronic. They all seemed to condemn the construction of such lists rather than the fact that the list targets the most vulnerable demographic.

In response, I released the FetLife Creep List, Volume 1 a few weeks later, a similar list but including one of FetLife’s most privileged demographics (male dominants with money) rather than one of its most vulnerable demographics (young women). The point is to illustrate that it’s possible to highlight privacy problems with websites like FetLife which continues to be a privacy and security nightmare many years after I first publicized them in a way that is equally compelling and attention-getting (e.g., by calling them “Creeps”), but doesn’t also target the most vulnerable possible demographic. Unfortunately, since the Internet’s “Social Justice Warriors” are all talk and no walk, they missed making that obvious point, not to mention failing to actually take advantage of that point to further their own stated goals. That’s typical SJW for you, though.

Fact is, there’s a lot of actionable information about rape culture and the BDSM subculture’s reliance on rape culture’s perpetuation for its own survival that can be illustrated with a list of the most privileged demographics in this case. Once again, that’s something that sex-positive “feminists” consistently miss, the poor dears.

After compiling the Creep List, I did a bit of basic statistical analysis on FetLife customer demographics and found numerous discrepancies between what the BDSM Scene and FetLife in particular say about themselves and what they actually do. The two biggest take-aways from the preliminary analysis are as follows:

FetLife isn’t a social network. It’s a porn site, both in terms of its business model and its general usage. It simply cannot be classified as a social network with the likes of Facebook under any reasonable definition of the term. This directly contradicts FetLife’s own statements about how the site works and why the site exists.

Users who support FetLife financially (i.e., FetLife’s paying customers) are at least 13 times more likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence, rape, and consent violations than the average (non-paying) FetLife user. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of FetLife customers as well as the overwhelming majority of FetLife users reported to the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife consent-violation tracking system are male doms, further corroborating the claim that FetLife actively silences rape survivors for expressly self-interested financial motivations.

Let’s look at each of these points and the data behind them in turn.

FetLife is a porn site that pretends to be a social network.

The first thing that the data clearly shows is that FetLife’s is effectively the same kind of site as amateur porn sites like YouPorn or XTube. Here’s how unquietpirate described it in her post summarizing the statistics:

FetLife’s business model is, effectively, to be a porn site in “social network” clothing. Instead of hiring models and performers and charging for membership, the adult content is provided for free by some “community members” and consumed by others. (Ironically, because of FetLife’s shoddy security, the “premium” video content offered exclusively to paid members is actually available to anyone with the URL.)

It’s an oft-repeated truism in discussions of “free” social media: If you’re not the customer, you’re the product. We know who the “product” on FetLife is. Much has been written about how the “Kinky & Popular” feature primarily displays photos of young, conventionally attractive, scantily-clad, submissive women. Who is the customer? Clearly, those who support FetLife financially.

[…]

A few days ago, in response to the release of the FetLife “Meat List” (a database of female-identified FetLife users under 30), Maymay published the FetLife “Creep List” of 3,700+ male- and dominant-identified paid subscribers to FetLife, drawn from a dataset of 1.5 million FetLife user accounts. Further data analysis showed that “a total of 15,495 accounts were identified as having premium FetLife memberships” and that “Male doms make up far and away the largest proportion of FetLife’s [paying] customer base, accounting for 3,452 (22.28%) of the total customer accounts identified.” (Not to mention that 72.89% of FetLife’s total paying customer base identify themselves as male, further confirmation that FetLife is a porn site, not a social network — which research shows are almost universally dominated by women.)

Put another way, the data shows that nearly a full three-fourths of FetLife’s customers are male. That’s an even more pronounced gender split than typical online porn stats. Even more revealing, though, is that nearly a full quarter (22.28%) of FetLife’s customers are both male and dominant-identified. Here’s a simple heatmap showing these stats visually:

FetLife’s customers are 13 times more sexually predatory than non-paying members

Regular readers will remember that, in addition to the FetLife Creep List, I’ve also been working on a long-running project to build sexual violence prevention software into the architecture of the Internet. The most visible parts of this social impact project is a set of free software applications collectively called the Predator Alert Tools (PATs). One of the earliest PATs was designed for FetLife, and it’s been collecting data for well over two years. With the release of the FetLife Creep List, it’s now possible to cross-reference over 1.5 million FetLife user account’s basic profile data with the data collected by the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife to build a profile of FetLife users involved in situations with questionable consent practices.

And that’s what I’ve done. The results are sobering and unsurprising, confirming yet again that male doms (the same demographic as FetLife’s best customers), and certain male doms in particular, are far and away the most sexually predatory demographic on the porn site. In her post, “FetLife’s Best Customers,” unquietpirate summarizes the findings like this:

Analysis of this huge dataset, which comprises demographic information for nearly half the total member accounts on the site, is ongoing. There is great potential for cross-reference with demographic information drawn from the PAT-FetLife database. It’s unknown yet what kind of questions we might now be well-placed to answer about the FetLife userbase and BDSM Scene membership in general. (FetLife offers a functional microcosm for suggesting broader research, since makes a point of monopolizing online “social networking” space for the national and international “kink community.”)

One of the most striking early findings to come out of the data, however, is the correlation between FetLife users who pay for premium accounts and FetLife users who have been reported for violating a partner’s consent[.]

The way the correlation breaks down is like this:

In the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife database as of April 29th, 2015, there are 652 unique users reported as having violated someone’s consent. Out of those 652 users, 86 (13.19%) are paying FetLife customers. […]

Among paying FetLife customers, consent violations are overhwelmingly perpetrated by D-type roles, with Doms across all reported genders accounting for 19 accused users (22.1%), followed by sadists and switches, who each account for 10 accused users (11.63%). Notably, there are no male S-type FetLife customers who have been accused of consent violations so far.

From a dataset of over 1.5 million FetLife accounts (1,517,103, to be precise), a total of 15,495 customers were identified, showing that FetLife’s customer base is approximately 1.02% of its total user base. In contrast, out of 652 unique users reported to the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, 86 of those users are paying customers, which is a whopping 13.19%.

This indicates that paying FetLife customers are 13 times more likely to be sexual predators than the average FetLife user. In other words, you may want to be especially cautious whenever you see the “I support FetLife” badge on someone’s profile. :\

So. That’s a thing.

Once again, a visual heatmap of the above stats:

Although FetLife insists that protecting their revenue stream isn’t why they censor rape survivors on their site, the fact of the matter is that the data shows a significant chunk of their revenue comes from people who materially and substantially benefit from FetLife’s continued censoring of rape survivors. There just isn’t any wiggle room anymore. Numerous bloggers, including myself, have questioned FetLife on this in the past. For example, M. Lunas was quite explicit on this point 2 years ago this month:

FetLife is a private For-Profit Canadian company. Among other sources, it receives funding from members who opt to pay a fee for added features–what is known in the tech world as a “freemium” model. What sort of features do these “supporters” get? Along with a number of pretty useless things, they get community status in the form of a badge on their profile, the ability to view over 5,000 of each day’s most popular pictures, videos, and writings, and the ability to upload and watch videos. There are over 80,000 such videos–mostly amateur porn–currently on the site. In other words, the benefit of paying is the ability to perv endlessly on other users’ amateur porn. And FetLife’s ability to provide the maximum amount of porn to paying members depends on other users not giving much thought to the security or privacy of what they’re uploading and sharing. And a rich database of amateur porn attracts more paying members. In other words, it is in FetLife’s direct financial interest not to provide security and privacy features.

He also voiced concern about the influence the vocal minority of FetLife customers—who, again, are primarily male doms and in many cases literally the same people accused of rape by other FetLife users who are not the site’s customers—might have on FetLife’s notorious policy of siding with “community members” who are accused of rape and against survivors of sexual violence:

[C]ould there be a profit motive here too? While disturbing, it makes sense. We know that predators (especially repeat abusers) are often community leaders, often older, and often male. Such people, I would hypothesize may be more likely than the average FetLife user to be a paying supporter of FetLife, either as a signifier of community status, or because they are better off financially (having had more time to rise in their careers and accumulate resources). […] In short, paying supporters are likely over-represented in the set of users who have allegations against them in [Predator Alert Tool for FetLife database]. Therefore, were FetLife to adopt a policy of removing members who were accused of consent violations, they would be targeting a group that disproportionately supports the site financially.

At the time of M. Lunas’s post, we could only make the educated guess that FetLife’s motivations for censoring rape survivors was indeed a policy designed to protect male doms, the demographic who is statistically most likely to pay them money to perv on your nude selfies as well as the most likely to actually physically assault you if they met you in person. Now, we no longer need to guess. Now, we know.

In an otherwise inane post about the FetLife Meat List issue, Rebecca Hiles writes:

the exposure of The List has raised the very important question of why Fetlife is the only popular option for kinksters looking to network and create a sense of community.

Given that FetLife’s customer records show it to be a porn site, not a social network, it’s definitely worth asking why the BDSM Scene continues to insist that it’s “not a meat market” when their primary social gathering spaces—both in-person and online—are commercial porn venues. But even more important than that, I think, is that given male doms are disproportionately more likely to be perpetrators of rape, why is it that the BDSM culture at large, not just FetLife in specific, continues to support rapists by glorifying dominance and sexual violation? And why do we continue to buy into a financial, economic, and legal system premised on the same sociopathic principles as justifying or excusing sadomasochistic rapes?

These and others are important questions. We’ve got a lot of tools at our disposal to attack rape culture. But don’t expect Hiles and the pro-BDSM contingent to focus on these latter questions or to do the work required to actually mitigate rape culture’s horrific impact. They’re far too busy enjoying their Social Justice Warrior circle jerk to think about it much, and besides, as BDSM’s cultural advocates, they rely on rape culture to get their jollies in the first place. When push comes to shove, they don’t want rape culture to actually diminish.

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tallulahtightrope

I’d always felt uncomfortable about FL’s business model but it’s never been put to me in such ucertain terms that it exists as a porn site, receiving revenue, and doesn’t even have to pay anyone for content.

Add that to the general unsafeness of the site, and how it is used by predators to trawl through profiles and I think I’m finally going to hit the delete button. I never use it anyway so I’m just another profile for creeps to drool over.

I’ve cross-referenced “The FetLife Creeplist, Volume 1” a massive database of over 1.5 million FetLife user accounts’ basic profile data (which offers some insights all on its own), with the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife consent violation report database (formerly FAADE).

In the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife database as of April 29th, 2015, there are 652 unique users reported as having violated someone's consent. Out of those 652 users, 86 (13.19%) are paying FetLife customers. This table summarizes the self-reported genders and roles of those 86 customers.

Of FetLife customers reported to have violated someone's consent, 52 (60.47%) are male-identified. Male doms alone make up more than a full fifth (20.93%) of FetLife's customers who have reportedly raped or violated consent (18 users), with the next-most dangerous demographic being male sadists (10 users, 11.63%) followed by male switches (7 users, 8.14%).

From a dataset of over 1.5 million FetLife accounts (1,517,103, to be precise), a total of 15,495 customers were identified, showing that FetLife's customer base is approximately 1.02% of its total user base. In contrast, out of 652 unique users reported to the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, 86 of those users are paying customers, which is a whopping 13.19%.

So. That's a thing.

See also, in NCSF survey results, joining BDSM Scene increases your risk of being raped by 50%.

This dataset is compiled from over 1.5 million FetLife user accounts' basic profile data (available here).

In this dataset of 1.5 million accounts, a total of 15,495 accounts were identified as having premium FetLife memberships ("supporter" badges). These are FetLife's direct financial supporters, a kind of customer. The complete list of these customer accounts is shown in full in the "All Paid Accounts" sheet.

Of the 15,495 customer accounts, 14,540 of them (93.84%) self-reported their gender as either "F" (Female) or "M" (Male). The table above shows the self-reported sex role of these customers. Male doms make up far and away the largest proportion of FetLife's customer base, accounting for 3,452 (22.28%) of the total customer accounts identified. Taken together, cisgender men make up 72.89% of FetLife's total customer base (11,295 accounts).

If you ever wanted a clear idea of why FetLife.com (BitLove, Inc.) continues to insist on the protection of rapists time and time and time again ad nauseum, here's a big clue.

amberying

After I wrote about the gaslighting dom I encountered on OKCupid, a few other women approached me to confirm that he is controlling, ignores boundaries, and is active in Providence. Based on my texts with him, I know that he is also active in Greater Boston. If you encounter a Joshua Greenwald, don’t get involved, and realize that he doesn’t take no for an answer and will try to emotionally manipulate you into staying in contact.

I wrote a report on him for the Predator Alert Tool for Facebook. Right now, he is not searchable by his name, but you can find him by his Facebook ID: 1001047. Unfortunately, I don’t know where he is on Fetlife. I would have reported on him there, too [using Predator Alert Tool for FetLife].

Why would I put the energy into this? After spending about two years in the grips of Stalker Ex, I am heavily invested in preventing abusers from abusing. Telling people about abusers creates herd immunity. Abusers benefit from and prey on inexperience and ignorance.

Finally, I created a Douchey Dom that summaries my experience with Greenwald:

whichlights

Signal boosting for the warning. And for this:

Telling people about abusers creates herd immunity. Abusers benefit from and prey on inexperience and ignorance.

malesubmissionart

See also the kink community’s MO is entirely about protecting abusers and Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid: A Plugin that Searches OkCupid for Sexual Predators.

fun-sized-princess

The Fetlife Meatlist: a Blog by some Asshole with too much Time on his Hands. If you are woman under 30 with fetlife profile, your name is or will be on this list. Please reblog this if you are a kink blog.

Edit: the blog has been removed, for more info a link has been posted in it’s place.

nudityandnerdery

So, Fetlife. It has some security problems, and apparently some guy decided to demonstrate this by circumventing it, getting a list of women under 30 on the site, and posting it to his website. To demonstrate their security flaw, apparently. Fetlife, for their part, issued a DMCA takedown notice, and he took the list down. Then Fetlife didn’t follow it up, which apparently meant their takedown notice was meaningless. And he put the list back up. Which kind of puts a lie to the idea that it was about demonstrating Fetlife’s security flaws and just makes him an asshole. His blog is down now, but, still, asshole. But it also points out that Fetlife has flawed security, knows it has flawed security, and doesn’t really do much to protect their member’s information. So… I’ve recommended Fetlife before to people looking to learn about kink and get into the community, but I’ve pulled back on it lately, and this certainly doesn’t help their cause at all. So if you’re on Fetlife, you probably want to check up on your info there. If you’re not and are considering joining, you probably want to carefully consider if you want to be.

kagome-mizuno

Okay, here’s where i drop some knowledge on you. Fetlife is sure as shit not secure, they’ve known it for YEARS. This is not even the first time someone has done something similar. The problem is, while the first person who did it (maymay, the same guy who FINALLY got them to use SSL) showed he could copy things like user pages without ever having to log into the site, and created a search addon that allowed you to search anything BUT women (which people complained about because they wanted to search women only), he knew how big a target women were. He literally only did it to point out the security flaws. The Meatlist bullshit, though? That’s the guy literally wanting to put up a list of available women to other guys.

Same guy also created the Fetlife Alleged Abuser Database Engine (FAADE), which was made in order to let people warn others about possible abusers (something i installed immediately when i found out about it). You could only see user reports if you had the script plugged in, reporting was anonymous, and there was only a single database, which reports could not be removed from. Know what happened there? The “Circle The Wagons” effect, where people were like “but i like that guy/that one could never be an abuser!” and did a whole bunch of false reports, purposely to make it so the tool had ‘no power’ to it.

Never mind that the kink community itself is fucked right now in general. We have things like the ‘missing stair’ effect where people assume everyone knows about someone with issues. We have things like Jay Wiseman writing about how he was shocked to find out how many women have been sexually abused by guys who should know better, with years of kink experience. We have the Shibaricon incident, where a guy banned by the board for being unsafe was then put in charge of the most classes ever the next year because he was friends with the con’s owner (half the board resigned in protest). We have the NCSF take the assimilation tract, trying to say “we’re just like you guys, only we’re kinky!” while trying to shut people up about the RAMPANT abuse that occurs.

Fetlife has issues, yes. But they also reflect the issues with kink right now. We have tons of instances where consent is violated, people are shunned or kicked out for speaking up, abuse survivors are shut up, there is rampant cronyism and the whole idea of a safeword has become a talisman. On the topic of abuse alone, Fetlife has constantly moved the goalposts: right now, they claim “police report or it didn’t happen”….except, when someone DID put up their police report, and it got up on the Kinky and Popular, FL worked to take it down. When someone was being stalked by 2 other FL members, their personal info being given out by said members (with screencapped proof), the higher ups shut up the one being stalked and did nothing to the stalkers.

This is all nothing new, either! It’s been a pattern of consistency that has been going on for well over a decade now, it is just coming out due to the fact that people are far more connected via the internet. Kink congregation sites have been, well, Cesspools for a long time now. Collarme was a cesspool, had an ownership issue, became collarspace to avoid paying the right person, and is still a cesspool. FL reflects the current kink issues. Bondage.com shut down. Alt still has way too much functionality behind a paywall. None of this is new, this is just the newest face of it (just like Gamergate is the newest face of conservative white males).

https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/theres-a-war-on-part-1-troubles-been-brewing/

http://maybemaimed.com/2011/03/20/fetlife-considered-harmful/

http://jaywiseman.com/SEX_BDSM_LyingPricks.php

http://disruptingdinnerparties.com//?s=got+consent&search=Go

http://fetlifefail.tumblr.com/post/44165249827/why-im-leaving-fetlife-and-you-should-too

http://sinshine.tumblr.com/tagged/fetlife

http://www.graydancer.com/shibaricon-concerns/

http://www.notjustbitchy.com/safewords-theyre-just-words/

(more to be added as i find and remember)

nudityandnerdery

Just some added info on FetLife and the kink community in general. Please, everybody, be careful out there.

malesubmissionart

Some additional resources to add to kagome-mizuno’s good list:

The FetLife Creeplist, Volume 1, over 1.5 million names, ages, genders, roles, friend counts, etc., of FetLife members publicly searchable

http://maybemaimed.com/tag/fetlife/

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/how-kinks-largest-social-networking-site-fails-its-users/385586/

http://slantist.com/fetlife-is-not-safe-for-users/

http://fetlife.maybemaimed.com/reverse-the-spin.html

But of course, the core of the problem isn’t FetLife, really. The core of the problem is that dominants are rapists, and only BDSM’ers think it’s a good idea to normalize the abuse inherent in BDSM.

Here is a list of the first 3,730 of FetLife's financial supporters who are male- and dominant-identified. More specifically, this list contains the FetLife user ID number, name, age, location, and number of "friends" of most FetLife users who purchased a premium FetLife membership and who self-identify as male and one of either "Dom," "Master," or "Top" on their FetLife profiles. I hereby dub this the FetLife Creeplist, Volume 1.

(Interactive table on maybemaimed.com powered by Inline Google Spreadsheet Viewer.)

This list was trimmed from a publicly-available dataset of over one-and-a-half million FetLife users' basic profile information. That bigger list is also available for anyone to download from here, or here. But it's much more interesting when only a specific demographic is targeted, isn't it? ;)

vdsdisc

isaacsapphire

I’m posting just a link because this is very long and I am, perhaps in error, looking to discuss just one part at the moment.

Whiteness, because it’s a structure of domination and not a legitimate identity, can be wholly shed, destroyed, reduced to nothingness and then remembered only as a horribly evil thing

Ok, since it’s an innate part of this position that Whiteness can be shed, could somebody please give me examples of what that looks like? Because I have pictures in my head of what abandoning my gender would look like, and I know people who have done it, so if I was told that I ought to abandon my gender, I’d at least have a picture of how to go about doing that. But the closest thing to abandoning one’s ethnicity that I have a picture of is passing (which I’ve only ever heard of being done in the direction of privilege, not away from it) and this guy, who I’m not sure what to think of.

vdsdisc

Aren’t super-codified abuse-reduplicating power dynamic identities are entirely besides the point w/r/t rolequeer? Like, sub and dom don’t really apply apply anymore when focus is on fucking with power and power-aligned roles. Even with rolequeer’s roots as a bastion of submissive self-care, which I prefer to respect, my understanding of rolequeer is that it is about finding respect for vulnerability, about muddying the concept of ‘power over’ and what that even means if you reject a stagnant and rigid power binary, and sort of doing away with dom or sub identities because people and their desires are more complicated than that.

Er, that is, if we’re squeezing down rolequeer to simply where it applies to kink and kinky ids. *waves towards the other important convos elsewhere less about d/s*

I dunno, I’ve just been thinking that ‘submissive’ keeps being narrowly conflated with ‘powerless’ within BDSM and most of rolequeer’s early work is to chew on that script and leave a bunch of tooth holes.

But, isn’t the whole /point/ of dumping d/s identities for a rolequeer id to shed an ill-fitting, predefined identity? Rolequeer is something new and something different and while threads of the old are present—and those threads are useful and allow mental hooks for processing and re-conceptualization—ultimately they are a starting point.

I think the paths are weighted differently, depending on which ‘side’ of the binary you got hit by. There’s finding acceptance and strength in all you’ve been abused for, and deeply rejecting of all you’ve been lauded for, and it’s heavy emotional work no matter what mixture of the two you’re dealing with. That, and (if you’ll forgive the awkward extended analogy), after you’ve ditched the worst of the the toxicity and moved on, it’s not like anyone’s at the same place, like ex-subs living in a house with ex-doms. Everyone’s sold their houses and moved to a new city with a completely different (hopefully healthier) culture, and everyone has to relearn how to co-exist with each other while the trauma-memories still linger in the back of everyone’s heads. There’s a certain amount of culture-shock and pushback and… just… it’s messy.

Anyways, this musing is brought to you because rolequeer -the-blog-as-distinct-from-rolequeer-the-movement posted something again denouncing the idea of ‘ethical domination’ and citing s-focused early material. I sort of feel that ‘submissive don’t need dominants’ is now only half of the requisite information. Like: ‘dominance should be ditched (here’s why), and also ‘submissives are awesome (and also might consider evolving their personal narratives)’

I… *frowns* I guess I feel a bit sacrilegious in suggesting this, considering all that’s gone before, but why not ditch submissive as an identity entirely also? Is becoming okay with being submissive without being paired off just part of the process? Why stop there, and what does stopping there accomplish?

I feel like there are other directions that everything can go.

rolequeer

Okay, this is a legit question, but no. I was going to write a reply to this myself but I had a conversation with Maymay and they said a lot of stuff way better than I could say it, so here’s a big quote from them. I hope you don’t mind.

To borrow your use of analogy, what you’re suggesting here is the equivalent of telling a given group that because their given oppressor-identity is not a real identity, neither is theirs. This is obviously incorrect when the given group is, for instance, White people and Black people. Whiteness, because it’s a structure of domination and not a legitimate identity, can be wholly shed, destroyed, reduced to nothingness and then remembered only as a horribly evil thing, whereas Blackness cannot. The reason for this is because Blackness is not defined in opposition to whiteness, but whiteness IS defined in opposition to Blackness. In other words, Blackness has a positive essence, it is A Thing, whereas the entirety of whiteness is specifically that-which-is-not-Blackness. The recent posting of Kim Ja Kil’s open letter to “white anti-racists” talks about this at some length.

The analogy here applies to Submissives and Dominants precisely because Dominance is defined solely in opposition to submission (i.e., dominance is not-submission), but submission is not defined in opposition to dominance. It is a misunderstanding at best or an intentional erasure of Submission at worst to describe submission as not-dominance.

Another analogy that might help you work through this is a gender one. As you may know, certain vocal strains of radical feminist thought seem to believe that the solution to gender discrimination is the abolition of gender. This makes about as much sense as the destruction of any other given essence. You can no more destroy meaningfully destroy the concept of gender and still exist as a gendered being than you can destroy the concept of a “self” and exist as a being distinct from other beings at all. The existence of trans folks makes the “abolish gender!” argument downright stupid, because obviously trans folks have an experience of themselves that is deeply, somatically gendered. The essence of a trans woman’s identity as a woman is an experience of gender, and so the continued call for the abolition of gender amounts, ultimately, to little more than the abolition of trans people. The same is true of transmasculine people. Note, however, that cis people are not similarly harmed by calls for the abolition of gender, and so it should not be surprising that the people who most loudly advocate for gender abolition are, themselves, cisgender.

This analogy also maps nicely (if not perfectly, as no analogy can be perfect) onto D/s identity-binarism: the abolition of power as A Thing makes about as much sense as the abolition of gender (i.e., none). There will always be material or social roles that exert power of one form or another over and on certain people, at certain times, in certain places. Rolequeer theory is not an attempt to live in a power vacuum any more than trans-inclusive feminism is an attempt to live in a genderless society. Quite the contrary.

Therefore, cisgender-ness, like whiteness, is a structure of domination. Domination, is a specific application of dominance. “Being white” is equivalent to “being a dominant.” I.e., it is a claim that one’s environment SHOULD be structures in such a way as to bias itself towards the advantage of the speaker. But the truth is, there is no such thing as “a white person,” because “white” is not a descriptor of what someone IS. Rather, it is a description of what someone is NOT. (In this case, it is a claim that the speaker is not Black or some variety of Ethnic.) However, this is obviously historically false. Even people who are societally considered White today, like many light-skinned Jews, or the Irish, to use two famous and recent examples, have an ethnicity and a culture and a history that was not historically white. When Jews like me (or the Irish) got our “white card,” i.e., when we were afforded reprieves from colorist discrimination, we did so in exchange for our own complicity against darker-skinned peoples in which we purposefully forgot our own history as a discriminated-against people. That is why you will see ignorant young Irish people (on Tumblr, no less) claiming that they are and always were “white,” even though their grandparents were never able to make that same claim.

What this means is that it is a misunderstanding of rolequeer theory to perceive it as an argument trying to “dump D/s identities.” That would position rolequeer as an identity structure, even though it is not. Insofar as rolequeer has an affiliation with a D/s identity, it is only affiliated with Submission. This is the same argument as one that describes anti-racism as definitionally anti-whiteness (because whiteness, itself, is racist). But just as anti-racist work cannot be authentically anti-racist and claim that Black people “are not Black,” rolequeer theory cannot that submissive people are not submissive.

Yet another way to explain this is by recalling unquietpirate’s assertion that “the radical act is submission to someone less powerful than you.” I believe the point she was making there is that it is obviously anti-oppressive to empower those with less power than you have, while it is obviously oppressive to use the power you do have to dominate others. Politically, this makes identifying as Dominant an act that oppresses, that is, the act of identifying with dominance is itself an oppressive act, because it legitimizes a culture in which dominance is acceptable. The same is not true with submission, which is an act that (if actually carried out authentically and with genuine compassion for those with less power than you have) valorizes generosity, and kindness. In other words, what Jesus said we should do, but what few Christians actually do.

I am certainly in favor of people who identify as submissive evolving their personal narratives, and I do not mean to suggest that all people who identify as submissive are, by that fact alone, rolequeers themselves. Here, I draw a parallel to the fact that not all women are feminist, and there are individuals within all marginalized groups that actively work to undermine the liberatory efforts of their own groups. But the existence of such women does not in itself mean that femininity is in any way equivalent to the kind of “toxic” masculinity that defines itself by its capability to violate and repress woman-ness.

Given all this, the reason for people who have no interest in violating other people to ditch a dominant identity is clear: the defining element of a dominant identity is the legitimization of non-consent. And the reason for people who have an interest in supporting efforts for social justice not to ditch a submissive identity is also clear: the defining element of submission is the further empowerment of other people.

malesubmissionart

*facepalm*

Whiteness is not an ethnicity. One can no more be “ethnically white” than one can be “gendered American.“ It’s nonsense.

unquietpirate-blog

Rolequeer: Pro-Critical Analysis; Anti-Shame Radical Feminism: Pro-Critical Analysis; Pro-Shame Sex-Positive Feminism: Anti-Critical Analysis; Anti-Shame Religious Conservatism: Anti-Critical Analysis; Pro-Shame

Neither radical sex-negative nor liberal sex-positive feminism is the clear opposite of rolequeer theory. Instead, they are opposites of each other, but their opposition exists in a space between rolequeerness and its true cultural opposite. What sexual politic is negative on critical engagement and positive on shame? What sexual politic claims that you should feel bad about your sexuality but that you shouldn’t think too hard about it? Welp, stock-standard conservative religious puritanism comes to mind.

Read more: [Bandana Blog] Locating Rolequeer within the Landscape of Sexuality Politics

the-laugh-of-the-medusa

I’ve never heard of rolequeer. Having done just a little bit of reading over the last hour, I feel like it really addresses a lot of the things that have always made me extremely hesitant to label myself a sex positive feminist. This is interesting and very important stuff.

A short etymological exploration of consent, or, Contractual consent and the privatization of experience

I was curious about the etymology of “contract” after remembering that the etymology of “consent” is actually literally “to feel together,” itself a formulation of the Latin “con-” prefix (meaning “with”) and “sentire” (meaning “to feel”). Contract, perhaps unsurprisingly, is much more direct. It is from the Latin “contractus,” which means exactly the same thing in Latin as “contract” means in English today, though it is derived from an even earlier word, “contrahere,” literally, “to draw together.” Curiously, though, there is at least one mention of the term “contract” meaning, “an arrangement to kill someone,” apparently first recorded in 1940 and introduced by the United States “underworld,” according to Etymonline.com. So that’s creepy.

Given all the legalism surrounding the colloquial uses of the word “consent” as synonymous with “permission,” it then occurred to me to look into the etymology of that word. Turns out, permission is taken directly from the Latin “permissio” which is the noun form of the Latin verb “permittere,” which is curiously defined as “let pass, let go, let loose; give up, hand over” as well as the more contemporary “to grant, to allow.”

Both “consent” and “contract” seem to have originated in the late 14th century AD, though clearly the latter has a much more direct root to earlier Roman notions of law. The simultaneous arrival of these derivations suggest that there is some important distinction between the two, then as well as now. On that note, “permission,” did not appear until the early 15th century, and it took several hundred more years until “permit” became a noun meaning “an authoritative document granting certain permissions.” Therefore, the clear connotation of the word “permission” is one in which autonomy is relinquished by the permit’s benefactor, and not obtained as is sometimes thought; that is, the person to whom permission is granted has heretofore “let go or handed over” their autonomy and has merely contracted for its temporary return.

Perhaps this is why I feel so strongly that “it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

At this point I wondered about the early uses of the words, so I asked the Google Books NGram Viewer for a chart that depicted the relative distribution of the various terms, “consent,” “contract” and “permission” across their entire available English corpus from 1500 to 2008. Here’s the result:

As you can see, although each word appears with about the same frequency at first, things begin to diverge radically in the early 1600’s, where usage of the word “consent” spikes to a higher point in the corpus than any of the rest of the words will ever reach. However, a few short decades later, in the 1650’s, use of the word “consent” begins to fall steadily and continues to do so until it is actually the least-used word among all the others, today. Meanwhile, at that same time, the word “contract” begins slow, steady climb, and a similar trajectory can be seen for “permission,” although with less volatility. Finally, in the latter half of the 19th century, “contract” finally surpasses “consent” during a dramatic increase and the same is true when “permission” overtakes “consent” just prior to 1950.

So what happened in the 1600’s that caused such a dramatic spike in occurrence of the use of the word “consent”? Well, one of the most dramatic shifts in global power at that time was the invention of the corporation, specifically the founding of the East India Company in 1600. This new form of combined social and legal organization proved the beginning of the end of feudalism and a radical shift towards what we now call “privatization” and away from the notion of the “commons” (as in common land, or property owned by multiple people rather than a single deed-holder). Indeed, numerous references to “consent” in the period of the word’s spike shown on the graph is a reference to this exact social issue in which the people who were once feudal lords became what we now know of as “landlords,” such as in, “Reasons Against the Enclosing of Commons Without the Consent of the Tenants: Shewing the Tenants Right in the Lords Wasts”, an 18-page treatise published in 1661 seemingly arguing for the continuation of communal property by tenants themselves and against the privatization of the land, using the terms of its day.

By this point it seems clear that the use of “consent” was entangled with legal definitions of property, but the context of the term was vastly different than it is today, wherein there is a clear argument for communal agreement, and rather explicitly against the notion of individual permission-granting. If we go even earlier, the notion of consensus is an explicit characteristic in writings mentioning “consent,” as in the 1588 publication, “Of the Incurable Scepticism of the Church of Rome,” which contains a discussion across several pages about how, exactly, to come to agreement “by consent” which focuses almost exclusively on the number of people involved and how many of them, precisely (in terms described as either “All Mathematically,” i.e., every person, or “All Morally,” i.e., some percentage of the affected), do in fact “consent.” Moreover, “consent” here seems much more a reference to matters of Faith than matters of Law, though clearly the society at the time was undergoing a massive restructuring that would ultimately (at least pretend to) distance the two. Also interestingly, the word “consensus” is itself etymologically related to consent in that its own etymology is directly from the same Latin word which actually means “agreement,” but whose derivation in Latin actually comes from the past-tense construction of “consentire”).

The point here is that the notion of “consent” seems historically entangled with the concept of unanimous, collective thought, a kind of group-feeling (or “group-think”?) that has obvious roots in advocacy against the kind of individuation most frequently invoked by the term today. Even the US government’s founding Declaration of Independence uses a kind of implicit collectivism to describe consent when it states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” I think the Declaration’s clever sociological sleight of hand here is actually not about consent, because after all the word had always used to mean a form of consensus reality, but rather that it uses consent to institute a legal foundation on which the definition of “unalienable rights” could be founded; ironically, perhaps, declaring only that which is unanimously agreed on as a “right.” Famously, these same men considered only three-fifths of what earlier text might have termed consent by All Mathematically. ;)

I bring up this historical and etymological exploration mostly to muse about the sources of our tragically dissonant cultural dialectic about consent: these things we “have” called “rights” on the one hand, and these things we feel about and with one another, regardless of the “things” that make up our consensus reality. Consent’s cultural relationship to contracts seems less important in light of this history than its relationship to the more general concept of ownership. It’s telling, then, as Graeber notes, to consider that those who argue for the contractual definition of consent have been most keen to describe how we have “permitted” them to own our bodies, even if only between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, or during the time we spend with them between the sheets.

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