If you prefer the Fetlife of 2015, maybe you should travel back in time as a woman or a common target of hate speech

I joined Fetlife one sunny afternoon in 2014. The first consent activist who educated me is currently awaiting trial for rape and sex trafficking. This was not unusual in those days. I’ve watched a few Fetlebrities get dragged through the courts since then. They were the men who first taught me about BDSM, and their lessons became a pandemic that spread through the scene. TW taught us that you don’t use safewords if you’re The Real Deal, but MJ was even worse. His One Twue Way apologia was some of the loudest on the site. If you were a sub, you had to pass through The Golden Gates of MJ, but you didn’t always make it through. Some of us got caught between the bars, having established relationships that subscribed to his toxic principles.

For women, the theme of 2015 was anger. We had no inbox filters in those days, so our messages were clogged with harassment. Fet’s TOU were more of a list than a book, and hate speech snuck through every hour of every day. There was an infestation of transphobia and racism in the open air, and if you reported it, you were as likely to be heard as you were to be ignored. Spotting was still allowed, so online abuse could swallow you for weeks.

After several pointless bouts of activism, Fetlife at last started taking hate speech seriously in February 2020. Spotting was banned, the inbox filter was borne, and women could at last feel marginally comfortable on the site. Four years have passed since then, and it’s been glorious. Fetlife has its problems, but it doesn't have 2014's problems.

And that’s saying something. The change has been dramatic.

Yesterday several men celebrated the beauty of the “Golden Era” of 2015. You can tell the sex of the commenter by their opinion on this. If they thought it was glorious, they’re almost certainly cis men. If they thought it was a horror show, they’re almost certainly women, trans folk, male allies, or minorities.

2015’s K&P was full of amazing writing, but it was uninhabitable terrain unless you were cis, white, and male. That’s why the Tits for TOU campaign happened. It’s why the Slut Strike happened, and it’s why the No Hate campaign happened. Now, we don’t have those campaigns because great swathes of the community haven’t felt the need. Vice hasn’t published an anti-Fet piece for years.

The Good Old Days weren’t good at all. Not for subs. Not for women. Not for trans folk. Not for Black or Brown folk. No ecosystem is completely inhabitable for minorities, not even Fetlife, but this community was once untenable for us. The site is still sorting through its own mess, so I’m not going to tell you we’ve reached our happy ending. I am going to tell you Fetlife has made great strides, though.

These days, The One True Way cannot flourish. It hunkers into humid corners where few ever go. When it appears in the wild, we shout it down. We’re a lot better at consent these days. We’ve banished “No-Safeword” Sadists from the top 10, and that’s progress.

Fetlife has been making changes for cis men, too. When you complained about Only Fans, Baku gave you a commercial filter. You can now view K&P without seeing a single Only Fans account. The site even went so far as to remove clickbait from the top 10, so “press love” posts have been obliterated. If you have Only Fans in your feed, it’s because you’re not using the filter and/or are following Only Fans accounts. There are no Twitteresque algorithms here. Either you click and follow or you don’t.

But if you prefer the Fetlife of 2015, maybe you should travel back in time as a woman or a common target of hate speech.