An interesting thread on Twitter the other evening debated the extent to which one should link to kinky friends using social media. My rules are pretty clear…
Twitter is for kink. I won’t use my real name there, or disclose certain details about my real life – in the same way that I’m protective of certain aspects of my life here on the blog. I’ll write stuff there that I wouldn’t want vanilla acquaintances to read. Although my account’s locked, I’ll accept follower requests from anyone whose account shows that they post about interesting (aka kinky) stuff from time-to-time, aren’t promoting commercial offerings too blatantly, and/or follow or are followed by a fair number of others in the scene.
Tweeting, for me, is a little like blogging. With SW, the more folks who read my random jottings, the better. Ditto Twitter. Aside from providing a forum for lovely, open discussion with spanko friends, I enjoy sharing my kinky thoughts with anyone who’ll read them – and if they bring an occasional smile to people’s faces, so much the better. I’m just a tad cautious – editing some details to preserve my anonymity, and declining some follower requests – given the risk of folks out there whose intentions towards the scene might not be entirely supportive (aka journalists in disguise) or of people wanting to link to me to help them make money.
I only joined Facebook a few weeks back. For me, that’s entirely vanilla, and I use my real name. I link to kinky folks – given I don’t actually have a wide friendship group outside the scene – but I’ll only make friends even with folks I’ve met through our shared interest in spanking if their accounts make no reference to kink, either in their choice of name or in what they post. To be honest, I even hesitated to link to Haron, given she doesn’t use her real name there – the saving grace being that she doesn’t use a scene identity. And on FB, I only befriend people I know in real-life, or (in one or two rare cases) online where I’ve chatted to them enough to trust them absolutely.
I wonder how others reconcile the desire to chat openly, and to engage fully with both scene and vanilla friends, on scene and vanilla topics. I’d be interested in any views. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me here (and feel free to email too if it’s not obvious from your own Twitter account that you’re “one of us”); on Facebook, an email or DM would be great from any friends to whom I’m not yet linked.
I think you are being unfair to say that anyone who declines your friendship request on FB is not a *real* friend, we have a mutual friend who quite simply does not have any kinksters linked to them on FB, and that includes some very close friends. It is because of privacy and also security and has nothing whatsoever to do with friendship, as most people fully understand. Social media is a wonderful thing but we should all be free to use it how and when we want to, without feeling we ‘must’ link to someone for fear of our friendships being questioned.
Hi, Sarah – I agree entirely about freedom of choice; this wasn’t actually an issue of security in the cases in point.
For me, Fetlife is my kink hub. I hate the ads and some of the more graphic images that come up from time to time, but most of my friends seem to be on it. It’s also a nice way to keep up with casual friends met at parties and such.
My Facebook is basically vanilla. I only have three friends whom I met through the scene as friends on there. We’ve been friends for years and years. Even as I make deeper friendships the more involved I become in the scene, my FB will always stay vanilla because two of those friends are no longer active. I’ve been with FB long enough to know the ins-and-outs of what we affectionately call “Facebook stalking.” It’s sooo easy to find people by looking through friends lists, so out of respect to them and their privacy, I won’t risk inadvertently outting them.
I don’t know the details… but… Maybe this is why your friend chose not to add you? (Although you said it wasn’t security related, so maybe not…)
I’m like you with Facebook. I’ve been on a couple years now, as of this month, and almost all of my friends on there are relatives, work friends, or childhood friends. Three friends on there know about my kink side, but I told them when I friended them that my Facebook page is totally and completely vanilla because of the other people on my friend list. Twitter is my kink hideout, along with my blog. I’m on there incognito so that the people on Facebook couldn’t possibly track me down even if they tried.
There are days when I wish I could just come clean on Facebook and be myself, but I can’t. One of my uncles is born again and would most likely disown me, so I just keep quiet. I doubt it would affect my job status, but why take the chance? I just know it’s safer to keep the two parts of my life separate for the most part, but I don’t have to like it.
I’ve taken the rare decision to slightly edit my original post here – and to delete an unpleasant comment that was made in response. What I’d written was too easy to take out of context for people who didn’t know the background.
I found this to be a difficult issue. When I started tweeting and blogging I didn’t tell anyone my online name, so that I could not only be open about kink but also moan, boast, bitch about my friends and do similarly unacceptable things. Then some of the people who followed me on Twitter and read my blog solidified in the real world, and I realised that I’d have to be a little more circumspect; I had the sense of being in a social circle, even if only on the perimeter. When people I met on the scene found me online I was only mildly troubled. Then Twitter started suggesting vanilla people I knew from my writing course, using whatever pernicious methods it has to divine connections, and I had to make a call on whether to maintain the separation of my kinky and vanilla selves. I decided that since they’d workshopped accounts of visits to fetish clubs and canings, they could probably cope. I realise that’s a decision it’ll be hard to go back from—I’ll never marry a politician—but it allows me to feel like I’m not hiding things, while making sure no one will work out my real name during an idle google. It helps that, in my case, there are few people who would care that I’m kinky.
Facebook, therefore, has become a bit of a dumping ground for old acquaintances. It’s where I store the people I don’t use any more, but can’t quite bring myself to let them go, in case, like that pair of shoes I found in the box in the bottom of my third wardrobe, they turn out, eventually, to be perfect for the occasion. Or like the boots I’ve had since I was sixteen, and still like even if they have fallen to bits. I’m not worried about having one or two kinky friends on Facebook, but I suspect that, after this, they’re unlikely to issue an invitation.
NotAnOdalisque – thanks for a really interesting perspective.
I’m now closing comments on this post, sadly. My edit to it was trying to reduce the tension that one line had caused for other people, but doing that seems to have provoked further reaction. I love constructive discussion here, but really don’t want to propagate hostility.