There are No Shortcuts to Vetting

In the beginning, when kink is still new, you follow the widely followed. You go to event hosts for your kink education and K&P to learn about consent. Surely the kink scene knows who knows, so popularity is your best vetting tool. Party planners know everything, you know, so just keep doing those munches. Your scene leaders’ knowledge will enter you via osmosis.

Then a Fetlebrity on your following list is shown to be a fraud.
A scene leader violates your consent.
A host is removed from their leadership position for being more profit-hungry than they are compassionate.
It happens again…
And again.
Hell, it happens for years.

They say if you spot one roach in your kitchen, you should assume you have a hundred in the walls. This is how the scene works: One violation is a sign of hundreds hidden in the walls. Where there’s one consent-violating Community Leader™, there’s always more. If you were an abuser, would you stay obscure or start your own event?

Which of those two personas would serve you more?

Do I sound cynical? I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m a Fetlebrity, and I have friends who spend as much time practicing rope as I do producing content. None of them is a high-profile lifestyler. None is on K&P. They just quietly get on with the business of kink, refining their ethics while I try to refine my words. Of course, we have people who are worthy of their high profiles. I used to link to one of them all the time in my posts.

Then someone warned me she’d had coffee with him a few times, so she knew it wasn’t safe to expose new subs to him. He’s the first name you see in the vanilla media when they write about kink, and he cannot be trusted.

In the beginning, when kink is still new, you assume you should follow the popular set, but then you meet Jason. You haven’t heard of Jason? Me neither, and that’s the point. Jason doesn’t care about social exposure or play party profits. He’s just here to borrow the St Andrews cross at events. His girlfriend always looks forward to their public scenes, but nobody knows either of them, even though they have so much to teach. You live the values you celebrate, and Jason and Gemma treat one another with love and respect. That’s the totality of their kink experience: not Ted Talks or K&P or party profits. Just love. Just ethics. Just volunteering as dungeon masters at their local parties.

I don’t know a lot about kink, but I know a lot about writing. Jason’s skills are CNC… and consent… and impact… and rope. If you’re still getting your kink education from high-profile people, maybe you’re not learning as much as you think you are.

Clearly, you need to start avoiding the trendy and the trending, so you start using Fetlebrity as a slur and stop trusting hosts who haven’t earned it. You go to obscure people at the edges of the scene instead—the ones who don’t even attend parties.

Then a Tinder stranger is shown to be a fraud.
A man from Facebook violates your consent.
It happens again…
And again.
Hell, it happens for years.

Maybe you should go back to absorbing knowledge through high-profile people…

You only know you’ve passed the beginning when you learn we’re all just individuals and, as such, we all need our own vetting. The moment you use someone’s demographic as a shortcut, you’ve already lost.