Confucius say if you want to get laid on Fetlife, you have to be just fine with not getting laid on Fetlife.

Fetlife is divided into two kinds of men:

• Those who understand women.

• Those who do not.

Jack is one of the latter. He belongs to “Fuck or Pass” groups. He has an album full of cock shots. He spends much of his time loving smut pictures. He writes the kind of DMs he’d like to receive:

Single male looking for spanko in South Florida. I like fishing and camping. I work as a lawyer and live in a little white house made of candyfloss.

Okay, so maybe I made that last part up because I got bored, but the example still applies. The trouble with Jack is that he thinks straight women are exactly like him… and we aren’t. Jack wants to see people’s junk and make plans based on their hobbies and location. In short, Jack wants someone to love.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting someone to love. It’s just that your average Jill takes a while to consider that kind of thing. Her first question is not “Is he compatible?” It’s, “Will he kill me?” so Jack’s hobbies don’t matter as much as he thinks they do at this point.

Jack’s kinks don’t tell Jill if he’s a predator.

His house and career don’t either.

That’s one of many reasons Jill rarely responds to those DMs. None of those things is relevant when you’re not yet sure if they’re the fictional universe of a predator. This is, unfortunately, the landscape most of us are living in. You can adjust or keep flogging a dead dildo. That decision is entirely your own.

Men who understand women know this, so they don’t use DMs to fish for dates. They meet women in less intimidating environments and earn trust gradually. They attend events that protect women. If they’ve graduated to Master’s Level, they also work at expressing their ethics on their profiles. This is what Jill is scrying for, after all.

Straight women have to take care with their bodies in hazardous biomes like Fetlife, where the first Google autocomplete is “Fetlife murders.”

I used to date men who asked me out in the wild. The more hazards I encountered in my dating life, the more I hated dating. 28 years later, I don’t date at all. I meet men on a platonic level, preferably at kink events. When I do meet men directly from Fetlife, it’s because they have a reputation in the local kink scene or have engaged with me at length in public threads.

I’m not the only woman who feels this way, otherwise nobody would have chosen the bear.

Confucius say if you want to get laid on Fetlife, you have to be just fine with not getting laid on Fetlife. You’ve got to demonstrate that a woman has value to you even if you never fall in love.