ABC News Brings the Dinosaur Stupidity On BDSM

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Partners in Shame: Jezebel.com and Fetlife

"Sure, you used your safeword, but you didn't say "Mother may I!" Image source: Fucking Dungeon.com.
Jezebel.com is running an article about the community at Fetlife slut-shaming a woman who wrote about being groped on a college campus on the Fetlife website. The student wrote about being accosted by a couple of costumed fellows on Halloween day as she walked across campus. The student tried to defuse the situation by smiling and telling the guys to buzz off in a nice way, but when they grabbed her and groped at her, she got shrill and yelled, and still no one helped her.

She posted about her experiences on Fetlife, expecting support from a kink community that understands, and what she got from a lot of them was a lot of slut-shaming. She was derided for not screaming, for not biting them, for smiling at them initially, etc., as if the attack was her fault for not being unfriendly enough.

The Fetlife response was blaming the victim, classic slut-shaming behavior, and it was a shameful way for any kinky community to behave. Kink is supposed to be all about safewords and informed, enthusiastic consent, and yet when this woman got attacked, she's hearing it was her fault because she did not immediately start biting and screaming when a group of men approached her in a not-particularly-threatening manner.

What next? "Well yeah, you were using the safeword and I still put the anal hook in you, but you weren't SCREAMING the safeword, so how was I to know you were serious?"

The thing is, as I've written in the past, it was the sexual freedom that feminism fought for that makes kink acceptable ... if "No" does not mean "no" then "Yes" does not mean "yes." Without the culture that says sex with informed consent is OK, you really can't have kink as an acceptable part of sexuality. Therefore, kinky folk have a particular responsibility to eschew slut-shaming and to condemn non-consensual sexual activities, not just because it's the morally responsible thing to do, but because it's important to our fucking self-preservation!

The people who slut-shamed the woman on Fetlife were not just morally wrong, but promoting attitudes that are dangerous for the entire kink community. They should be roundly condemned.

However, so should the editors at Jezebel.com.

Why? Because look at the title: "Kink Community Tells Sexual Assault Victims It's All Their Faults."

Here's how it should read: "A Kink Community Tells Sexual Assault Victim It's All Her Fault"

See the difference? The article dealt with only one sexual assault victim, a woman named Dayna. It dealt with only one kinky community, Fetlife. But the editors/writer CHOSE to publish a headline that made it appear that all kinky people were slut shaming sexual assault victims, and that's just not true. It was undoubtedly done in a cheap, sleazy grab for recreational outrage readers. Basically the editors at Jezebel were willing to fuck over the entire kink community via their headline for a little attention-getting.

Readers (other than me) wrote in to let them know their headline was misleading and wrong, and they've shown no interest in changing it. So, it's a considered, deliberate bit of sleaze. I've written about the unwisdom of tarring one group for the actions of a subset of that group, but this is not dumb partisanship, I don't think, it's just sleaze.

Well fuck em both I say. The sexual assaulters need to spend some time in a jail cell. The Fetlife slut shamers need some heavy ostracizing. And the Jezebel editors need to get their asses kicked by readers and everyone who reads the site should be aware that the editors will go for sleazy recreational outrage-baiting at the expense of kinksters. There's plenty of blame to go around for everyone.

Jezebel.com Hypocrisy: Slut Shaming Fifty Shades Readers

Kink.com model and Felicia Day celebrity clone lookalike Justine Joli being professionally slutty on WhippedAss.com. Your average Jezebel.com reader would defend her if someone tried to slut-shame her. But there are those that Jezebel readers WOULD slut-shame.

Image source: Kink.com video 4508, "Deep Dildo Pussy Stuffing" starring Justine Joli.

As I wrote in an earlier post on mainstreaming kink, I am seeing signs of a backlash against Fifty Shades of Grey and its readership in the material the flying monkeys bring in of late. All sorts of groups hate Fifty Shades of Grey. Feminists because maledom/femsub, BDSM people because Christian Grey is neurotic, social conservatives because it's sexy AND kinky sexy, literary types because it's not Great Literature ... and there's probably more, but these are the main groups with beefs.

Despite all the different groups backlashing against Fifty Shades of Grey, I felt that there was some vague underlying theme to the backlash, but I couldn't quite figure out what it was.

Until I read this very insightful review by Kristen Elizabeth on the TVequals.com website, of a recent episode of Law and Order: SVU that dealt with a Fifty Shades sort of author who got raped. The review was full of sharp points well presented, but this was the paragraph that really got me going:

It’s like we’ve finally reached a point in our society where we’re willing to let women enjoy sex…as long as it’s straight-forward, missionary position, no-kink sex. Anything else and it’s suddenly all right again to mock and shame them. If you need proof of this, just look at the backlash against 50 Shades or the way romance novels have been treated throughout history, but most especially in the past forty to fifty years. A book that is entirely about a woman having and enjoying sex or even just falling in love is dismissed as being fluff or ridiculed for being implausible…even by other women!!

And that's when it hit me: the women who are backlashing against Fifty Shades of Grey are engaging in a variation on slut-shaming. They're saying: "These women who read Fifty Shades of Grey are NOT LIKE US. They like trashy books like Fifty Shades of Grey, it's not a GOOD book like the ones we read, their fantasies are IMPURE, all WRONG, not the proper sort of fantasies for a woman to have! They like to read sexual fantasies about transforming neurotic billionaires through love! They're trashy, sexually immature, not very bright, oh might as well just say it ... SLUTTY women!"

That was what was bothering me, that hidden subtext running underneath the criticism of ALL the articles I read, most especially in the comments to the various articles and posts, like a crowd muttering obscenities while the candidate speaks, egging them on without speaking any obscenities themselves. That slut shaming.

I'm not too surprised by this sort of thing from social conservatives, they are what they are and I expect hypocrisy from them, it is after all embedded in the beliefs that make them social conservatives.

But c'mon ... Jezebel.com? That's what bothers me, that they engage in slut-shaming while loudly decrying the practice of slut-shaming when it is used with respect to things other than like Fifty Shades of Grey.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's a list of Jezebel's articles about slut shaming, they're on the right hand side of the page, scroll down them and read as many as you like, you'll see a very clear condemnation of slut shaming.

Now here's a list of Jezebels' articles on Fifty Shades of Grey, look at all the negative, slut-shaming-ish comments embdded in them, like the one in article on "Try Not To Imagine Your Nubile Daughter in Bed Reading Kinky Sexy Books":

The fact that semiliterate sexually inexperienced children are fans of Fifty Shades of Grey actually makes perfect sense.

And you'll find much more slut-shaming type quotes in the comments at the end of the articles listed here, of course. (The article that is highlighted in the list at present is a review of the Fifty Shades of Grey Law and Order SVU episode Elizabeth reviewed. But the Jezebel review completely misses all the salient points brought up by Elizabeth in her review, though some of the commenters brought some of Elizabeth's points up. It's not ALL slut-shaming with regard to Fifty Shades of Grey, though there is far too much of it.)

The thing is, this kind of slut-shaming on Jezebel.com's part (and don't get me wrong, Jezebel is just one with the herd in doing it, all the sites do it, it's almost reflexive in most cases) is not only hypocritical with regard to their stand on the issue of slut-shaming, but just plain dumb as well. All these women who have read Fifty Shades of Grey are potential converts to the cause of sexual freedom.

"You liked Fifty Shades? Oh, isn't it great we can read books like that nowadays? Wasn't reading about all that fun they were having fun? I like that too!"

See, take that approach and maybe you have a new friend now instead of someone who thinks you're a stuck-up bitch for putting down Fifty Shades and its readers so severely. There are fifty million women who have bought Fifty Shades of Grey, more or less. MIGHT be a good idea to see if you can use the book to widen some horizons.

But hey, the appeal of a little bit of cheap moral superiority is intoxicating to many people. Ask any fan of the double standard, or anyone who wants to consider women who wear party dresses when they go out clubbing to be "deserving" rape victims.

Yeah, that IS the company you are keeping.