We Are the Product

During my first year at Fetlife, an internet stranger told me he wanted to cut my throat, hang me upside down over a bath, and watch me bleed out. In the years since, I’ve lost count of the men who’ve asked me if I fuck my dog. Rape and murder messages are so frequent they’ve turned my inbox into a horror movie. I can’t tell you which is preferable: to find those messages unusual enough to shock you, or to find them so common that you no longer have an emotional response. When rape and murder are as routine as “how R U” messages, something is desperately wrong.

These are not mere fantasies from men looking for wank fodder. They’re attempts to distress, but on Fetlife, it’s only harassment if you do it over and over again for months on end. The caretakers will rarely respond to one violent message. To them, that’s not an issue of harassment, but of freedom of speech. We know this because, when we ran a #NoHate campaign against transphobia, the vast majority of the hateful abuse was reviewed and allowed to stand in the name of censorship.

Dudebros’ rights to say violent things are more important than women’s rights to use the site unimpeded by verbal violence. Fetlife is unique in this. Over the last few years, other social networks have been rolling out tool after tool to keep their female users safe. Twitter’s automation picks up offensive content in messages by keywords. If a non-follower sends you content containing flagged words, it's hidden. Facebook lets you filter all messages from strangers. Instagram gives you an auto-hide feature, along with a tool for filtering keywords.

Protecting female users is trending…

… unless you’re on Fetlife, because on this site, our written content is not the product. K&P is not the product. Even Fetlife itself is not the product. We are the product. Women are the product.

Your average Joe signs up to this site to look at a few pussy pictures and send out wank spam to women. I strongly suspect that this is where Fetlife butters its bread. Getting in the way of potential replies is getting in the way of profits. Just ask the last dudebro who closed his account because there were no real women on Fetlife.

Rolling out a Twittereque spam filter would only get in the way of rapey dudebros’ wank fodder hunting. That is, in any case, my summation of the issue. If we go by @JohnBaku’s history with violent text, a spam filter would be censorship, and he seems to think that's much worse than receiving rape and murder messages.

If you’ve spent any time reading online dating site reviews, you’ll know that one of the biggest priorities is whether there are real women using the site. Fetlife insists it’s not a dating site, but that’s precisely how the dudebro genus uses it when it's not demanding free porn.

Women are tired of being the product.