
FAITH ROSWELL, shown above in her Roswell Ivory modelling days, is now a writer and activist helping women guard against predators who exploit kink (photo: Patrick Ceuppens/KinkyStyle)
The predators who exploit kink to abuse – and the women calling them out. Report: Faith Roswell.
OUR MAY COVER STORY is a disturbing look at predators in positions of power who misuse terms and practices from kink to abuse women. Author Faith Roswell first saw this in her ‘Roswell Ivory’ latex modelling days, and it set her on a path of activism that led to rebranding as a ‘warrior woman’ helping others avoid similar experiences. Her three-page article is in two parts. First is an overview of bad behaviour including this year’s ‘celebrity abuse’ allegations about Marilyn Manson. Part two reveals how the Manson case prompted claims about another individual that brought things much closer to home. Page 3 has an extensive links section, including some online resources for anyone who recognises their own situation described in this article. BANNER: Faith Roswell (centre) with Sarah Hunter (left) and Slaykitty (right). Photos (l-r): Lorne Marcum, Rick Jones, The Scarlet Lens
The past year has changed our vocabulary. Phrases like support bubble, social distancing, executive dysfunction and key worker have made their way into our lives and intend to stay.
For most of us, while lockdown has been a bleak place, it has afforded us time in which to hold a mirror up to ‘the way things are’. Not only to ourselves and the people forming our support bubbles but to the worlds we inhabit both by circumstance and by choice.
Even through unimaginable stress, endless busywork, time management strategising and a constant state of fear, we have experienced a degree of time in which to self-reflect, even if the only conclusion we have drawn is ‘this cannot go on’.
We are seeing this time and time again. The Black Lives Matter movement is, perhaps, the loudest voice, but the same sentiment extends to the LGBT+ community and the resurgence of ‘reclaim the night’ in response to the murder of Sarah Everard (1).
Communities the world over have reached breaking point. This cannot go on.
Too many predators who exploit kink
While we may be missing our individual support networks, the fetish community is extremely tightknit and has historically been protective of new people. And yet the fetish scene still has too many predators who exploit kink.
In 2012, the term ‘missing stairs’(2) was coined to describe such people by Cliff Pervocracy for his blog The Pervocracy, in a post discussing dangerous people in kink.
‘The missing stair’ is his metaphor for a dangerous person known to a community, which chooses to quietly warn individuals of the danger instead of deeming the problem unacceptable and fixing it.
This is not to suggest that there are a greater number of predators among genuine kinksters. But fetish culture can be a convenient smokescreen for predators — vanilla or otherwise — to hide behind.
As we have seen in recent years, predators have felt increasingly comfortable appropriating fetish terminology — sometimes called ‘kinkspeak’ — and aligning their behaviour with BDSM culture in order to get away with torture — and possibly murder.
This is basically what was going on with the ‘rough sex’ defence first used in the UK as a murder defence in 1972. (The victim in this case was Carole Califano, whose abusive partner was originally charged with murder but subsequently convicted on a reduced charge of manslaughter.)
Now also known as the ‘50 Shades’ defence (3), the claim that a victim liked ‘rough sex’ is not officially a legal defence, but juries have been sympathetic to its use.
Typically, it is used to suggest that victims died because (as in BDSM play) they eroticised, invited and consented to ‘rough treatment’ — treatment that in this case had unintended tragic consequences.
Activist Fiona McKenzie began cataloguing cases in which the ‘rough sex’ defence was invoked, and found that by 2018, it had featured in 60 cases in the UK alone.
The Operation Spanner prosecutions of a group of gay men for various ‘extreme’ BDSM practices in the early 1990s established the broad legal principle that consent was not a defence for serious physical injury.
UK law change bans rough sex defence
In 2020, MPs voted in favour of a change to English law designed to restate, in statute (4), that no death or serious injury, whatever the circumstances, should be defended as ‘rough sex gone wrong’.
Over the past year, we’ve seen that people en masse can understand that sex work is work, can learn the difference between trans and cis gender, and can adapt to wearing masks in public.
So it should also be possible for kink concepts like consensual nonconsent (a mutually agreed arrangement in a trusting dom-sub relationship that permits the dom to act as if the sub had waived all consent) to be understood and taken seriously, if shown to have been exploited by an abuser.
Right now, however, public ignorance in this area is still a veil that abusers can hide behind when choosing victims.
Such abusers use words from the BDSM lexicon like ‘daddy dom’, ‘owner’ and ‘polyamory’ to describe practices which, in their hands, are actually nonconsensual sadism, manipulative behaviour and cheating.
Inexperienced people take them at their word. When such people later learn they’ve been misled, they will often leave their abuser and tell their story to some trusted friends.
Those friends, having no basis for thinking otherwise, may well then wrongly link these BDSM concepts with abusive behaviour.
Just as a woman’s right to feel safe in the street is more than just a ‘woman’s issue’, the misappropriation of fetish terminology is an issue with repercussions reaching beyond the fetish community.
Refuge (5), the UK’s largest domestic abuse charity, say that calls to their helpline have increased by 25 percent since lockdown measures began. The lockdowns have been a double-edged sword, keeping many of us safe from more than just covid-19 but also increasing the danger to others who were already trapped.
In lockdown, there has been less opportunity for predators who exploit kink to operate outside the internet: no munches, no events, no hunting ground. The internet is not necessarily a safe place but it provides us with a world, literally, of education and an infinite anonymous support network.
This is especially important for kinksters — not everyone wants to be ‘out’.
The lockdowns have afforded us the opportunity to educate, be educated and take action. We’re no longer too busy to brush allegations under the carpet, or just keep moving forward because if action is taken on, say, the keynote speaker’s abuse allegations, the event will have no keynote speaker.
We have time, right now, to look at the way we address those ‘missing stairs’.
Publicly naming the person is the first step. The next must be holding them accountable. Once a rolling object gains momentum, it is harder to stop it in its tracks: the same goes for predators.
The earlier they see consequences, the harder it is for them to gain celebrity status and respect, and use these as armour. The more we educate ourselves and each other, the harder it is for them to use ignorance and prejudice as shields.
Stoya accuses porn partner James Deen
STOYA (pictured in 2010): feminist porn star who outed fellow actor James Deen in 2015
On November 28, 2015, American writer, porn star and activist Stoya (above) accused fellow porn star James Deen of rape in a tweet which read:
“James Deen held me down and fucked me while I said no, stop, used my safeword. I just can’t nod and smile when people bring him up anymore.”
Her accusation triggered an avalanche of women into coming forward about their own experiences with James Deen.
It is notoriously hard to convict a rape case even when people with no public profile are involved.
But given that both Deen and Stoya were not only well known but also in a relationship; that Deen was well respected in the porn industry; and that there exists a notorious, pervasive yet false opinion that ‘a porn star cannot be raped’… it is small wonder that Deen was not publicly outed earlier.
He was, however, known. His name appeared on blacklists, industry professionals knew to avoid him, and new performers were pulled aside and warned.
Provided with that knowledge, those select few people were safe. But the world was not safe from James Deen until his name was spoken clearly in the public domain.
BuzzFeed and Guardian join the fray
On December 1, 2015, BuzzFeed posted an article by Tasneem Mashrulla (updated on December 9) titled Here are the women who have accused James Deen of sexual abuse and assault. The article listed and quoted nine women including Stoya who had made allegations against Deen (6).
On December 4, 2015, The Guardian also pitched in, with a major article by Melissa Gira Grant covering the same topic: How Stoya took on James Deen and broke the porn industry’s silence (7).
Accountability was needed and the porn industry responded, blacklisting him. Deen had successfully used his fame, his kinky image and his respect as a smokescreen, until it was eventually penetrated — if you’ll forgive the term — by Stoya.
It is no longer enough to whisper and trust that information spreads to the right people. Predatory behaviour should not be disclosed on a purely need-to-know basis.
READ MORE – GO TO PAGE 2 OF 3Tags: Abuse, Community, Legal, Models, Personalities