What The Fetlife Meatlist Tells Us About BDSM Culture

­Fetlife is a website that is specifically geared towards kinky people. It’s important to note that Fetlife is not a dating site, but rather a social network that was created by kinky people, for kinky people. Recently, Fetlife has come under fire for a pair of third-party posts, published as “The Fetlife Meatlist”. For these posts, a user created a relatively simple web script that crawled Fetlife for data that was freely available to anyone with an account. The list is a searchable database including the profile name, age, BDSM role, sexual orientation, and location of Fetlife members. The creator of this list claims that he is motivated by the altruistic goal of pressuring Bitlove (the creators of Fetlife) into implementing security fixes to prevent these sort of attacks happening in the future. Unfortunately, the so-called “meat” advertised by the list is comprised exclusively of female-identifying members under the age of 30.

Some might argue that the risks of this incident are relatively minimal: if you followed any of the links from the list, you would still be required to create a profile or log-in before seeing the information available. Photos, videos, or writings posted on Fetlife were not leaked, meaning that the risk of being outed is lessened unless a user selected a profile name that they’ve used on another site. On the other hand, if you suspect someone is kinky, and you know their age and location, you could find them simply by following links. The core problem is that the personal intimate and sexual data that members consented to share in one specific location has been copied and published in a new location without their knowledge or consent. The information has been curated for and advertised to an audience of predominantly cis male sexual predators, that now have a well-laid out database of disproportionately vulnerable and inexperienced potential victims who may be unlikely to expose their alternative lifestyle by going to the police or perusing other means of defense. The upside is that the list is not comprehensive, and because of that, many women are not listed in either volumes of the list.

The list’s creator maintains that his only motive is to point out vulnerabilities in Fetlife’s security. But simply by titling it the “Meatlist”, his thin veneer of good intentions cracks: this is a blatant case of misogyny and predation. To refer to Fetlife, which is a networking site and not a dating site, as a “meat market” is to imply that Fetlife is not a community hub, but rather a place for people to meet sexual objects. Women are not meat, and regardless of what they post on a fetish site, they do not deserve to be treated as inanimate objects that exist merely for the entertainment and sexual stimulation of men… or as collateral damage in “hacktivist” stunts.

Within the BDSM community, younger members are often treated with a heavy dose of negativity. Younger male members, specifically Dominant male members, are often dismissed in the community and their experience (or lack thereof) is seen as inferior and less desirable. Conversely, younger female members are often considered desirable, not only due to the problematic idea of youth in our culture being seen as sexually desirable, but also because they are viewed as easily exploitable due to their perceived lack of experience. Younger female submissives often haven’t had a long-term BDSM relationship and are seen as more malleable, easier to mold into the “perfect submissive”. The creation of a list that specifically targets the most vulnerable populations within a community that is already dealing with extensive issues around abuse and consent violation, and proceeds to makes them easily locatable, is incredibly problematic… especially when these younger women are already overwhelmed by unwanted contact from male members.

One of the biggest frustrations surrounding the Meatlist has been the response (or lack thereof), from Fetlife. When the second post came to light, it became clear that Fetlife had known about the posts in February of 2015. They had originally sent a DMCA notice, but since what The List creator had done was not technically illegal, the posts went back up March 3rd. After that, Fetlife was silent on the issue. They did not alert their members to the fact that their information was shared in any way. Unfortunately, much of the damage was already done. Since each account has a sequential user ID indicating how many members have joined, the only real way to ensure not being on this and future, similar lists is to delete your account and start over with inaccurate information.

Fetlife’s lack of communication surrounding this leak – especially to affected users — is indicative of a much larger problem surrounding communication within the BDSM community.

Within the community, there is an unhealthy culture of silence. Communication is encouraged within partnerships, and consent is encouraged between individuals, but — perhaps in an effort to keep those within the scene from being exposed or “outed” to friends, families, or employers — there is a lack of open communication between BDSM communities themselves. Without much intersection and discourse between BDSM groups, predators hop from community to community with ease.

In terms of creating a safe space for a BDSM network to flourish, there are a few things that need to happen. There needs to be a safe place for kinksters to talk about their lifestyle and seek guidance, support, and education without fear of public exposure. There needs to be a space that respects the importance of consent and allows for people to publicly talk about consent violations in a way that discourages predators from jumping between communities, or preying on vulnerable parties (as we’ve seen with Jian Ghomeshi). There also needs to be a space that, as a site of contact with the broader community, maintains transparency in regards to security breaches and other leaks. Fetlife has failed to provide the community with this space, consistently failing to protect members’ privacy, and even actively preventing victims of abuse within the community from red-flagging their abusers to other members on the site.

Fetlife is a site with a stagnating user interface, and one that no longer serves the community well. Despite their search for developers and designers over the better part of a year, no updates have been made, nor are there any expected release dates on updates. Their most recent update to their site was a cleaner “friend feed” and a modernized mobile site. Fetlife currently maintains a space where people are often being bullied on their forums, and a basic web search surrounding Fetlife and consent provides overwhelming evidence that the site implements their community guidelines inconsistently. The approach from the caretakers, and creators of the community guidelines, sides with predators in forbidding victims to publicly name those who have violated another’s consent under the guise that criminal accusations would “degrade the quality of discussions and people’s experience here on Fetlife”.

In order to protect the BDSM community and their interests, some changes need to be made. Not only is there a need for structural change on Fetlife, but also a need for cultural change within the BDSM community as a whole. There is a dire need to encourage communication and transparency between BDSM groups and members. Visibility of kink communities has grown with the normalization of BDSM as a result of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey. In this environment, transparency should be encouraged across the board more than ever before. In addition, victims of sexual assault and consent violations who come forward should be supported and validated, and given a safe space to tell their stories. From a structural standpoint, it would be ideal to see privacy controls similar to Facebook and Google+, as well as restrictions on access to the back-end of the website. Those changes would allow for a greater sense of security and require much more effort for a person to exploit those vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, those changes require dedicated employees and the money to craft those changes, and the fallout from this newest exposure of the lack of security on Fetlife is likely to encourage many paying users to cancel their accounts.

This is neither the first nor the last time that Fetlife will have dealt with someone exposing the lack of privacy on their site. Hopefully, with the negative publicity around this event, they will develop a standard practice of how to handle leaks like this. On a positive note, The List has opened a dialogue about many of the issues plaguing the BDSM community. Within technical, sex-positive, kink, and feminist communities a number of questions have been raised. What are sustainable safety and security options on social media sites? Can we change the laws so that they are in line with the speed that technology is developing? What is the expectation of privacy on the internet? How do communities encourage practical safety advice, and encourage personal advocacy, without victim-blaming those who had their information publicly exposed?

Finally, the exposure of The List has raised the very important question of why Fetlife is the only popular option for kinksters looking to network and create a sense of community.