A “sock puppet“, in internet slang, is the creation of an account to support (or denigrate) a specific point of view. It’s also pretty childish.

Recently, as per usual in Atlanta, there’s been a kerfuffle over one of the groups that runs events. It’s coming out that said group’s leader is not ideal leader material and that he does not treat people well. But even more recently, there’s been another Fetlife account (whose name I will not mention) that’s supposedly an “impartial” voice of the community. That account is clearly a sock puppet. It posts comments basically saying “What else do you want the group/leader to do? Haven’t they done enough already to express remorse?”

When you get to this point, Mx. Unnamed Group Leader, it’s better to just fade away. You’ve used up all of your goodwill, and you’ve burned all your bridges, and creating any number of sock puppets will not sway public opinion in your direction.

This is why it’s so hard to be a group leader — the moment you step even a toe out of line, you polarize the community (whatever community it is) into “for you” and “against you”. It’s one of my biggest fears as a community leader and the director of a national spanking party. If I do something that is perceived “bad” by a plurality of people, I’m basically done for. I won’t be able to attend kink events on a local or national level, and no one will trust me to do kink with them ever again. And i don’t think I could live without kink.

And that, really, is the biggest problem: there’s no clear path for repairing one’s image and reputation in the kink community. Sure, celebrities can say “oops, my bad, I’m remorseful” and eventually people will let it go, but I’ve yet to see someone in the kink community successfully repair their image. The only thing to do is to throw yourself on the community’s sword, apologize profusely, be quiet for a little while, and then, when you resurface, hope that things have calmed down enough that you can show you’ve made a change.

Creating sock puppets in the interim, though, isn’t going to make things better for you. We can all see who’s attached to the hand that holds the sock.