The best way to make a girl feel comfortable is to demand her address after laying your creep fantasy at her doorstep like a half-murdered mouse.

This morning I received a lovely message. It was about recipes and creativity, but then he threw this sentence in at the end:

You must be one hell of a fuck. Give me your address and I’ll send chocolate.

Yep. The best way to make a girl feel comfortable is to demand her address after laying your creep fantasy at her doorstep like a half-murdered mouse.

I hadn’t prepared myself for the objectification because the recipe theme had lulled me into a sense of security. I found the message oddly disturbing. Funny how that happens. Spend seven years reading sexual messages, and you’ll develop a talent for stoicism, but then one of them will sneak in and swallow you.

You get rather good at receiving rapey messages on Fetlife. You build stronger walls. You identify creepers before you open the message. You prepare yourself before you read and make sure you keep your vulnerability in a cage with your sense of security. Somewhere along the line, though, you forget you’re entitled to baseline respect. Wank fodder messages are so common that they become a part of the landscape. If you’re not careful, you’ll start seeing yourself as a sexual object—not in conscious ways, of course, but the belief will roam around in your subconscious kicking over all the furniture.

If you’re a woman, you’ve got to work hard to create a comfortable space for yourself on the site, especially if you have sexual trauma in your history.

And one in five of us have been raped. Most of us have experienced other kinds of sexual trauma. We’ve been flashed, assaulted, coerced, and violated. You might think your creepy messages aren’t a big deal, but if we drop our wall at the wrong time, they can become legitimate triggers.

If this morning’s creeper had read a post like this, he’d probably nod along with me thinking he was not like Those Guys™. Funny how that happens.

You’re going to tell me if I can’t stand the heat, I should get off of the website. I should tighten up my inbox filter and just be quiet, but do you know how we got that filter? A developer who wasn’t on the Fetlife team got tired of reading posts like this one. He developed a TamperMonkey script as a giant “shush” to Fetlife’s women.

Baku learned about the script and gave us our on-site filter that day, but the initial filter wasn’t developed quite so considerately.

I hear you. We complain a lot. We get tiresome. We should just go touch grass, but there is a stubborn feminist inside me who refuses to be ousted. She insists she has a right to consensual interactions.

Tightening up my filter doesn’t just keep dudebros out. It keeps everyone else out as well. I don’t think I should have to make that sacrifice, so I rarely do.

The trouble with sexual violence is that it repeats on you. No matter how thoroughly you recover, you will experience the rare trigger. That never really goes away, but I’m holding my ground. Creepers should change. Their targets shouldn’t have to change. We are not at fault.

Do I sound angry? That’s because I am. I have a right to this anger because it’s justified. It's also a sign of my burgeoning self-esteem.

Am I complaining too much? That’s because there are too many of you to ignore.

Do I take a lot of potshots at men? Maybe, but that's a response to the daily potshots they take at women.

Do I seem broken? Perhaps I am somewhat, but I plant the blame firmly on predatory shoulders.

Do better.