By John Ruch
Photo: A detail of a screenshot of CollarMe.com on May 25, 2014.
A top BDSM dating site has been bound and gagged by one of its cofounders in a high-drama dispute over its cash and ownership.
The tale of CollarMe.com’s Memorial Day weekend disappearance involves claims of discrimination against a new mom with a sick baby, bigotry against foot-fetishists, and a literally broken heart. It offers a rare peek behind the curtain of the discreet BDSM industry—while leaving many of the subculture’s kinksters wondering about the security of their own intimate info.
CollarMe is like the Facebook of BDSM: a totally free-of-charge social resource widely bashed as a playground for trolls and fakes, yet still extremely popular in the community. For over a decade, it has served as a top BDSM hub. The website analytics firm Alexa ranks it as among the 2,200 most-visited sites in the U.S., and in the world’s top 7,000.
The site’s features include a chat forum and porn vids. But its meat and potatoes—or rather, leather and lace—are its thousands of personal ads from around the country and the world, including scores here in Terminalia’s Atlanta hometown. Just about every kink imaginable is on offer from a user base highly diverse in gender, age, race, sexual orientation, and the mix of pro sex workers and lifestylers.
On May 23, CollarMe’s kink-a-thon was replaced without warning by a blog post from one “Tiffany,” titled “Where is CollarMe?” The short answer: She’s holding it hostage in an escalating dispute we might call DollarMe.
Identifying herself as the site’s cofounder, she advises readers to “grab a drink and some popcorn, as this tale is a long and harrowing one.”
Tiffany claims that she and an unnamed male friend, with whom she once lived platonically, created CollarMe as an informal partnership. In their division of labor, he handled the servers and code, while she owned the domain name and managed the highly lucrative advertising.
After several years of drifting away from the business, Tiffany recently returned more actively under a formal contract with her friend. But the friend/partner became not-so-friendly with her and others in the business.
He even performed an act of kink heresy, she claims, by rejecting “an extremely tasteful ad which showed several young ladies’ perfectly manicured legs and feet. The ad was obviously for the large segment of the BDSM community who have an interest in foot fetishes but he was ‘grossed out’ by this and insisted that ‘no one wants to look at women’s feet.’”
If true, that surely is a bizarre case of shooting himself in the foot (fetish). Google “CollarMe.com” and “foot fetish,” and a perusal of the nearly 65,000 hits will give you a sense of how many toes that’s stepping on.
Tiffany’s tale turns from the merely peevish to the disturbing as she recounts becoming pregnant last year. She apparently lives in New York with the father—not the same man as her CollarMe partner.
The baby was diagnosed with a rare, severe heart defect, Tiffany claims. When the child was born in October, this defect was even worse than the doctors expected, and it was clear she would need multiple major surgeries. Tiffany says that she then notified her CollarMe partner that she would need a few weeks off to attend to her baby.
The “very next day,” she claims, the partner sent her a notice terminating her contract, and an attorney’s note that she wouldn’t get paid for the previous month’s work.
“Despite CollarMe.com’s substantial revenues, I was told that the company cannot afford to pay me,” at least at this time, Tiffany writes.
She says that the baby’s father makes a “high five figure salary,” but half of that goes to rent in NYC, and the rest still won’t cover the baby’s medical needs.
So, worried that legal action takes too long, Tiffany says, she decided to pull the plug on CollarMe.com until her partner comes to financial terms.
This tale of a nasty break-up ironically sinking a personal meet-up site is the talk of online BDSM. Tiffany’s post has drawn more than 860 comments expressing everything from sympathy to skepticism to fear of where their personal info has ended up. Kinksters are flocking to such competing sites as FetLife and commenting similarly there. Rumors abound that Tiffany’s partner has made an end-run with a new site at CollarSpace.com, but that was nonfunctional today.
In a couple of follow-up posts, Tiffany attempts to reassure CollarMe users that their personal data remains secure and confidential. She also admits she can’t prove her story, claiming that, for legal reasons, she cannot currently identify the people involved. (CollarMe.com is registered under a proxy, and I couldn’t find a registration for the company in California, where it appears to be based.)
“I hope [the dispute] is short lived and you all can get back to chatting with your friends,” Tiffany says, attempting to raise hopes that this will amount to an unfortunately un-kinky long weekend.
Even if it is, it’s an open question whether kinksters will return to a revival of a site many already had mixed feelings about. As a free and relatively unmonitored site, CollarMe was unusually open to BDSM folks of all social classes and experience levels. But that also drew poseurs and con artists.
User “Sinfulharlot” offered a representative comment on Tiffany’s post: “It is no mystery that CM had spiraled into a website that was filled with scammers and liars. That being said there were as well many good people on it.”
But now there’s also a question of whether there are good people behind it, and whether the site will keep up its disappearing act. It looks like someone’s about to face some discipline over CollarMe’s nonconsensual bondage, and users can only guess who will come out on top to dominate the site’s future.
Photo: A detail of a screenshot of CollarMe.com on May 25, 2014.
A top BDSM dating site has been bound and gagged by one of its cofounders in a high-drama dispute over its cash and ownership.
The tale of CollarMe.com’s Memorial Day weekend disappearance involves claims of discrimination against a new mom with a sick baby, bigotry against foot-fetishists, and a literally broken heart. It offers a rare peek behind the curtain of the discreet BDSM industry—while leaving many of the subculture’s kinksters wondering about the security of their own intimate info.
CollarMe is like the Facebook of BDSM: a totally free-of-charge social resource widely bashed as a playground for trolls and fakes, yet still extremely popular in the community. For over a decade, it has served as a top BDSM hub. The website analytics firm Alexa ranks it as among the 2,200 most-visited sites in the U.S., and in the world’s top 7,000.
The site’s features include a chat forum and porn vids. But its meat and potatoes—or rather, leather and lace—are its thousands of personal ads from around the country and the world, including scores here in Terminalia’s Atlanta hometown. Just about every kink imaginable is on offer from a user base highly diverse in gender, age, race, sexual orientation, and the mix of pro sex workers and lifestylers.
On May 23, CollarMe’s kink-a-thon was replaced without warning by a blog post from one “Tiffany,” titled “Where is CollarMe?” The short answer: She’s holding it hostage in an escalating dispute we might call DollarMe.
Identifying herself as the site’s cofounder, she advises readers to “grab a drink and some popcorn, as this tale is a long and harrowing one.”
Tiffany claims that she and an unnamed male friend, with whom she once lived platonically, created CollarMe as an informal partnership. In their division of labor, he handled the servers and code, while she owned the domain name and managed the highly lucrative advertising.
After several years of drifting away from the business, Tiffany recently returned more actively under a formal contract with her friend. But the friend/partner became not-so-friendly with her and others in the business.
He even performed an act of kink heresy, she claims, by rejecting “an extremely tasteful ad which showed several young ladies’ perfectly manicured legs and feet. The ad was obviously for the large segment of the BDSM community who have an interest in foot fetishes but he was ‘grossed out’ by this and insisted that ‘no one wants to look at women’s feet.’”
If true, that surely is a bizarre case of shooting himself in the foot (fetish). Google “CollarMe.com” and “foot fetish,” and a perusal of the nearly 65,000 hits will give you a sense of how many toes that’s stepping on.
Tiffany’s tale turns from the merely peevish to the disturbing as she recounts becoming pregnant last year. She apparently lives in New York with the father—not the same man as her CollarMe partner.
The baby was diagnosed with a rare, severe heart defect, Tiffany claims. When the child was born in October, this defect was even worse than the doctors expected, and it was clear she would need multiple major surgeries. Tiffany says that she then notified her CollarMe partner that she would need a few weeks off to attend to her baby.
The “very next day,” she claims, the partner sent her a notice terminating her contract, and an attorney’s note that she wouldn’t get paid for the previous month’s work.
“Despite CollarMe.com’s substantial revenues, I was told that the company cannot afford to pay me,” at least at this time, Tiffany writes.
She says that the baby’s father makes a “high five figure salary,” but half of that goes to rent in NYC, and the rest still won’t cover the baby’s medical needs.
So, worried that legal action takes too long, Tiffany says, she decided to pull the plug on CollarMe.com until her partner comes to financial terms.
This tale of a nasty break-up ironically sinking a personal meet-up site is the talk of online BDSM. Tiffany’s post has drawn more than 860 comments expressing everything from sympathy to skepticism to fear of where their personal info has ended up. Kinksters are flocking to such competing sites as FetLife and commenting similarly there. Rumors abound that Tiffany’s partner has made an end-run with a new site at CollarSpace.com, but that was nonfunctional today.
In a couple of follow-up posts, Tiffany attempts to reassure CollarMe users that their personal data remains secure and confidential. She also admits she can’t prove her story, claiming that, for legal reasons, she cannot currently identify the people involved. (CollarMe.com is registered under a proxy, and I couldn’t find a registration for the company in California, where it appears to be based.)
“I hope [the dispute] is short lived and you all can get back to chatting with your friends,” Tiffany says, attempting to raise hopes that this will amount to an unfortunately un-kinky long weekend.
Even if it is, it’s an open question whether kinksters will return to a revival of a site many already had mixed feelings about. As a free and relatively unmonitored site, CollarMe was unusually open to BDSM folks of all social classes and experience levels. But that also drew poseurs and con artists.
User “Sinfulharlot” offered a representative comment on Tiffany’s post: “It is no mystery that CM had spiraled into a website that was filled with scammers and liars. That being said there were as well many good people on it.”
But now there’s also a question of whether there are good people behind it, and whether the site will keep up its disappearing act. It looks like someone’s about to face some discipline over CollarMe’s nonconsensual bondage, and users can only guess who will come out on top to dominate the site’s future.