On the Risks of Being Kinky and Female in Tech

While many who live and work in San Francisco are part of the mass tech industry migration, for others, the city holds general lifestyle appeal, and they end up in the industry after the fact. I am one such convert, a lifestyle female dominant who grew up in East Coast kink scene. Before, I had only online interactions that grew out of the dark corners of vanilla dating sites; with few public kink events to offer indication of anyone’s sociability or reputation, there was a tepid air of distrust sewn through every online and offline interaction I had. On moving to San Francisco, I was relieved to live and date in a place where I could find an extensive BDSM community. I could take people on kinky dates, have them meet my kinky friends, and feel some kind of self-esteem in my identity as part of my “real life.”

Photo CC-BY screaming_monkey.

In the time it took me to transition to tech, kink was already experiencing a kind of mainstream cultural resurgence, even in my workplace. I became aware that certain men at Google lived their lives firmly out of the sexual subculture closet, either as polyamorous or kinky; Google directors and high-level managers proudly proclaimed their preferences in news articles and speaker websites. Of course, they were generally middle-aged white men, all of them dominants or tops.

The dichotomy between the risks of being out and male, versus being out as a kinky woman, became particularly apparent when I found myself on dates with other kinky tech professionals, especially other Googlers. By virtue of the numbers game, dating in a city where many people work for a handful of tech companies, lots of the amenable kinky gentlemen I met on dating sites ended up being one of my fellow 14k Bay Area Googlers. My OKCupid and Tinder profiles included the usual vague biographical details, and flagged my femdom identity. Could a coworker spot me without my knowing? There was always the risk, but it felt a measured one, or at least one proportional to my right to find happiness.

So I found myself on a date with – let’s call him Matthew, a fellow Googler who joined me for a fine enough first round of drinks at a local bar near my evening GBus stop. But in subsequent texts, things began to get tense:

“So oral worship huh? That’s your primary thing?” he asks.

“One of many things. Even vanilla women tend to like oral sex.”

“I don’t, at least not giving anyway. I don’t eat pussy. I’m old enough now that I know I just don’t like it, never have. Don’t do it.”

“I understand if that’s not your thing, but it’s a deal-breaker for me. I’m not really into play that’s only about pleasuring the submissive.” (He had just finished telling me in extensive paragraphs all about his desire to be pegged.)

“A deal breaker? That’s fucking ridiculous.”

“If we’re not a good match it’s not ridiculous, it’s my right to say no to something as much as yours.”

“Fine, thanks for wasting my time then.”

Yikes. His texts predictably ceased after that.

Just a few weeks later, I am standing at the bar inside the resort rented exclusively for our amusement as Googlers, pushing the ice around the well drink from the open bar. A group of male coworkers near me is conversing animatedly, ducking their heads around each other to steal glances in my direction. Before I can consider the possibility that they might be looking at me, one breaks away and slides in, close: “You’re in [group] aren’t you? I think I’ve seen you when I go to that building.”

He is slightly older than me, generic medium-brown hair, medium-build, medium-everything white male tech employee with a Patagonia vest unzipped over his button-down shirt.

“Yes, haven’t been there very long. You guys are all in… what, Ads?” I reply, glancing at the shirt of one of his friends.

“He was. I’m not.” He slides his hand up the bar behind me, and I see the wedding ring. I crunch my body away as my internal proximity-alarms start going off.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” he continues. He’s so close I can smell the scotch on his breath. He tries to snake the other around my other side, corner me against the wall. I defensively raise my hand.

“Expect to see me?” I blurt out, “I don’t know you.”

“I know you though,” he laughs. “The dominatrix from [group].”

My heart rate, steadily rising during our brief interaction, feels it has been stopped by a hard electric jolt.

“Ex-excuse me?” I stammer. My mouth tastes like metal.

“Yeah, you’re that one he said is like a professional dominatrix? Or something? That’s really hot…” he continues but my heartbeat is pounding so hard in my ears that I can’t hear him. I bat his hand away and scramble through the crowd.

He said.

He said? My brain races with panic as I sit at the bottom of some service stairs. Who is he said, WHO SAID….

Oh my god.

Matthew knew my first name, what group I worked in, could easily look me up on the intranet directory and find not just my full name but my email, even what building and what desk I sat in. The latter feature had become a hazard before: I had twice caught male Googlers who had lurked my OKC profile coming into my building to stare at me across the floor. Were they checking to see if I was as attractive in my pictures as in real life, or worse…?

The Google value of available, transparent information, of universal and powerful search had come to bite me firmly in the ass, violating my privacy, threatening my job and even my physical safety. Massive tech companies still make these internal features available, indeed many of their external features, without any consideration for how they can disproportionately be weaponized against women by jilted men. I thought of the directory again as text messages began to roll in from different strange numbers that night, soliciting me for sex, to come to a hotel room at the resort, that Matthew said I was “available.”

Many people know Google’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” but there was another stated value that stuck with me from when I heard it in my Noogler orientation. It was: “Google should be a responsible steward of the information it holds.” When employees who hold the world’s information, their coworkers’ and users’ information, fail to internalize this value, there is a loss to the product, to the workplace, and to retaining talent, that is multiplicative and potentially apocalyptic.

My time at Google was brief, but long enough to experience firsthand how a company that struggles to remove harassment from its own products also enables harassment within its own walls. Like many women who are sexually harassed in the workplace after rejecting a coworker, I eventually left Google for another job without ever feeling as if I could even begin to explain the problem to someone with the power to stop it, let alone go through any official reporting or remedy processes. In kink communities I had always believed myself to be safe, that there was a respect and a vocabulary for the divide of private and public information between partners that carries through to each of our “real lives.” But my identification with the community was no inoculation: entitlement to my body, my sexuality, my space still exists, a function of how men see women: consumables, objects available for their sexual consumption.

I wish I could believe that the entitlement reinforced by our industry and our workplace didn’t empower Matthew to take revenge, simply for being too incompatible to go on a second date. But this entitlement is baked into our platforms, by those that can neither imagine being subject to it nor believe it to be wrong: it takes just the slightest push of a bad actor, more empowered by technology than they ever have been, to cause the protections that I carefully erect to come tumbling down.

Photo CC-BY torbakhopper.

It’s a consideration I have to make carefully now. Men who partake in sexual subcultures are seen as studs, badasses, sexual wolves. The image of the kinky man is the intense, rugged dominant man swimming in nubile submissive women, running his leather glove-clad hands over their flanks as they coo over his dark sexual power. By contrast, dominant women are broadly seen by men who do not desire them as a subversion of this “natural order,” a kind of demanding, bossy shrew. To men that do desire them, femdoms are a hypersexualized toy: surely the drive for sex (with them, of course) is the only reason a woman would demand anything.

This hypersexualization characterizes my entire kinky dating experience, and especially the toxic sexual harassment that leaked into my workplace. I am very often treated as if I am some box for a man to check, an experience he needs to have, something exotic or novel he wants to try just to say he did, or to see if he “even likes this kink stuff.” I exist for men’s own sexual self-exploration, a freak without my own right to privacy or freedom from public shame, a resource for their own self-discovery — that like all things in an on-demand world, they feel entitled to access at any time.

As male kinkiness and male sexuality fetishisizes the taboo of taking without asking, is it any surprise that the products they build have no consideration for consent, for the safety of the user built in?