The Cautious Kinkster
Victims and survivors of abuse deserve the chance to confront their attackers openly and with the support of the kink community behind them. Even years later.
Those on the other side deserve a chance to publicly take responsibility for their actions. They deserve a chance to change.
Dominants, tops, or anyone else who holds power over another -- tell the world that supporting victims and survivors is more important than a fear of false accusations. It will only cost a small fraction of ones privilege.
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"I _have_ been looking for a way to serve the community that incorporates my violence." -- Turanga Leela, Futurama
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I'm the Demon, Kia. I write & comment about lots of stuff.
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apocalyptomania.tumblr.com
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a-world-of-abuse.tumblr.com
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church-of-the-multiverse.tumblr.com
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media-demon.tumblr.com
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move-eat-live.tumblr.com
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poking-the-powers-that-be.tumblr.com
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politi-kia.tumblr.com
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stealthbananas.tumblr.com
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NSFW:
thecautiouskinkster.tumblr.com
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I also contribute to the Free Open Society Project:
freeopensociety.tumblr.com
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Minion applications now accepted. Also seeking muse & amanuensis. Must be willing to wear a pink uniform. Probably leotard-based uniforms.
…The fact that these men felt they were doing nothing wrong is precisely the problem. The fact that for generations, men of all ages have felt able to use and abuse the bodies of women and children for their own entertainment is the problem, and the fact that our culture legitimises this approach is a bigger problem.
For centuries, men in positions of power were untouchable, while women and children were anything but. One simply could not call a man like Jimmy Savile or Stuart Hall to account for his actions and expect to be taken seriously. One could not accuse a popular football player of rape and expect justice. These things went on, but they went on in silence, with the complicity and of quiet armies of flunkies and facilitators.
The reason that these “old men” are being prosecuted – sorry, “persecuted” – right now is simple. They are being prosecuted because their victims are finally coming forward, and their victims are finally coming forward because society has reached a tipping point when it comes to rape culture.
Rape culture, for those who still require an explanation, is the cultural tolerance of rape and sexual assault. It’s the idea that people who are raped must have in some way provoked it, and I know from experience that it can take years for victims to understand that it is men’s responsibility not to rape. It’s an old prejudice, embedded in our institutions, in our police forces and judiciary systems, in political parties and in public organisations like the BBC. It also infects the tabloid and broadsheet press, who have changed their tune in recent weeks only because the process of consciousness-raising is panic-inducing, and there’s nothing the media loves more than a good panic.
Right now, though, things are changing, and men and boys and those who love and respect men and boys are going to have to shift the way they think about rape, abuse and harrassment – fast. The most important attitude change is going to take place not among abusers, but among the far larger contingent who simply stand by and let it happen. Among the people who have been taught, or learned from hard experience, that these things are simply part of the tissue of power in this society, perhaps not strictly moral, but not worth taking the risk of speaking out about. They’re only women, after all, and they were probably asking for it.
For many, many generations, women and children were told: don’t let yourself get raped, and if you do, for god’s sake don’t whinge about it. Don’t act like a slut. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t ever assume for a second that you have the same right as a man to exist in public or private space without fear of assault and humiliation. That message is slowly, finally, starting to change, so that instead, we’re telling men and boys: do not rape. Do not grope, assault, bully or hurt women, children or anyone over whom you have temporary power. Doing so will no longer increase your social status. If you do it anyway, you will find yourself publicly shamed and possibly up on criminal charges. This is the age of the internet, and nobody forgets….
…Those numbers are even worse than victim self-reports of rape in the general population; which the New York Times reports as about 20% based on a study supported by the National Institute of Justice….
…The best data we have shows that a third of kinksters have experienced a consent violation, 30% of kinksters have had their negotiated limits violated and 15% have their safeword ignored….
…if we continue to track spam reports this way, assuming that the publication of this post doesn’t change griefers’ future behaviors, we will eventually see the pattern described above repeat. That is, we’ll see the friends of an alleged abuser start to spam FAADE by reporting themselves with griefer reports. If this hypothesis can be proven, it may provide a far more reliable red flag for identifying social groups where consent violations are likely to be covered up rather than addressed constructively.
Those social groups are, to put it politely, not places where I would want to spend much time….
BDSM Scene power brokers are doing everything they know how to silence discussions of the rampant rapes, sexual assaults, and violations of consent in their midst (especially by high-profile, VIP-status people), to censor postings linking to critique, and to prevent important safety and privacy information from spreading.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been sent more than five different Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices for videos I’ve made and posts I’ve written criticizing the “single largest online organ in the BDSM universe,” FetLife.com (aka BitLove, Inc.). Moreover, as of this writing, most of my counter-notices were allowed to proceed unchallenged, a tacit acknowledgement that FetLife is well aware their DMCA takedown notices were improper and that my material was all either non-infringing or fair use. The majority of my content is now back online.
As I recently wrote, the BDSM Scene is an abusive social institution. I believe its institutional structures ought be destroyed as quickly and as mercilessly as possible. No institution deserves loyalty, no demographic compassion, no organization trust, no culture respect. But every person is entitled to each of these.
Since the BDSM Scene’s powers that be have economic incentives to support rape culture, to perpetuate technical ignorance, and to erode Internet user privacy, I’ve begun writing computer code to provide users self-empowering tools. This is an effort to break through the “somebody else’s problem” mindset, and an attempt to show that, on the Internet, users—not institutions—can be in control of our own well-being if we work together.
Volunteers are needed to help write code, beta test new tools (such as those linked below), brainstorm new ideas, and generally disrupt the BDSM Scene-State’s abusive functioning. The game is cat-and-mouse; the goal is to spread this information before Scene-State agents censor it, to implement as many tools empowering users as possible, with or without BDSM Scene permission or assistance. Every reblog counts. Every link shared matters.
The free FetLife Epic Thread user script gives FetLife.com threaded comments.
The FetLife Epic Thread user script makes reading long, passionate discussions on FetLife.com easier by adding comment threading for @-replies, a “previous/next” link for related comments, and visual highlights. Instead of needing to scroll past a bunch of unrelated comments, simply click the “Next in thread on page” link to go to the next comment in the thread. Rather than having to scroll up or copy-and-paste to see what a comment is replying to, click the “in reply to” link to see the original comment right under your cursor.
Download and install from maybemaimed.com.
See also:
The FetLife Epic Thread user script makes reading long, passionate discussions on FetLife.com easier by adding comment threading for @-replies, a “previous/next” link for related comments, and visual highlights. Instead of needing to scroll past a bunch of unrelated comments, simply click the “Next in thread on page” link to go to the next comment in the thread. Rather than having to scroll up or copy-and-paste to see what a comment is replying to, click the “in reply to” link to see the original comment right under your cursor….
Since FL management endlessly drag their heels over making the site more useful (seriously, no text search capacities for the endless number of groups render the place an unusable mess, amongst many other problematic design issues), it sure is nice of others (like the much-banned Maymay) to lend a hand with after-ware solutions . .… :D
This is cross-posted from this thread on Fetlife regarding many community members’ desire to change the policy preventing users from posting any identifying information, including usernames, of people they claim are abusers or rapists. Currently, if anyone publicly posts a “criminal accusation” the Fetlife team will go in and remove any and all information identifying the accused. Many people have responded in favor of the current policy, claiming that people should not be able to throw out accusations “willy-nilly” and that “criminal accusations are the job of the police.” Here is my response to that:
Here is what makes me certain that people in favor of maintaining the rules that abusers should not be named in public are full of UTTER SHIT and are only here to cover their own asses and because they are afraid of getting called out on their own questionable behavior.
Let’s say we actually do have someone who is your mythical “false accuser” and just holds a petty grudge and wants to blast a person’s name in the worst way possible.
If everyone is following the rules, that person could just private message all of their friends saying “hey this guy raped me, please let fellow community members know.” The message could just get passed along. In this scenario, the accused would have NO WAY of knowing that they are being accused of something, and suddenly everyone would be avoiding them for what seems to be no reason. Furthermore, there would be no public forum for people who know the accused and can vouch for their good behavior to speak up and let everyone know that the accusation is probably false. Even if some people who receive the message about the accused know that it is false, they have no way of knowing who else has gotten the message and therefore no easy way of spreading the word that it is a lie. On the other hand, let’s say someone accuses a person in a public forum. The accused can then see what is going on, who is accusing them, and respond in their own defense. People who know the accused is not a rapist can speak up against the accuser. Everything will be out in the open in a way people can discuss and come to their own conclusions about the matter.Now let’s say that there is a community member who is actually a predator, and someone wants to spread the word. They could do so through private messages, like described above. However, there is then no way to know how many people in the community they may have also abused; if someone gets the message has also been abused by the accused, they may commiserate with the person who sent the message, but not be able to gather further data on the breadth of the abuse the accused has committed. On the other hand, if someone accuses an abuser in a public forum, others who may have been previously afraid to speak up may do so, and the abuser’s patterns of predation may be fully realized.
So, you see, putting accusations in a public forum is BOTH better for the innocent AND worse for the guilty, and to try to suggest otherwise reveals you as someone who is probably trying to silence people from calling you out on YOUR shit.
Also, for everyone saying “just go to the police” ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? ARE YOU FUCKING BLIND? Are you willingly ignorant of the stories of people in the kink community who have been raped? If you know anything aboutrape statistics you know that less than 7% of rapists reported to the police spend a single day in jail, and that is after a long, re-traumatizing process for the victim. Most rape statistics are likely under-reported anyway, and if you add a kink element to the equations the numbers get lower. I have had several personal friends who DID try to report it to the police, who were straight-up told that they were lying and/or that they couldn’t get a conviction based on the evidence even if they tried.
Basically it works like this: Are the victim and the accused in a relationship, or recently ended a relationship? No conviction. Did the victim consent to certain acts but not others? No conviction. Was the victim seen being flirtatious/friendly/happy with the victim in any context? No conviction. Does the victim have pictures/video of themselves in a kink context on the internet? No conviction (go ahead and read about Fetlife’s horrendous security issues to see the irony on that one)
If you haven’t been living under a rock your entire life, or perhaps if your male privilege is emblazoned on your forehead, you know that our criminal justice system does shit for rape victims. And as rape victims have realized in response, the best, if not ONLY, way to truly protect our community is keep tabs on each other and let each other know who to be careful with. The law will not protect us, so we have to protect each other, and for Fetlife to hinder us from best protecting each other is absolutely criminal.See also: Let Us Name Abusers