- No photos of your face (or the rest of your body that could be identifiable)
- No using your full name or giving out your location, address, or workplace
- No using identifiable information about yourself, including pets, hobbies, and activities.
- Don't link your vanilla profiles to your kinky ones (i.e. Facebook with Fetlife). Use a different email and password for all your kinky profiles than you use for your vanilla ones.
Protect yourself!
Of course, I understand you want to share your kinky pictures, or even just show a nonsexual picture of yourself on Fetlife or CollarMe, so people can see what you look like. I've done the same myself. However, even a non-kinky photo of you on a Fetlife profile can let an angry ex or coworker know who you are. You don't want to explain your BDSM profile to your boss, do you? Believe me, it's happened.
Sometimes, family members find blogs, like what happened to Lexi. Even if your family does not know about your kinky lifestyle, you can bet your mother will still recognize those photos of you with your head covered and your arms bound, or your writing style, or your age and location. It doesn't take too much to put 2 and 2 together. And, sadly, I know of many cases where an ex-spouse brought to court their partner's "alternative lifestyle" to prove they are unfit to raise children and get sole custody. Unless you want your juicy sex-life details spilled at your next family reunion, anonymously emailed to your boss, or dragged into court, you need to protect your information.
I know that some BDSM bloggers, like Clarisse Thorn, advocate an eventual move to where kinkiness is no longer something we hide behind with psuedonyms and stock photos (I love my stock photo, by the way). However, even Clarisse writes under a psuedonym for now. I hate lying, so I generally don't put any false information about myself on the web (like some kinksters who say they're from Alaska or Antartica to keep their locations secret) and if I'm honest, I can admit that I prefer to look at profiles with photos. A guy on Fetlife once accused me of being a "fake" because I "didn't even have the courage to show [my] face," so I put up several pics. I'm not ashamed of who I am, but blogs like GrayLily and Lexi's make me cautious. With all the myths about BDSM out there, being involved in this lifestyle could get you fired or disinherited or make you lose custody of your children.
Please, unless you really have nothing to lose, be careful online.
5 comments:
I hope nothing personal happened to you to prompt you to remove your identifying information. I've never put pictures of myself or my name on a place like Fetlife, but I've learned that even seemingly inane details like a hobby shared by millions and general location (i.e., nearest major city), was enough to have creepy people looking for me. And since "prefer not to say" is not an option for your location on Fet, it seems like Antarctica is the only way to avoid giving out that detail... I don't look at that as a lie since that really seems to be the purpose of having Antarctica as an option. And if someone I don't know wants to call me fake, why in the world should I care?
Lvs, I love that you are from "Antartica." :) Nothing happened to me, but I noticed 2 out of the Top 10 Submissive Blogs had closed because of these issues. That's too high a percentage for me to risk.
Once, on a site, I gave out my first name and city. There could have been dozens of us, but some creep used the university to find my name and Facebook. Ick ick ick. Needless to say, I'm being more careful now!
Yeah ... it's a sad conundrum. I only know one kink blogger who doesn't write under a pseudonym -- Meitar Moscovitz, or maymay, who blogs at http://maybemaimed.com/ -- and he's been personally attacked for it. He's lucky because he has an easily freelanceable job in a highly kink-tolerant field (programming). I'd like to collapse my pseudonym someday, but I don't know if I'll ever feel safe enough.
Thank you for this cautionary post. I also keep my sexual preferences to myself, since , for me, it isn't a spectator sport. Since that isn't part of my comfort zone, and I do not want my children to be subjected to knowing what Mama does in the bedroom, I keep this to myself. I am new, inexperience etc but as I told one gentleman, my iq and common sense have kept me alive so far, I'm not abandoning them now. My children are linked to me, their safety comes first I must always think of them
For what it's worth, I'm not out just for me, I'm also out for you. That is, choosing to desegregate my legal name from my nickname/pseudonym with regards to my BDSM and other sexuality writings is a political act. Only when enough of us come out of the closet will we gain the political power necessary to effect the social change that brings acceptance from the hegemony to the undercultures we thrive in.
Until then, you will never be safe, not out of the closet, and certainly not in the closet, despite how much more comfortable it may feel to you to be pseudonymous for now. Being out of the closet makes me safer.
Also, it should perhaps be noted that I'm not simply "lucky," although I certainly am fortunate. I worked damn hard to create a situation for myself that allowed me to be out about who I am authentically, to live the way I want to live (economically, socially, and otherwise), and that this was not an easy or an easy path, nor a task that can genuinely be called "done" at any given moment. My goal in doing this is singularly directed: to make it easier for the next person who wants to live an authentic life out of the closet to do so.
Anyway, in the mean time, you may find my blog post about online reputation management for sex bloggers worthwhile reading.
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