This week’s podcast was the hardest I’ve ever recorded. It’s easy to share the positive aspects of kink—the great experiences and the joys of exploration. What’s hard is sharing the negative experiences. It would have been much easier to keep this private, but my podcast is about sharing my kink journey openly and honestly. I can’t do that if I’m only highlighting the good parts.
In this episode, I discuss a recent experience where my vetting process failed, and I ended up trusting someone who caused me significant harm. This experience was confusing and required a lot of reflection and conversations to understand fully. I share all of this on the podcast as openly and accurately as I can. This isn’t about pointing fingers but rather an honest exploration of the risks we take in this community and how we can better protect ourselves. If you want to know what happened, please listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, as it’s too complex to write about here.
What I want to focus on in this post is one surprising aspect of this experience—how incredibly difficult it was to speak up about it.
“Drama” is a dirty word in the kink community, and so far I’ve prided myself on avoiding it. But there’s a big difference between staying out of petty drama and being shamed into silence about legitimate concerns. For the last few weeks, I have been terrified of sharing my story on my podcast, fearing I’d be seen as someone who “creates drama” or is out to ruin a person’s reputation. This fear was almost enough to make me cancel the podcast altogether.
This has got me wondering, is the anti-drama culture here unintentionally making people afraid to speak up when they have a genuine issue?
I love this community deeply. The worst part of this person’s actions was that he almost took all of that away from me. Instead of addressing the issue, he chose to gaslight and threaten me, warning that if I spoke out, I would no longer be welcome in the community. These textbook control tactics have lead me to scrutinise every interaction and second-guessed myself for weeks, even though I have written proof supporting every aspect of my story. His words were so effective because they played on my fears about being judged for sharing this experience here.
I am shocked that it took just one person to change how I felt about kink and this community, almost convincing me that speaking up would lead to ostracisation. Thankfully, some good people (you know who you are) reminded me that this isn’t the truth. This community is built on care and respect, and this one person is the exception, not the rule.
I have been very lucky in my kink journey so far, and until this incident, my experiences on Fetlife and Chaturbate have been incredibly positive. I may have needed some reminding lately, but I still believe wholeheartedly that this community is filled with good people.
To everyone reading this, I want to emphasise that your acts of kindness make this community safer. They encourage people to feel secure enough to talk about their experiences, both good and bad.
Let’s fight fear and blame with compassion and respect. Instead of anti-drama, let’s create a culture that makes everyone feel safe to speak out. This isn’t about persecution, it’s about validating everyone’s feelings and experiences.
I’m interested to here your thoughts below…
Harley 🐰 xoxo
