Excerpted from Nancy Ava Miller's Award-Winning Book, Pervert: Notes from the Sexual Underground.


Sera, (505) 217-6110


“If you want to be successful, you have to pick a fight. This is what I learned from marketing,” says JohnBaku, the new face of S&M support in this dawning century, a modern age of kink, computers, and communication. “Essentially, I’m picking a fight with the Web 1.0 players.”

            Hold on! This is not as technical as it sounds. The Web 1.0 sex sites, you see, are a bit—shall we say?—distant. Mostly pay-for-access venues, they didn’t offer Mr. Baku the intimacy and sense of humanity he craved, sans the assault on his credit card. So on January 3, 2008, fueled by frustration and desire, JohnBaku, at home in Montreal, launched his 2.0 web extravaganza, FetLife.com. But here’s the good part: FetLife is not just “his.” Like Nancy Ava Miller in the early days of PEP, JohnBaku reigns as a benevolent dictator over his territory, emphasis on “benevolent.” That is, he listens, he invites, he welcomes, he’s approachable, and he maintains his own honest profile on the site, just as others do theirs. Some FetLife aficionados view this man not as a king or an entrepreneur seeking fame or wealth, or as a lounge lizard flaunting some hazy geek notion at the World Wide Web convention in Vegas while he gropes the girls; no, more and more, JohnBaku is felt to be, well, a friend to the FetLife community and beyond, to the S&M province of seekers and support group goers, to the confused, the horny, the lonely, the desperate. Ring familiar? JohnBaku, it seems, looks a lot like Nancy Ava Miller in the early days of PEP—reaching out and exploring fresh frontiers of love, obsession, sexuality. Go further back and you see Pat Bond in 1971, forging Eulenspiegel in New York City, the first S&M support group anywhere, or Henry Hay during the 1950s, bravely reaching out to gays through his revolutionary Mattachine Society.

            What exactly is FetLife and how does it work? Just like JohnBaku, FetLife—designed specifically for the BDSM/Fetish community—can be described with adjectives such as “intimate,” “interactive,” “human.” Here one finds pals, playmates, soul mates, and love coupled with education, discussion groups, resource information, historical contemplations, and news of events. Like JohnBaku himself, a FetLife denizen may build a personal profile with or without photos, and peruse the biographical renderings of other sincere kinksters. In other words, one can meet, learn, contribute, and grow via FetLife. And if on FetLife you don’t discover your own personal erotic proclivity, you are encouraged to create a sentence or a story to announce the kink you covet. Start a discussion group or add your longing to a preexisting fantasy list. Just another feature of Web 2.0: control and change in the hands, hearts, and keyboards of the community.

            In the years since its conception, FetLife has garnered over 1 million members. And over 1,000 new kinksters join the party daily. What’s the attraction? Rather than describe the usability of FetLife, its design and functionality, its organic nature, or any further contrasts of 1.0 versus 2.0, best you fire up your computer some dark night and head over to FetLife yourself. It’s “100% pervert certified,” you know. Just leave your wallet behind and check out what JohnBaku has done for you and your kinky soul, for us. One member at a time, FetLife documents our history, our people, becoming a “Kinkapedia” of sorts.

            FetLife: allowing our community to take another tiptoe out of the shadows, out of isolation. Tiptoe—hell! Maybe a giant step! The S&M netherworld is not so subterranean as before, thanks to JohnBaku and a handful of other perverted pioneers. In today’s miracle of dot com and dot net, you need not be alone. Never.