![]() ![]() Sometimes John Kopanas engages with users in the comments section, asking questions, agreeing and disagreeing with user responses, and flirting. Instead, proposed changes are up for public debate in a forum called “FetLife Announcements.” These forum discussions often result in threads that are several thousands of comments long. If people who are into impact play walked around hitting people because it felt good, that would be assault,” said Lola.įetLife’s owners are seemingly unwilling to simply update their policies. Until you have that permission to use that language, that’s not race play. “I think people forget that one of the main BDSM tenets is consent. But sex educators are quick to note the difference between race play and acts of racism. People engaging in race play may assume taboo roles in their sexual play, like a master and slave on a plantation, or a concentration camp prisoner and SS guard. Memes blaming Jews and BLM for 9/11 sit side by side in galleries with photos of saline-engorged testicles.įetLife users have expressed continued frustration that Nazism and racist imagery has been permitted to exist on the site, now under the guise of “race play,” a category of fetish where participants play out negotiated scenes that explicitly address race and power. Users post photos of SS officers with captions foretelling European uprisings, and forum posts call for the elimination of the Jewish people and the establishment of a white ethnostate. Some profile images prominently feature “white power” symbols and hand gestures. They’re not using the buzzwords, but they’re trying to cover it up.”ĭespite FetLife’s terms of service, which state that users may not “Make or promote any type of racism or hate towards anyone in specific or a group of people, unless in the context of role-playing between consenting parties,” hate speech is easy to find on the site. Lola told me that attempts to address the problem of racism on the site were met with disdain from white users: “If someone speaks up about something, you get, ugh, everything’s about race! This is a kink site, what does that have to do with anything? Which is racism lite. I’ve definitely come across Nazi supporters, clearly stating they believe in white supremacy,” said Max, a Canadian sex worker who has been using FetLife for five years. “Since the BLM movement and people discussing racism on FetLife more, there’s been a lot of racist people coming out of the woodworks. The laissez-faire content policy has meant there has always been racist speech on the site, but users have experienced an uptick in the amount and severity of hate-based vitriol since the protests following the killing of George Floyd. The site has always maintained an ethos of freedom of expression, to allow for conversations about sexually explicit matters which might get users banned elsewhere. (Kopanas did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) Since then, it has grown to host over 9 million global subscribers, who can set up profiles based on their sexual interests, and join groups and discussion boards with topics like “Poly and Kinky,” “Rope Bondage,” and “Spank You Very Much.” Lola is just one of a growing group of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color who feel that FetLife has failed them as hate speech becomes more commonplace on the platform.įetLife, a kink- and BDSM-focused social networking website, was founded in 2008 by a Canadian software engineer named John Kopanas. “I got a really long message that was someone basically telling me what was wrong with Black people and that me wanting to be part of the BDSM community was me wanting to be back in slave days, and that we should all get on board with that being what we really want.” “I’ve been called n-word bitch, ‘you’re going to suck my white cock’…just this tirade of a bunch of racist things,” she said. I’ve talked to people from small towns, where there’s not a fetish club, and their only connection is talking to people on FetLife.”Īlthough she still maintains a FetLife profile, Lola visits the site less frequently now, due in part to the unmoderated racism she has experienced on the platform. ![]() “For some people, this is the only place that they can go to talk about their kinks. ![]() It’s an important resource for a lot of people,” she told me in an interview in late September. “When I first started out, that’s where I was. Dirty Lola, a 39-year-old queer Black sex educator based in New York City, joined FetLife in 2012 in an effort to expand her network of kinky people in her personal and professional life. ![]()
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