Things That Will Happen if You Don't Ban Predators from Kink Events

My bathroom tiles have begun to crack. This is a minor symptom, but I know enough to worry about what’s happening on the other side of the wall where nobody can see. A little moisture can cause a lot of destruction. Water will find its way through the smallest of spaces—even those that are invisible to the naked eye, and the consequences become increasingly dire with every passing day.

Predators are a lot like water. If you leave them to fester, fester, they will. They’ll seep into the tiniest cracks in the community. They’ll cause infestations of trauma. They will create catastrophic degradation behind the walls where nobody can see. They will continue to eat through the grout that connects us and destroy our foundation until the entire structure collapses.

When you leave a bathroom leak because it doesn’t look that bad, you ignore the destruction you’ve yet to see.

When you leave predators in your community, you ignore the chaos that will one day emerge when the walls finally crumble.

And unless you seal up the leak, the structure will fall down. It might take some time, but the degradation will happen. Predators know no other way.

If you average out the most reliable studies in the western world, you’ll find that around one in five women have been raped. It’s difficult to find reliable results, but if you’re looking for surveys on the percentage of men who’ve raped, you’re going to find numbers like 4% to 15%.

In other words, rapists get around. They get around a lot. One study found that 120 rapists committed 1,225 separate acts of interpersonal violence. Leaving one predator to run rampant in your community is like leaving one ebola sufferer to do the same. Given time, the disease and trauma are going to spread everywhere, just like my bathroom leak. If anyone’s giving out awards for mixed metaphors, I would like to apply, but let’s move along.

Back in the COVID era, I had to do a stint in hospital. One of the patients, a domestic violence survivor, became oddly terrified of a new patient. We all assumed it was her trauma speaking… but then that patient groped someone at the bottom of a staircase. He leered at the others and became increasingly erratic. Ultimately, the clinic refused to keep treating him. Patient privacy rights aside, we can infer a fair amount from that ejection. The morning before he was moved out, the female patients were legitimately scared.

Someone had left a leak too long, and there was black mould all over everything.

This plays out in the kink scene as well. People don’t like sharing space with predators for obvious reasons, so fearful innocents will gradually remove themselves from events. Allies will follow in principle. The only attendees left behind will be apologists and other predators, and this is when communities split in two. The foundation has been obliterated. The grout is cracked, and streams of water are seeping into the slab.

If you leave a slab leak too long, cracks will begin forming in your walls. Your foundation will collapse, your flooring will rot, and your furnishings will degrade.

Rapists rape. That’s what they do. Cats meow. Dogs get zoomies, and predators predate. Their recidivism rate is 24% after 15 years, and that’s only the ones who’ve been imprisoned for their crimes. Pervocracy wrote a brilliant essay on why some events choose not to ban rapists. We think we can babysit them better when we keep them close, but that’s not what happens.

My tiles are cracking. I see no leak. It's hidden behind a wall. Rapists hide, too. Until you can follow them everywhere 24/7, it’s best to banish them entirely.