Facebook for the kinky

Montreal-based FetLife.com networks
fetishists of the world

CREATING A COMMUNITY: John Baku

by ANDREA ZANIN

Social networking sites have swept the globe in the last couple of years, but with privacy concerns, not everyone’s comfortable posting the truly intimate details of their lives on Facebook. Especially for those who deviate from the sexual norm, the risks are high; after all, do you really want your work colleagues to learn the details of your personal kinks? And yet, for kinky adventurers, there’s often a strong drive to connect with the BDSM community online.

Enter FetLife.com. “It’s Facebook for the kinky community,” says site creator John Baku, 41, a Montreal-based software engineer and kinkster who makes a hobby of studying sexual and gender diversity. “Instead of asking you what books you read, it’s what fetishes you are into.”

The site, which is entirely free for users, has grown by leaps and bounds since its launch in January of this year, with the current count at over 32,500 users. “Last week, we averaged 350 new members a day,” Baku says. “This month, we’ve grown by 8,000 to 10,000 accounts alone and it’s 100 per cent by word of mouth.”

Given the site’s birthplace, a large percentage of FetLife users are Canadian. “If I go by city, it’s Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Halifax—Halifax is pretty big, they’re really kinky out there!” The United States is just beginning to edge out Canada in the number-one spot. Australia comes in third, followed by the U.K. and Brazil.

Cruising and conversation

The BDSM/leather/fetish community experienced a boom in the early ’90s when isolated people began to connect across geographical boundaries on some of the Internet’s first message boards. Since then, listservs and kinky personals sites (such as Alt.com) have multiplied, but kink lists are frequently targeted for deletion due to their subject matter, and personals sites are often heavy on the cruising and light on the real conversation. FetLife may well be ushering in an entirely new era for kinksters worldwide by combining the best features of both options and eliminating the undesirable ones.

“I’m a creator, I’ve always been an inventor, and I love creating community,” Baku says. “I was hoping FetLife was going to be successful, but you don’t realize what’s going to happen until you do it.”

Baku certainly takes a community-oriented approach to welcoming new members. “If somebody comes to my house, I want to say hi to them and make them feel at home,” he says. “That’s what I want FetLife to be, a home, a place to meet your friends. So we have a group of 30 volunteer greeters from all over the world so that every single person that joins the site gets welcomed.”

Fortunately, with FetLife, the sign-up, login and home page are available on Google, but no other pages can be searched from the outside. “Privacy is extremely important to me,” Baku states emphatically. “We live in a very judgemental world and I didn’t want someone to lose their job over this.”

"Do what’s best for the women”

Baku’s philosophy is disarmingly simple. “My mantra is, do what’s best for the women. If you do that, the men will come.” With this in mind, he refuses to add a refined search feature, so men cannot seek out women within specific parameters in order to cruise them.

“It’s not a dating site, it’s an anti-dating site,” he deadpans. “If you do meet somebody through FetLife, it’s because you had good conversations in a group and hit it off. Any other way is purely about sex.”

It may seem counter-intuitive to create a site for kinky people that’s actually not about hooking them up to have kinky sex. But, says Baku, it works: “Because of this, we have an unconventionally large number of women on the site. The majority of dating sites have under five to 10 per cent women, but we have a ratio of almost 50-50. Or let’s say 40-50, when I put in the genderqueer, male-to-female and female-to-male people.”

It’s typical of Baku to welcome the diverse range of people who sign up to FetLife. “The lists are user-generated, so people can add new fetishes. And every time someone comes up with a new gender, I add it,” Baku enthuses. “Orientations too. I thought there were straight, bi and gay, but I found out there’s queer, heteroflexible and pansexual.”

That diversity shows in the numbers: just over half the site’s members (18,800) identify as straight—which means that everyone else doesn’t.

He’s got numbers for kink roles too: 28 per cent of users label themselves dominant, 30 per cent submissive or slave, 17.5 per cent switch and seven per cent unsure. Other categories include bottom, top, sadist, masochist and fetishist.

And as for John Baku himself? “Y’know what’s interesting is that I’ve never gotten a date from this site. Now that’s a cool number!”