Submissive does not mean slut, it does not mean weak, and it certainly does not mean that you can get me to jump into bed with you from a one line email telling me how dirty I am and that I must NEED to be owned by you.
I first introduced to the world of kinky online communities (ok…dating sites) in the Alternative Sexually Collective at my college, and went right on back to my dorm and signed on to Fetlife and Collarme… each with completely different results. While any site that’s even remotely adult related will of course be littered with creepy older men looking for underage (or at least underage LOOKING) girls to kidnap, guys pretending to be young innocent girls looking for other girls to play with, and of course spambots trying to get you to join their ‘kewwwl dating site!!11!’, there are a few real, down to earth people, looking for friends with similar interests, that won’t drag you into a field and beat you unconscious…unless you wanted that.
As a whole, Fetlife was a rather positive experience, mainly because it wasn’t advertised as a dating site so there wasn’t any pre-conceived notions that everyone was there just to get laid. There are tons of discussion intensive groups, and hilarious fetishes based on Dexter, beards, or even other Fetlifers! I have, of course, received some horribly offensive messages on the site, telling me that I’m a dirty skank that can’t live without this man telling me what to do and preventing me from having any sort of professional life, I have also met some really great people from my college town and my hometown that I can talk to freely about kink without any worry of being judged.
Collarme, on the other hand, was almost entirely a negative experience. Within the first 5 minutes of signing up, I had 3 pages worth of messages from guys more than twice my age, with out any pictures or profile information whatsoever, telling me that, from the one very G-rated picture that I posted, they could tell that I was a dirty, depraved slave that needed a strong man (namely…them) to come into my life and control every aspect without a care for what I wanted, despite the fact that all over my profile it says that I have very serious career aspirations and refuse to let any partner (Dom or otherwise) get in the way of those goals. I have, in the nearly two months that I have been a member of this site, have received messages from the same guys, regardless of the fact that I refuse to respond, telling me that I am a cunt and tearing apart my beliefs of kink and submission being an empowering experience for a strong feminist women, yet still believing that I must want to talk to them.
My experiences on such adult and kink related sites gave me a very interesting view on how many dominant men view submissive women. Though I already knew that there was going to be a lot of misogyny and blatant mistreatment of women in this community (thanks to ignorance and the assumption that since a woman is submissive she must want you to completely degrade her humanity and worth), I was not aware of how apparent it actually is.
I do not mean to say that all women who are submissive and involved in the kink and BDSM community do NOT wish to be completely enslaved by these men, nor do I mean to show them any amount of disrespect. I do mean to say that many strong, career driven, feminist, submissive women that are looking to these sites for friends and potential partners have a lot of work to do to remind the world that submissive does NOT mean inferior.
