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littlesarbonn -> RE: Outing Collarme members on vanilla websites...? (6/3/2006 6:57:54 AM)
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I'm actually surprised and not all that surprised that someone asks if it is ethical to out someone for any reason whatsoever.
I'm one of those strange outed people who succeeded in outing himself when the Internet was young. I didn't do it because I wanted to "out" myself but because I was bluntly honest with who and what I was. That "decision" way back then has been both a positive and horribly awful situation.
You see, when I first started signing my name to posts where I was talking about lifestyle submission, I was doing it not for the notoriety or "fame" that comes from doing such a thing but because NO submissives were coming forward and communicating. I felt that if I was honest about who and what I was, maybe other people would start coming forward and discussing who and what we were. We were so much in the closet back then, and I really felt that if good writers and average people could demonstrate that we're not a bunch of weirdos hanging around children parks waiting to abduct children, then maybe ALL of us might find acceptance with our lifestyle one day.
That decision has caused a lot of problems in my life. You see, when it was me deciding to out myself, I realized that I'm extremely tolerant about other people. Other people, on the other hand, haven't been all that tolerant about me. As subsequent generations (or iterations) of Internet users have come on board, the seas have changed to one of comraderie to a self-importance dynamic where "others" are seen as insignificant to one's personal motivations and desires. Let me explain.
When I first started posting, I never imagined that everything I ever posted in the past was going to be able to be searched through a new technology called google, and every other search process that came along. I never realized I was leaving an electronic paper trail that will live long after I'm gone. When that started to happen, and I realized it, it was already too late to stick my finger back in the dam. I was already soaked and the waters were flowing like a river out of control.
This opened up my past to people I knew casually. If someone was nosy, and it's inevitable, that person can start to trace your past if you've been a part of the Internet as long as I have. My first realizations of this were actually more pleasant experiences because it was usually a woman who was interested in me on an intellectual level in the vanilla world who then discovered I was a prolific writer on all things concerning lifestyle submission and then started to think that maybe she might like being the dominant part of that dichotomy. In the years, I introduced quite a few women who were slightly interested in me to the bdsm community, and a number of them are actually well known pro dominants to this day (although they evolved in the scene to seek much more than I could ever offer...or they just sought much more than I could ever be, but then this isn't really a complaint post).
Well, fast forward to today with a whole new paradigm of people who use the Internet, and those originally interested people have turned into nosy people who think that knowledge of someone else is power. I was a political science professor. A young woman did an intense search of me on the Internet (as I had been doing less actual postings on that subject over the last number of years) and she found out about me. She then wrote me one of the rudest emails, indicating that she was interested in this lifestyle and wanted me to provide more information. I wrote back politely that it would not be appropriate as she was one my students, but told her I'd gladly help her find the resources she needed, if desired. That situation turned into a young woman who thought she had an "in" on me and tried to make my life miserable by telling anyone who would listen about my sex fetish and my "sickening ways". She even tried to get me fired by contacting the Chairman of my department who thanked her for the information and then called me into his office, laughing because he already knew about my past because I had revealed it in case something like this ever happened. He didn't really care, as long as I separated my lifestyle from my work. But that's a rare response from someone in the academic community.
Today, I realize that most of the time people aren't looking for information about me because they're interested in me, but because they're trying to dig up dirt. This is a huge change from the past. It never used to be this way, at least not with me. This is a newer trend of information retrieval. This is why whenever I am involved in a relationship with someone, I'm pretty open about my past, and what I am. However, there are probably a lot of cases of where I wonder if a woman I know casually is not interested in me any further because she has googled me and immediately thought I must be some child molester or something because everyone knows that bdsm people are evil child molesters.
This is why I have a whole problem with the whole concept of using someone's information against them or about them without their permission. We have enough people outside of the community who are going out of their way to hurt us for reasons that quite often border on insanity and instability that we should NEVER be doing the same thing to those in our own community as well.
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