Okay, I was going to write about my hot vacation fling, but I just read this week's Savage Love, and I'm now horrified by this Jason Fortuna CL experiment. I'm not going to link to the page where this fellow posts all the emails he received, including photos and whatever contact information the respondants sent. This strikes me as an appallingly low act primarily motivated by mean-spiritedness. Obviously, by aiming the ad at kinky people, the experimenters (who are active on LiveJournal as rfjason and demure) play on mainstream ideas of what's acceptable in terms of interests and attraction (and kink, though popular, is definitely not approved by the mainstream, especially not "heavy" kink.) In this way, it's easy for them and/or other people to pull the line, "Hey, these people are sick, so they deserve to be exposed."
The responses this ad received are certainly typical of responses I receive to ads I post. Some of them are thoughtful; some of them are shitty; some of them are informative; some of them are useless. Although I have no love for the lame responses I get, sexual freedom is important to me, and I love the fact that there are forums such as Casual Encounters, which make my life infinitely easier and allow people who are looking for similar things to find each other, probably more safely and reliably than in most other hookup scenes like bars and clubs.
Unfortunately, nothing is 100% safe, and privacy is never assured. I am always surprised when I receive responses from men from their work email addresses or that include their work phone numbers, because I'm cautious, myself. On the other hand, I appreciate it a lot when guys are up front about who they are. As a rule, women take more risks in casual hookups, and it's right for men to provide as much information as they can to show that they're who they say they are.
On this front, I'm especially sorry to see this sort of thing happening (and, apparently, there are some copycats, too, now), because it means that thoughtful men who know that I need information in order to be safe are going to be less inclined to share that information for their own safety. It pisses me the fuck off that someone would use this most important feature of online meetings to expose and humiliate people who are, after all, doing what so many of us try to do: make connections, whether sexual or otherwise.
Further, as a person who has a lot of nonstandard sexual interests, I'm pissed off at yet another blow to the system that I would like to see, where consenting adults can do what they want with each other. I doubt there's a person out there who doesn't have some bizarre interest, whether it's banana peels or stockings or shaving or what the fuck ever. Who isn't human, after all?
Anyway, this is just another lesson, I suppose, for those of us who have an online presence, to be cautious about what we share, because, after all, privacy is increasingly rare. Enough people are honestly out there looking for sex and hookups, and sex is compelling enough, after all, that this is hardly likely to be the end of CE and other venues for making that kind of connection, but I'm sorry to see this, anyway, because I know it'll mean some good prospects decide to skip the whole scene, and that's a loss for me, and for you.
