So You Want to Keep Politics off Fetlife

When I first found the kink scene, I thought about politics once every four years during voting season. Hell, I didn’t even call myself a feminist. Fetlife is one of the most politically charged communities on the internet, so it turned me into a wholly different person. If kink were water, politics would be the cup of dye that turns the ocean red. That hue gets into everything. That’s why Jack Sprat keeps asking us to keep politics off of Fetlife.

Every time someone develops a BBC kink, BDSM becomes political.
Every time you see K&P awash with white bodies, kink becomes political.
Every time someone takes on a slave, kink becomes political.
Every time sex workers are silenced by SESTA/FOSTA, kink becomes political.

Politics are the blood in the water. They can destroy us in a thousand different ways.

BDSM is political when someone’s consent is violated and they cannot take it to the police because the law still doesn’t understand our consent practices.
It’s political when the NCSF gets BDSM removed from the diagnostic manual.
It’s political when women grow tired of being assaulted at events.
It’s political when your forthcoming president threatens to censor Fetlife, and it’s political when the Ugandan government throws someone in prison for being gay.

We remain a marginalised community. That’s blood. That’s politics.
We’re still overrun by the male gaze in all its glory. That, too, is blood.
Puritanical ideas of marriage as a monogamous institution are blood. We’re haemorrhaging so badly we’re barely surviving.

The Times called BDSM the most democratic sex, and there’s a reason for that: Those who came before us wrote politics into our ethical frameworks. If you don’t want to think about such things, your kink is still as crimson as a vial of blood. You’re benefiting from all the politics your forerunners brought to the scene.

Keep politics off Fetlife? Sure. Go into the ocean and collect the blood in the water. I’m sure you’ll succeed.