So, among the escort services, hookup platforms and dating portals, there are obviously niche places. Some are softer (like Tinder), and some are meant for professional use. There are also more extreme cases meant for fetishists and highly horny people.
If you are one of such persons, then rejoice – there is a place called FetLife, and it’s a basically a social network for people like. However, it may not be for you if you overestimate just how horny and perverted you are. FetLife is a genuinely hardcore place where usual people would perhaps not be comfortable to be.
It still has a lot to offer to the special clientele. Just stick around and see whether what you see appeals to you at all.
What is FetLife?
FetLife is a website that resembles your usual escort services and hookup platforms – especially those revolving around cities and ads – in a number of ways. Here’s what’s similar:
- The website revolves around profiles, much like other websites revolve around ads and applications by the escort providers and alike;
- You get to find people by specifying where you live. The dating apps know where you are through geolocation, but here you have to pick a city yourself;
- You can also specify deeper details, such as your preferences, gender, preferred role and more
So, it’s basically a catalogue of people in some sense. The classic websites that provide or provided adult services would be exactly like the catalogues. There, you’d have to go through the sections that represent the services, and there might very well be other jobs besides escort. Once you’ve found the service, there would be tons of ads.
By slogging through a number of ads, you’d find a candidate you personally like or preferred over others. In general, you’d have a lot of candidates, which is why other websites introduce more details, such as even height, eye color, ethnicity and more.
FetLife doesn’t really have that, but it has other details. And you may very well expect what these details are. The main difference, however, is that you don’t look at ads on FetLife – you look at profiles. This website is a lot more reliant on constant pages rather than posts that can be removed at a slightest whim.
How does FetLife work?
To start with at the very beginning, you’ll have to create an account.
For this side of the Internet, it’s not common, because people on escort services are used to browsing through posts and ads without submitting any sort of information about themselves and then contacting actual people who did leave the info about themselves, again, without signing up at all.
Basically, if you are an escort provider, anyone can call or message (mostly just call) you in any given moment with possibly no regard at all to your own preferences. That’s why it’s beneficial for the professional who work escort full-time to have a work phone that will be disabled for the night.
On FetLife, it’s not the same at all. It’s a social network. People here can ask for payment, but most are generally just idealists – however weird their ideas can be for certain people. It’s a sort of blend between Tinder and Facebook, except for fetishists.
Profile management
The profile pages on this website are actually very like on Facebook. They are constant, and you’ll have to manage them.
While creating your account, you’ll obviously have to submit your name, age, gender and other personal information – some for the website to recognize and verify you, and some for clarity. That’s why, although you can technically hide your age on the page, you shouldn’t do that. Age is a crucial bit of information in this regard.
Much of this information will be transferred to your profile immediately, although you’ll have to fill it out yourself. That includes:
- Your location
- Photos
- Your description
- Additional info about yourself
This is all crucial, although you are not really dictated to fill it all out. But if you don’t, you’ll simply not appear on anyone’s radars, and the whole point of creating an account here will be lost – unless, that is, you don’t want to be seen. But for this purpose, you can simply deactivate your account.
Additional details
There are additional details. They are exactly what you’d expect from a fetishist social network – gender, ‘role’ and preferences. The first two are the most interesting, in fact – namely because there are lots of them.
Gender catalogue is a particularly surprising addition. Usually websites like this one would add a transgender or a same-sex option, but nothing besides that. On FetLife, it’s beyond expectation.
They have more than a dozen different genders, including stuff like pansexual, demisexual or asexual. It’s bizarre – even more so, considering that they probably do not have many users that identify as these genders in overall proportion. However, the representation is likely highly appreciated.
Role catalogue is equally extensive. In fact, they are going for extremely high levels of depth and representation. What role basically means is your preference. And yes, there are ‘roles’ considered gross by normal people, such as ‘slave’ or ‘master. You get the idea.
That’s the point at which you should finally decide whether you want to continue exploring about this social network. It’s not really gross, there are no really disgusting fetishes, but you really need to be a pervert to use this one (nothing against perverts).
Search parameters
Searching on FetLife isn’t the same as doing review on escort services. Functionally, it’s similar, but it doesn’t have the same essence. You generally can just find a person at random or through friends and contacts. Searching isn’t as mandatory.
Think of it as searching on Facebook. You can find people via a limited amount of parameters. On Facebook, these are location, education, gender and so forth. On FetLife, these are location, gender, role and that’s about it. You can find just by typing the name in, it’s a free enough network.
The search results will give you a number of people who fit your requirement, but it won’t be in a form of ads. As you know, you’ll find a number of profiles. Before you click on them, there’ll just be a very limited level of information.
Once you’ve found anyone who fits the parameters you set, you’ll be able to explore their profiles further and even message them directly, which is unprecedented for this sort of websites.
As you know, it’s usually all in open access, which could potentially be a goldmine for scammers. Seeing how it’s providers who usually scam people, it doesn’t work as well, but safety is definitely compromised.
Other features
Aside from creating profiles and searching for people based on stuff they included in their descriptions, there is other stuff to do on FetLife. It’s a social network, as you probably remember. So, many of the features here are directly derived from sources such as Facebook, Twitter and so forth.
Groups
There are groups. Like in Facebook, you can set up places where people who share your interests (any interests) would participate in sharing views, opinions and generally posts. It works the same way as you’d expect, although there are two major types of a social group here:
- Open groups. If you can find it, you can literally enter and subscribe to it without any qualms whatsoever. You don’t need to participate, and everything posted therein will be immediately open to you.
- Closed groups. It’s the same functionally, but you can’t enter it unless you are invited by a moderator or an admin. The access and, therefore, contents will be hidden from you until you are approved.
It’s probably fun to be a part of the group, because being a part of a dedicated community is never lame. In addition, many of them host events. Just what sort of event a community on FetLife would host is up to them, and at that point, some of these events may be pretty frightening.
In general, you should enter the communities if you’re 100% confident that what you’ll see there will correspond to your preferences, interests and beliefs. It’s unclear, but the messy stuff is probably not forbidden if you are in a closed group.
Posts
Both in groups and on your personal page, you can post very many things. Again, it’s very similar you your average post on Facebook. Right on your page, you can attach a picture or a video of almost anything (barring some extreme stuff) or draft your opinion on near anything.
Now, obviously, most people won’t just post their opinion about the political situation (maybe?) – the usual subject would be sex, unsurprisingly. People who take pay for this could post the updates or pricelists, anything to boost their business. Videos and pictures are a good way to showcase the performance (probably).
There’s actually no distinction between a professional’s profile and the profile of someone who just wants to meet and create a relationship. Obviously, most users here will treat the website as just a dating website but for people with hardcore tastes. The nice thing about it all is that it’s not written anywhere and you can do anything.
Chatting
Again, one of the great things about this website is the ability to chat with people. And, unless something went wrong, FetLife either already has a feature that allows people to chat in large groups or not yet. In general, they are still doing big steps towards making this website into a social network no worse than the general-use counterparts.
You can comment the posts and videos, message people and probably already set up chats where you and other fellows from the website will discuss anything at all. Granted, you can do absolutely the same thing on any other worthwhile social network, but if you ever feel an urge to do so here, it’s completely possible.
Messaging individuals who fit your preferences is a particularly good addition. Many websites that fulfill the same purpose do not have a messaging system at all, which is insane and inconvenient.
A good benefit, but you probably wouldn’t come here just to chat with people – it’s a hookup network, after all.
Availability
Availability is one of the key aspects of a sort of website that is FetLife. It doesn’t necessarily mean how high a threshold there is for new users or what sort of ordeal you need to go through to create an account here. In this regard, it’s fine. If you match the purpose of the website, it’s completely fine.
The main topic here is how widely this website is accessible in the global sense. And it’s actually a decent question.
It’s not blocked in most countries of the world, and you can enter it without any problems from almost any country in the world. It’s basically a social network, if you ignore the deeper context.
However, in terms of popularity with various nations across the planet, it is obviously popular with Americans – Americans just love various sorts of hookup, dating and escort solutions.
However, because there are heavily Eastern European roots, this website is also popular with a Russian-speaking community – not to the same extent and not on the same level, but these are the two most prominent groups of people within the userbase.
It’s also pretty popular with the Europeans – mostly with the British, Dutch and Germans. They are rather proficient with English, and they are really into everything related to sex or intimacy, for some reason. Well, maybe not English as much, but the other two nationalities – definitely.
From the technical aspect, nothing prevents people from Poland, China or even Africa to join. There are servers all over the world, and if you have a computer and access to the Web, there’s nothing stopping you from entering this website, creating a profile here and start interacting with other people around.
Granted, FetLife needs to be at least somewhat popular where you live, but the website owners themselves state that there are about 10 mil of total users, so it’s not going to be a huge issue, most likely.