And among those whose eye it caught was a moderator of FetLife’s Latex Lovers group who goes by the handle of Observer.

In a brief post titled Tibetan latex nun seeks funding, Observer notes that this isn’t “the usual ‘starlet wears latex’ news”.

He readily admits that he isn’t sure what to think of it, but feels that that the story is “worth discussing”.

He includes links to Damcho’s GoFundMe campaign page and to a story about her on a local London news site (subsequently flagged by Damcho as “inaccurate”), so that people can check the story out for themselves.

Observer’s post was a perfectly reasonable attempt to draw FetLife denizens’ attention to a potentially interesting new topic for discussion. But as a result, the Latex Lovers group found itself with a new shitstorm.

It was perhaps fairly predictable that someone claiming to have ‘converted’ from Buddhist nunnery to latex pervery and begging donations to finance a PhD would not get a smooth ride from everyone in this group.

And sure enough, while some of those commenting have been either neutral in their views or supportive to varying degrees of Damcho’s quest, a number of others have evidently found the whole pitch rather dubious.

However, one individual (with previous form) managed to lower the tone of the discussion so far that Observer, wearing his moderator’s hat, was forced to delete comments he judged to be alleging criminal behaviour by the lady — allegations backed up by nothing more than “personal opinion”.

As a relative newcomer to latex fetishism, tightlacing and BDSM, Damcho might have been surprised by the amount of cynicism and vitriol her story could unleash in an arena she might have assumed would be generally supportive.

In the current climate of austerity and intolerance, whether enough random strangers with funds to spare will consider her cause sufficiently admirable to enable her project to succeed remains to be seen.

But in the UK there are more women than you might think who, prompted by their own tastes and experiences, are engaged in postgraduate research into fetish/BDSM-related areas of human behaviour.

So perhaps the ambitions of this rubber nun are not as unrealistic as her detractors appear to think.

gofundme.com/bodhiunbound
huffingtonpost.com/damcho/interview
facebook/bodhiunbound
fetlife.com/bodhiunbound
fetlife.com/tibetan-latex-nun