Sharing Stories: Leaving Kinky Communities

I’ll cut to the chase:  a friend and activist is collecting stories and aggregating information about people who have left BDSM or kink communities and their reasons.  I think this is important, and I want to encourage people to participate.  There is a survey form here.  There is a FAQ post about it here, and a follow-up here.  The blogger, Motley Mayhem, has put the project ahead of the personality and I’ll respect that, except to say that I know and believe in Motley from consent culture work on Fetlife and I am really glad Motley is doing this.

The project has grown organically from a call to Motley’s friends to share stories, into a much bigger effort to capture the frequency and commonalities of these narratives.  I don’t have access to any raw data, but I can tell you from the stories I’ve seen and heard over the years that I expect the real news to be the frequency and similarity of certain patterns.  Regular readers will know what I think; what’s more important is to have thousands of accounts to back up the ways in which kinky communities drive off exactly the people who seek them out; the ways they act as power centers for the established members of the community and not as resources to guide or advocate for all the people who are or should be their constituents.

In the last two or three years, consent activism has exploded within kinky communities.  A lot of people can share credit for a revolution in progress, because there is a revolution in progress, or, as I said in my biggest series of posts on this topic, there’s a war on.  This survey is the forging of a powerful weapon in that war, a weapon made of truth.  Please help.  If you have a story to tell, please tell what you can, and if you don’t, please signal boost this so it finds the people who do.