The Daily Dot
by Alana Massey
Listening to people describe their initial discovery of FetLife, the social network for those interested in the BDSM lifestyle, is not unlike listening to the newly converted describe their spiritual awakening. When the website launched in 2007, many who had never disclosed their sexual predilections felt free to do so in what they perceived as a digital safe space. FetLife soon became the home for kinky people seeking like-minded friends and partners, local event listings, and a forum to discuss BDSM in non-judgmental spaces.
But as many users learned last February, FetLife was also the home of an unsophisticated code that left its user data vulnerable to collection and re-publication elsewhere. The incident shed light on a number of FetLife’s failures to protect its users. More broadly, the security leak was a reflection of how best practices around safety, privacy, and communication are inconsistently enforced on the site.
The most recent incident started when a man named Mircea Popescu published a blog post titled “The FetLife Meat List—Volume I,” which he promised would be the first of several posts featuring a searchable list of female-identified FetLife users under the age of 30. The list contained the FetLife users’ usernames, ages, preferred BDSM roles, and number of FetLife friends, as well as their sexual orientations and locations. The post also included something of a preemptive FAQ about the list, in which Popescu claims the leak was motivated by a desire to call FetLife to task for “putting up the pretense of a ‘fetish for security,’” a reference to a message that shows up on the site when a user signs on for the first time.
While Popescu’s claims about FetLife’s lax security measures were valid, his decision to target women under 30, identify them as “meat,” and bemoan the “alleged abundance of tail” on FetLife in the post belies less than noble motives. But because he wasn’t actually breaking a law by leaking the information, he has already posted up to Volume IV as of April 25.
Of course, Popescu is not a sympathetic character in this story. But the ease with which he exploited the site’s vulnerabilities and FetLife’s subsequent failure to take meaningful action sheds light on the site’s history of turning a blind eye to abuses of people they claim to support.
While BDSM pops up in mainstream culture from time to time, it still remains largely misunderstood and frequently stigmatized. Until 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classified a number of BDSM behaviors as inherently pathological, and BDSM remains largely illegal under US law. Simply having a FetLife account is not necessarily identifying oneself as a practitioner of BDSM, as the site can be used anonymously with non-identifying email addresses and usernames. But it is still a powerful medium for connection.
“FetLife can be hugely important to someone who is feeling isolated. Facilitating community is a huge service. And ‘coming out’ can be a matter of liberation,” says Tanya Bezreh, who studies disclosure and communication in BDSM. “But there are dangers, and it’s a question of risk tolerance.” …