In one of the Facebook groups for kinky polyamorous people that I’m a member of, there was a bit of a commotion. One of the admins, whose enthusiasm for expanding the group’s membership clouded their foresight, changed the security settings on the group from Secret to Closed. Some of the members who saw the notification of this happening and knew the potentially outing ramifications of it were understandably put into a bit of a panic over it. After all, it can lead to some really unpleasant consequences if Facebook recommends a group with both “poly” and “BDSM” in the name to your extremely conservative and gossipy Aunt Gertrude with your name attached as a member. The family Christmas party becoming a hundred times more awkward is just one of the milder possible outcomes.

Unfortunately, being outed as kinky and polyamorous can have much more serious consequences for some people. People have lost homes, jobs, and custody of their children over things like that. Online missteps can have real world outcomes and this incident reminded me how people can easily fall into the trap of thinking their situation is universal to others in the same group. Especially when online, where it’s easy to subconsciously perceive the lives of people you’ve never met with the same kind of regard one has for NPCs in a role-playing game.

In this case, the admin in question quickly recognized their mistake and took responsibility for not thinking how the change could affect others because they had the privilege of not needing to worry about it as much other might. It was a humble and graceful way of handling the situation. Unfortunately, not everyone is so willing to accept accountability for a mistake that endangers other, with a good counterexample being another admin who responded to the situation by threatening to shut down the group because they felt too harshly criticized by people upset about potentially being outed.

While interacting online or offline with any subculture that doesn’t have full mainstream acceptance carries risks of exposure, Facebook is an especially tricky space to engage with those communities online for a few reasons.

Facebook is a juggernaut in terms of how many people’s lives it has assimilated into its collective. I can think of few other sites where people are connected online not just to a subset of people in their lives but to people involved in nearly every aspect of their lives. Most people have not just friends friended on Facebook, but family, co-workers, acquaintances from social groups that it would be a huge stretch to call friends but they gave you a ride to the meeting/church/bar/sex dungeon that one time so you felt obligated to accept their friend request.

A funny example of this was when my ex-wife (at the time, current wife) made a comment on one of my posts referring to a group sex situation we’d been involved in and my sister saw it and made a comment alluding to the need for brain bleach. This is funny because my sister is cool. Were I less open about my lifestyle and my sister not so cool, this could have been an exceptionally unfunny situation where she could have created all sorts of drama for me.

Facebook also has a real name policy that’s so ridiculously enforced that my daughters couldn’t use their actual birth names to sign up because Facebook rejected them as real. This makes it harder to maintain anonymity and allows for nosy assholes to find people and snoop into their lives without those people even knowing it. If you’re savvy, there are ways to reduce this risk but because of Facebook not always keeping settings where you left them or things like admins of secret groups changing them to closed groups your privacy is never truly quite as secure as what your settings would like you to believe.

Worst of all, because of the real name policy depriving one of anonymity it opens the door to those with malicious intent sharing things you posted under a particular privacy setting with people that the privacy setting was meant to keep away from that information.

So be careful out there, especially on Facebook. Unless you’re like me and have no fucks to give about who knows what about your lifestyle, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the various ways Facebook could leave you exposed if you engage with non-mainstream communities like polyamory or BDSM. If you’ve got a lot to lose by being exposed, you may want to consider choosing different venues for connecting with others of like mind that don’t insist you hand out your real name or aren’t also deeply tied to your more vanilla life the way Facebook tends to be.

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It’s astonishes me how many people think that because I’m polyamorous that I’m perfectly cool with cheating. People are strangely open with me about their lack of faithfulness to their partners, despite not being willing to tell their partners about their sexual dalliances. In my experience, people who are openly polyamorous tend to be more critical of people who deceive their partners, recognizing the inherent violation of informed consent in knowingly withholding information from your partner that might negatively impact their desire to have sex with you.

That is, unless the polyamorous person wants to fuck the cheater, in which case it suddenly becomes not their business what goes on between the cheater and their partner. This is an alarmingly common stance in the polyamory community, though not surprising given how widespread the attitude in society that it’s okay to turn a blind eye to wrongness that is benefiting you. I have literally seen people in fits of wrath over someone cheating on them, while they themselves are cheating with someone who is cheating on someone else.

It’s kind of ridiculous the double standards people have about being honest in sexual relationships. It’s even more absurd when it’s someone who professes to be polyamorous or some other form of Ethical Non-Monogamy. We’re supposed to know better and be above that sort of deceitfulness.  

What blows my mind most, however, is how common it is for people to believe that cheating is wrong but think that having sex with a cheater is okay. They assert that because they’re not the one doing the cheating, their conscience is clean. I’m writing this specifically to call bullshit on that.  

Imagine, if you will, that your friend Jordan came and offered you five dollars for a ride to their lover’s house. No big deal, right? Who doesn’t like helping out their friends? However, on the way Jordan pulls out a revolver and starts loading it. You ask them what the gun is for and they tell you they’re going to kill their lover. The natural reaction, of course, is to mind one’s own business. After all, that’s between Jordan and their lover and if you didn’t give Jordan a ride, he’d just get ride from someone else so might as well get that fiver.  

Obviously, that’s not how that works in the real world. In reality, most people understand pretty well what it means to be an accomplice. Laws against aiding and abetting are based on the moral principle that if someone else is going to do something wrong to another person and we knowingly do something to help them commit that crime then we share in the liability of the harm done.

If you know I handed Bailey the crowbar they used to break open the door to your home so they could rob you, you’d surely be pretty pissed with me even if I didn’t do anything other than give Bailey the tool they used to steal your stuff. Rightfully so if I knew that’s what Bailey was going to do with it when I gave it to them and few people would debate that. Nobody would say “Why are you mad at that weird Discerning Deviant guy? It’s not like he stole your stuff. He just gave Bailey a crowbar knowing they’d use it to break into your house. What’s wrong with that?”  

So why do so many people think the basic principle of Good People Don’t Help People Do Bad Things doesn’t apply to sex. Sex in general seems to have this incredible power to test people’s moral convictions, possibly even more so than money. I understand how great the temptation can be. I’ve cheated in a moment of weakness, though I came clean with it right after I’d done so. I’ve been sorely tempted by offers of sex from people who would have been cheating, though I’d become strong enough by that point to not compromise my values to get temporary sexual gratification. Desire is a powerful thing and I can be forgiving of those who lose the battle between doing what is right and what one wants.

Just don’t expect me to justify the selfish thing as the right thing, nor absolve anyone of their guilt for taking part in someone betraying one of the deepest trusts that humans invest. If you have sex with Dale knowing that Dale is betraying Jesse’s trust by doing so, you’re not cheating on Jesse. You are definitely helping Dale cheat on Jesse, though, and you’ll never convince me that isn’t still a pretty crappy thing to do.

(Discerning Deviant is supported entirely through reader sponsorship via the Discerning Deviant Patreon.)