I’ve been having a little kink social media fatigue lately (and by that, I mean Fetlife). Nothing that a block of dark chocolate and some sunshine won’t cure. What has been making me tired is the stress emanating from a lot of people new to kink, and the stress I feel reflected back to them…
Tag: online communities
Abducted Scholar Zhang Ying Ying’s Case Brings Out Fetlife and BDSM Shaming in Media
Recently, Fetlife has come under the mainstream media spotlight due to an abduction case involving a missing graduate student from University of Illinois. The missing individual, Zhang Ying Ying, was a member of the Fetlife discussion group “Abduction 101”, and multiple surveillance footages have captured the evidence of Zhang being kidnapped by PhD Scholar Brendt…
Are Kinks Getting More Extreme?
Some people who’ve been in the BDSM scene a long time observe an escalation in the extremity of the things we do. It can certainly look that way in online communities. Safe, Sane and Consensual has given way to Risk Aware Consensual Kink, and there has certainly been a rise in popularity of identifiers like…
The Mysterious Old Guard
I self-identify as a kinkster and, like many others, I have spent a long time reflecting on and questioning my own characteristics and personality, and the desire and longing for a life that (for me) is geographically nearly impossible to achieve. I live in Malaysia, where you don’t see anyone wearing collars or use any…
Safely Separating Our Online Kink Spaces from Our Vanilla Spaces
WHY DO WE NEED SAFETY PROTOCOLS ONLINE? Our lives have become highly integrated with the online space of the internet and social media. For most people, a significant percentage of interpersonal social activities now happen online. Perhaps in the real world we could visit and leave a dungeon or play party without leaving too much…
The Difference Between Learning and Practicing
Some of this is going to seem very obvious to you, but I hope you’ll bear with me because I have a couple of opinionated insights that might surprise you. One of the things that separates Dominance/submission from more conventional relationships, I think, is that we’re on a continual learning curve. I’ve been involved in…