A repost of a post on my Fetlife blog from five months ago
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Check this out: if you go to my profile and look at the fetishes, you'll find that I'm curious about Bolivian Cuisine
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/1074035
and into Afghan Cuisine
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/1070622
but if you clicked on either link, you'd find the system listing 0 people interested in either, with a notice that the fetishes would be deleted in 48 hours if nobody added them. The Burgundian Cuisine and related fetishes have already been deleted, and since Fetlife has removed the option to add new fetishes, I can't fix that.
The excuse for the deletion of fetishes, so far, has been that the company has been doing what it has had to do in ordet to make the credit card companies happy, but unless one wants to seriously argue that Mastercard would have an issue with me making Coq au Vin for somebody I'm dating, that excuse isn't going to stand up to scrutiny this time. Basically, we have somebody on the staff sneaking around while nobody is watching and gaming his own company's system, getting the system to fail to register the fact that somebody has expressed an interest in a fetish, in order to get the system to purge said fetish. Why would the employee do such an absurd thing?
Because John Baku, owner of Fetlife (and Dom) is a control freak, that's why. In a discussion in the Fetlife Suggestion Box group which I'm having trouble finding at the moment, Baku himself expressed unhappiness over the fact that the membership was using the fetish list feature in ways he had not envisaged, creating fetishes that John didn't feel were pervy enough (like Burgundian Cookery). Baku suggested that the freedom to create new fetishes be limited so that such inadequated perverted fetishes could not be shared with others. As I recall, this suggestion met with no support, which is probably why I'm having trouble finding it. The peerless leader didn't like the idea of his failure to find support remaining in the record, I suspect.
But a control freak is going to remain a control freak, so instead of doing his own thing (by keeping us from being free to do our own thing) openly and running into more condemnation, John Baku is going to have His will have done sneakily, a fetish vanishing here, a fetish vanishing there while we're not looking. I am going to have to say that I'm really annoyed, really angry about this. That long fetish list you see on my profile wasn't just set up to blow somebody's mind through its sheer length, it's an integral part of my profile, in which I help visitors (and those who would write to and get to know me) to get a clearer idea of whom I am, what I'm interested in and what I'd like to explore. While the whole idea seems alien to John Baku, whose soullessly self-indulgent sexuality seems to go straight to naked boobies with no lead up, for me those interests aren't a diversion from my "real" fetishes, they are real fetishes, ones that absolutely belong on that list because for me, they're part of the mating dance. Cooking dinner for somebody who fascinates me, exploring a museum with her, talking about the books we've read, the research she has done, collaborating on a theater piece or a work of interactive art - these, for me, are part of what leads up to (and what will follow) physical affection and sex, being both part of the foreplay and the afterplay, in addition to being things done just because they're worth doing.
I am not into Pick Up culture. Sex, for me, is not something that exists in a vacuum or that I want to rush into without developing a deep personal relationship with the right woman, first, and whether John wants to understand this or not, the sharing of interests is part of how one develops real relationships. Is my list of fetishes long? Good. Having a wide range of interests is a good thing, something that makes me easier to get to know. But John Baku, on this site on which he has the balls to talk about his support for personal freedom, only wants to seem to tolerate those exercises of personal freedom which involve getting somebody's penis or vagina wet with a minimum of fuss, preferably while upsetting conservative people as much as possible.
While I'm not a conservative, myself, my life does not center around a desire to outrage the sensibilities of such people. If I and my next girlfriend want to go out and ... I don't know, decide to get root beer floats during one of our dates, the impression that these sneaky, underhanded fetish deletions leaves me with is that Baku et al. would have a huge problem with that choice, because a Christian preacher would not. What I don't see is how any of this becomes John Baku's business, and why intrusiveness from Baku and his staff is any less objectionable than the nosiness of that hypothetical preacher. If anything, I think it's worse. A relationship with no vanilla moments, something that is nothing more than an endless game of "can you top this" as I and my partner try to see how shocking we can be, is going to be an empty (and probably stomach turning) affair, with no real connection happening.
I discovered this, today, as I finally got back through my update page on Fetlife (in spite of the infinite scroll feature) in an attempt to recover my writing from the groups, only to discover that almost all of it had been purged during Baku's content deletions. A lot of my work, none of which had anything to do with blood or "vampirism", went to waste, deleted without warning, and now I am left with the impression that I'm going to lose more of my work. Those fetishes took time to create, they've been serving a useful purpose, but John and company are going to do what they feel like doing, even if they have to sneak around like little cowards in order to do it.
Sorry that the quality of writing has been so poor in this post, but I'm so angry that I can hardly think straight. I'm not a sub, and if I was a sub, I wouldn't be John Baku's sub, but I guess consent means nothing to the guy, does it? All that matters to him is getting his own way, and if we get fucked over in the process, to him, that's not just OK, that's how he gets narcissistic supply replenished - and that's why so many of us are spending less and less time on this site. There is no way for me to keep the time that went into creating those fetishes from going to waste, if (as seems likely) the staff goes on playing this game, but I can at least refrain from setting myself up for further losses of this nature.
As for posting real writing to this site - not going to happen. Some of you know me "in the real world" (offline), and I'll be happy to tell you where I'll be reading, but given the destructive behavior of the staff and the horrible attitudes of the owner, I think that one can see why I would not consider Fetlife as a platform for anything of substance, any more. This is a long overdue (and thoroughly justified) vote of no confidence, not just in this site, but in this industry. As I pointed out in the Fetlife Announcement group (before I was banned from it) even the most lightly attended open mikes I've ever seen offered audiences far larger than those almost any blogger will enjoy, with far fewer restrictions. After somebody in-group claimed to know more about Chicago than I did on the basis he visited my city once during the last century, and insisted that one couldn't read rape fiction at any literary event in our city, I mentioned one at which I read, in which one of the writers not only read a piece of rape fiction, but in fact, one told from the point of view of the demonically possessed knife used to disembowel the victim. Nobody had an issue with that. There was squirming, because the writing was both excellent and (obviously) dark, but no protest from anybody, including the organizers.
At the end of the reading, the author didn't lose his writing to an arbitrary content deletion, because it was sitting there, on paper, in his hands. That's where our effort belongs, I think - in tangible form, not at the mercy of some admin who can wipe it out for any reason or no reason at all, and will do so just to establish his own personal power. I'm not going to write to Support about this. I've tried that in the past, and I've seen how helpful they are not willing to be. I'm just going to grit my teeth and walk on. What else is there to do? These guys are scum and they're proud of it.
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After I published this post, I added a few comments:
"Deleting and re-adding the fetishes I mentioned seems to have
worked, but take a look at my fetish list. I don't have time to check
them all. I definitely don't have the time to keep checking them all, in
order to keep an eye on what the staff is doing, while I'm not
watching.
I shouldn't have to make the time for that. We should be able to
trust the people in Support to behave honorably, and as I've seen, we
can't."
"Oh, here's another one they targeted: Atmospheric Chemistry
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/1071131
a perfectly legitimate science I'd like to know more about. I have it
listed as something I'm curious about, and once again, on going to that
page, I saw the system lie to me and say that nobody had expressed an
interest in the fetish. Adding that if this didn't change soon, that the
fetish would be deleted.
These guys are such incredible (anal sphincters)."
"Once again, deleting and re-adding got me to reappear, but I
can't sit here all night doing this to save my fetishes and I shouldn't
have to. I should be able to trust the staff to refrain from playing
games.
Atmospheric Physics
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/995919
was not so affected, at this time. The credit card company will allow
us to study charge distributions within clouds, but not their chemical
compositions, then? :)
Can anybody take the official party line regarding content and fetish deletions seriously at this point?"
"Comet Chenistry
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/1084967
I'll try the delete and re-add option. So far, Fetlife doesn't seem
to like Cooking or Chemistry. Has anybody broken the news to John that
most universities have departments of Chemistry? That it's a perfectly
respectable subject?
How much crazier is this going to get?
"Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/1083580"
"Comorian Cookery. Same game. MC doesn't want us to put vanilla into our food, Mr. Baku? Really?
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/1073998
Bearded dude, you have issues."
https://fetlife.com/fetishes/1075176 "
After I raised a fuss (and maybe other people did), the fetishes started sticking and we got back the freedom to create new fetishes, so there is (once again) a Burgundian Cuisine fetish on Fetlife. But I remain banned from the official company group, where the content deletions were being discussed (and defended by a few fanboys who didn't like seeing me debunk their feeble rationalizations of the company's actions) to this day.
That's the problem with Fetlife: the site is crazy, not in the sense of wildness and amusing whimsy, but in the sense of providing the user with one pointless headache after another.