The Kink Continuum

[13 February 2007]

When Jason Fortuny baited BSDM fetishists on Craigslist, he exposed their personal information -- and our society's rampant sexual hypocrisy.

By Claire Litton

You may have heard of Seattle web developer Jason Fortuny’s September 2006 “Craigslist experiment” in which he posed as a submissive woman and solicited responses from kinky, dominant men. Citing safety, he requested real names, phone numbers, pictures, and other contact information—and then took all the personal information these men gave him and posted it on a website. Some responded to this with a shrug: Too bad about the privacy violation, but that’s what happens when you’re a disgusting pervert. Presumably as a kinky person, you just don’t have the same rights as anyone else.

But what Jason Fortuny did was extremely unethical, not because he was a man posing as a woman—as vice squad detectives can tell you, 17-year-old virgin Jennifer in your chat room may likely be 40-year-old PTA member Steve—but because he took advantage of people who were taking care to be ethical themselves. As sex columnist Dan Savage has pointed out, those responding to Fortuny’s ad were trying to provide a nervous woman attracted to a murky subculture with the security that their personal information could afford, assuring her that if she did end up getting hurt, she’d know how to find them.

Instead, they got blamed for being kinky, “outed” to their families and communities, and had their professional and private lives compromised; one couple in an open marriage begged that their information be removed from Fortuny’s website, as their religious friends and family were unaware of their lifestyle. Someone else recognized a coworker from a Microsoft-based email address; another email came from a usar.army.mil address, not an organization famous for tolerance of alternative sexualities. Fortuny’s considerate response to the experiment’s “subjects” who asked him to remove their information from his website? “Sorry. Try not to freak out. Take deep breaths. Recognize that your friends will laugh at you for a little bit, and you’ll get some prank phone calls. Maybe a feminist will write you a nastygram. If this is making you cry then grow the fuck up. Be the real man you claimed you were on your response, faggot. You should be able to take a hit in the solar plexus without flinching.”

Why the hostility? Our culture is happy to grapple with sex-fetish imagery in the mainstream, where an ad for Altoids features a corset-clad honey bun and the tagline “Pleasure in Pain”, and Justin Timberlake moans suggestively about shackles and slaves at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. It’s a vocabulary we all recognize: chains, whips, ropes, Chinese nurses, rubber. We have some generic cultural connotations for kink: It can suggest, for example, that folks are more adventurous, more interesting, possibly even cooler than nonkinksters. How often does Cosmopolitan tell couples to spice up their relationship with some light bondage, handcuffs or a silk scarf blindfold? So how do we get from thinking kink is a fun and exciting way to add a little zest to your sex life to finding it disgusting on the Internet and persecuting those who sought to practice it privately and safely?

Kinsey’s sex studies in 1948 and 1953 revealed that we’re all a lot weirder than we think. Gay, straight, kinky, or vanilla, we’re all blips on a continuum that is wider than we typically imagine. While Kinsey didn’t specifically study kinky behavior, his studies did reveal that approximately 12 percent of females and 22 percent of males had an aroused response to a sadomasochistic story and more than half of both sexes responded erotically to being bitten. And the prominence of kinky images in the media—such as TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s cavalier inclusion of handcuffs, collars, and safe words, the recurring dominatrix character in CSI, fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s use of stilettos, rubber, and leather straps and even the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which has players disguise themselves in bondage gear to gain access to a casino, suggest a vast population with at least some interest in kink. So the scorn leveled at the men who answered Jason Fortuny’s ad is hypocritical, to say the least. Chances are that some of those folks who sat down at their keyboards to write an e-mail blasting those poor guys had a pair of handcuffs under the bed or reach orgasm only while humping a high-heeled shoe.

The point is that it is a part of us. Just as we all have hair, and all have parents, so, too, do we all have kink. Calling people names or attempting to boot them out of society for something so fundamental is just about as silly as trying to drop-kick them for having two legs. Kinky behavior is the stuff of fantasy, the stuff you dream about, that you can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to do with you. When we see people give credence to those fantasies and make them reality, it threatens the separation society promotes between the two categories in order to maintain its mores. Therefore, images of a horny schoolgirl dominatrix are okay, but an actual dominatrix is socially unacceptable. Fortuny and the kink-slanderers he inspired denigrate those who reject that boundary between sexual fantasy and reality and enforcing their otherness while reassuring themselves of their socially prescribed normalcy.

But the funny thing is that the Internet has traditionally been a haven for fetishists of all flavors. Back in the old days before BBSs and chat rooms, before anything but pen on paper, toe fetishists and panty lovers were locked in tiny miserable worlds of their own, not knowing if there was anyone else in the world who felt the same way as they did. But with the Internet, the kinky community blossomed. Many fetishists reported experiencing relief at finding out they weren’t alone.  As a man-on-the-street interview in HBO’s erotic series Real Sex points out, now if you like to hump doorknobs, you can go online and find a club with 50 other doorknob-humpers. 

These new opportunities for fetishists to normalize their behavior is precisely what threatens Fortuny and his ilk, who seek to shame kinky people back into hiding, preserving the marketing power of kinky fantasy while denying it any place to flourish in reality. Mainstream culture forbids kinkiness to save its shock-value potency for nonsexual purposes. Internet-fueled actualization of fetishism threatens the status quo, and as a result, our feelings of belonging in our community. When society dictates that kink is wrong, and we see people actually engaging in said kink, it flouts society’s agreed-upon rules directly. There is no legitimate physical threat from kinksters—a common motto of the kinky community is “Safe, Sane, and Consensual”—but there is a socially induced psychological threat. If the mass media tells us that engaging in kinky behavior is naughty and someone actually engages in it anyway, what other social conventions might they reject? Rejecting social rules, we’re trained to believe, leads to chaos, confusion and the breakdown of society. Fortuny and his online pals became unwitting minions of our repressive culture, because he has internalized society’s dictates and rules and feels threats to them as threats to himself, despite all logical evidence to the contrary.

Fortuny was able to create scandal because privacy laws imply that only shame provokes us to choose to keep certain things to ourselves. But if our supposedly taboo activities are increasingly being revealed with the help of the Internet as more and more commonplace, they will not remain potently taboo for long. How can you shame someone for being “other” when there is more and more proof that this otherness is in fact the norm?

As Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.”  The more information we gather about the world in general and our place within it, the easier it will be to make decisions that benefit not just individuals, but society as a whole. Since the only permissible images of kink in mainstream culture stylize and distort what actually happens when people engage in kinky activities, it is important and necessary to allow safe social space where real information about this subculture can be exchanged. While some kinky behavior rightfully remains in the realm of fantasy, we should be able to distinguish between harmful and non-harmful fetishes, and we can’t do that without safe, sane and consensual access to information.  Fortuny’s prudish actions were more nonconsensual and harmful than the fetishes he denigrated. 

As long as we exist in social groups, there will be struggles for balance between group members and the terrible, fearful “other”. It is up to us to ensure that we do not needlessly alienate valid and productive members of society through lack of knowledge. Fortuny may have preferred to remain in ignorance, but the best gift we can offer each other from the depths of our little monkey brains is information and acceptance.

 
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Comments

Right on.

Comment by Brent from San Diego — February 13, 2007 @ 10:41 am

I love the insights in this article. It’s nice to see people stand-up for things that are basic, regardless of where you are in the kink spectrum.

Comment by Lindsay from Boston — February 13, 2007 @ 11:21 am

“There is no legitimate physical threat from kinksters—a common motto of the kinky community is ‘Safe, Sane, and Consensual’”

Yeah, but husbands promising to “love, honor, and obey in sickness and in health” hasn’t stopped domestic violence from being the #1 thing putting women in emergency rooms across America.

Getting off on seeing people in pain is…getting off on seeing people in pain. Pathological attitudes about sex=pain and pain=sex have real-world consequences. Here’s one from just this week but there are many victims of BDSM abuse who can’t come forward because hurting people to get off is now quartered off into “all getting off is good getting off” territory.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/496566p-418471c.html

“The stomach-churning charges allege that Marcus placed the woman naked in a large plastic bag and choked her, that he mutilated her genitals, locked another woman in a dog cage and posted images of them on his Web site, which was shut down after his arrest in May 2005.”

The idea that the men (some married) answering the ad didn’t block their personal information because they were empathically concerned about putting an anonymous woman’s mind at ease instead of it being a matter of later-regretted entitled laziness is possibly the most preposterous male-apologist contortion I’ve ever seen a woman write.

Comment by Thali from USA — February 13, 2007 @ 1:10 pm

Yet another article that misses the point completely, AND is factually incorrect to boot.

If you bothered to do your homework, you would find I did not solicit the personally identifiable information of these men, other than a face picture: <a href=“http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/RFJason_CL_Experiment#The_Experiment”>click here</a>.

What I got instead were genital pictures and mounds of personal information, which shocked me. How could people give up their personal information to a stranger so easily? It was this revelation that made me want to start a discussion, which required posting the results verbatim online, so that people could see what was really happening.

And it worked.

Comment by Jason Fortuny from Seattle, WA — February 13, 2007 @ 5:42 pm

Mr. Fortuny, you are an asshole. You solicit people to trust you with their feelings, and then you share what they sent you with the online community.  However socially unacceptable you may consider those folks’ feelings to be, it isn’t your right to betray their confidence.

What exactly is the social value of our seeing “verabtem transcripts” of “what really happens” between consenting adults? Real journalism could certainly be done here. . . as Ms. Litton points out, the kind of desires and the kind of role playing that we’re talking about here are a pretty pronounced part of the spectrum of sexuality in our culture. Honest accounts of what really turns people on might really help us to get past the stigma that is still attached to BDSM, and perhaps it might help to help get useful information to people about the really important difference between BDSM and abuse. And there is a big difference. One of the big reasons we need to have a public conversation about BDSM so that people who are curious about it know the difference, because this stuff really can be dangerous.

But the kind of conversation we need to have about this topic is not the kind of conversation you are trying to initiate with your dumb-ass, sub Geraldo Revera expose of peoples’ personal lives.

I’m not sure what the point of what you are doing could possibly be other than to point and laugh. If you think that a discussion about BDSM should be had, well. . . so do I, but not the discussion you seem to be trying to initiate. You are a part of the problem.

Comment by Bob — February 13, 2007 @ 7:27 pm

Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you? Where did I say that I had a problem with the sexuality of these individuals?

(That’s yet another factual error in the article. This wasn’t an attempt to punish people with alternative or extreme lifestyles. I’m not exactly vanilla myself, you know.)

I couldn’t care less about your BDSM “we shall overcome” crusade. I don’t give a shit about what kind of sex people have. That’s not what motivated my actions. It’s people’s cavalier nature about their personal information that struck me. There are naive children out there who are more cautious about strangers than the men who responded to my fake ad.

It’s absolutely insane to think that you can trust a random person online with your private and intimate information, yet these men did it to an extreme degree. THAT’S the discussion.

Once again, I’d like to point out that this article is a joke. The author didn’t do her homework, made some serious mistakes, and painted her personal skew of the events instead of sticking to the facts. Way to go, Claire. You’re a real pro.

Comment by Jason Fortuny from Seattle, WA — February 13, 2007 @ 7:40 pm

AAAAAAhhh. . . .

Obviously I relied on popmatters for my info about this whole debacle. The point of your article (or blog or whatever it is that you’re doing) WAS lost on me, and if your post is accurate, then the article here has misrepresented you pretty badly. My earlier post took for granted that your purpose was to “out” people for their “strange” behavoir. Seems I was misinformed. My question to you is why didn’t you use your earlier post as an opportunity to explain yourself better instead of whining about what a crappy article you think this is? If you were trying to pick on gullible people and not kinky people, why not say so? I think anybody who read the article here wouldn’t take you seriously enough to bother tracking down what you actually put online.

I do have to ask why you picked this particular group of people to solicit? I’m sure you could find folks who wanted vanilla sex to send you inappropriate personal information. Seems that the stuff you could get from guys looking to dominate women might be particularly embarasing, eh? Maybe make ‘em look like real pervs, eh?

Your intentions really don’t have anything to do with whether you are an asshole, though, do they? Couldn’t you make your point without putting people’s personal shit out there for all the world to see? You could certainly DESCRIBE the stupidity of sending nude photos of yourself to a stranger without publishing the things online, or at least censor the stuff so that no one could be identified.

As for your wiseass dismissal of my “we shall overcome” points about the conversation you seem to be trying to provoke. . . if we aren’t going to try to talk seriously about this stuff, why bother talking about it at all? I suppose I should just call you a dirty name or something before I wind up getting to read more clever schoolyard banter.

Comment by Bob — February 13, 2007 @ 9:01 pm

This all would be a funny commentary if not for the fact that real people’s privacy has been violated here and that the idea that it’s OK to humiliate people for being different, no matter what the excuse, is being promoted.  Our society is so hypocritical and corrupt about sexuality its ridiculous and harmful.  Considering the above comments, this is the first and will probably be the last time I make comments about sexuality on the web.

Comment by Joe — March 21, 2007 @ 2:44 pm

@Joe: Who said this was an intent to humiliate? STFU and read the comments. You’ll see that Claire didn’t do her research on this topic at all and completely misrepresented the situation.

Comment by Jason Fortuny from Seattle, WA — March 21, 2007 @ 3:24 pm

@Jason Fortuny:

J-dog, not everyone thinks you are as cool as you do.  It’s just not gonna happen.  Either live with that unchangeable fact or keep on vomiting your ever-so-eloquent vulgarities into the aether.  Those that agree with you will fawn upon you and those that don’t won’t be swayed by your nimrodian rants.  Personally I wouldn’t care if you died in a fire, as the kids used to say.

Comment by Erskine from DC — March 21, 2007 @ 10:34 pm

Where did that come from? When did we go from pointing out Claire’s gaytarded reporting skills to whether or not people think I’m cool? (And, really, why would I care?)

If you’re going to disagree and criticize me, do it with the facts, not with the crap Claire wrote.

Comment by Jason Fortuny from Seattle, WA — March 21, 2007 @ 11:59 pm

Hahahaha!!!!  But, J-man, it’s all about how cool you think that you are.  You punked some freaks and now think that you’re the man!  And when we don’t agree, you point and spew filth.

Comment by Erskine from DC — March 22, 2007 @ 7:20 am

Oh, no. I was the man way before this.

I think the best way to put this to rest is to remind everyone that I have a sense of humor about the whole thing:

http://www.rfjason.com/temp/Fortuny-Douchebag.jpg

In case the above photo doesn’t appear, see the high school picture of me at http://www.rfjason.com/?p=14

Comment by Jason Fortuny from Seattle, WA — March 22, 2007 @ 10:43 am

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