A Polyamory Paradox: Anonymity

By Maria Padhila

There are so many things to get outraged about in this world that I’ve had to limit myself to a short list. Currently, this list includes fracking, prisons-for-profit, “nice-guy” misogynist bloggers, union busters, health insurance executives, and for-profit education. (Teabaggers, of course, are so universally disliked that they don’t need to be mentioned; and coincidentally their numbers are well represented among my other dislikes.) So in following news about both polyamory and for-profit colleges, I would have seen this story sooner, except traveling kind of had me out of the loop.

A place calling itself “The University of Northern Virginia” — a name hilarious to anyone from the mid-Atlantic, and located in a small office building off a honking commuter road — was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, on charges that it had failed to comply with federal regulations for administering foreign student visas.

Shortly after the raid, with about 2,000 students in limbo, someone curious did a search on the name of the chancellor, and found that among his recent online activity was a posting to a BDSM website, with photos and a request for attractive single women “to become part of our poly family.” After The Smoking Gun published this, chancellor David Lee resigned.

What is going to happen to all those students? I don’t know. Everyone’s too busy checking out the pictures of the dungeon to ask that question.

The Smoking Gun was able to out him with a pretty simple search. Contrary to what many in comments on various articles seem to believe, he wasn’t outed by DHS, and he wasn’t fired for being on the site. It was The Smoking Gun, followed by other blogs, websites, and articles, that made the sex dungeon and not the possible scam on both students and taxpayers into the big story. My big question isn’t “should a dungeon master be able to hold down a professional job” but “how come we can’t get the goddamn DREAM act going for students who are already here and working hard, but there are still diploma-mill scams that run for years at a time, luring people in, ripping them off, working them without protections, and then kicking them out?” However, I doubt anyone would find it shocking if there were some selective enforcement involved; it’s immigration and DHS after all.

The investigation is still going on, but I also doubt anyone would find it plausible that one could figurehead a school whose “accrediting” organization bears the address of an auto-body shop and not know something was amiss. The school lost its federally recognized accreditation in 2008. If you were working there, you would have to make a real effort not to know what was going on.

This Washington Post blog entry is one of the few reports not to lead with “sex dungeon” but to look at the community, the students, and the money involved, even if it’s in a snarky way. The comments, of course, bring out all the usual racists whining about “immigrants” trying to take “our” country away, although in these types of cases it looks more like the foreign students are the ones being taken.

The Daily Mail, naturally, beat the story into the ground, publishing the photos while sparing little room to examine the students’ plight.

There are a lot more stories about this in the media in India, because that’s where most of the student body comes from. Places passing themselves off as colleges and universities have been implicated in ripping off many students from India recently. Reports say these places fudge questions of accreditation, promise student visas, and charge thousands of dollars. A California-based enterprise, for instance, was allegedly bringing people in, making them pay, and making them work low-level jobs at convenience stores, saying it was practical experience toward a degree. Making people pay to work — interesting business model, and one with a long tradition in our country. When that school was raided, immigration made some former students wear ankle monitors for their terrible crime of naivety and self-delusion. In one Indian publication, a woman pregnant with twins who had almost gotten a degree from the “University of Northern Virginia” wondered what she would do now — start over?

Lee’s wife was also brought in on an outstanding hit-and-run warrant, which to me is a really horrifying charge. Yet all people online can think to do is comment on her looks or her sex life. And The Smoking Gun says the two had announced plans to open a high school for international students. That’s probably got a lot of people’s alarm bells ringing — but again, they were advertising for ADULTS to play with. Get that clear. Any interest in high schoolers was apparently not prurient but confined to using them as a device to get their parents to wire more money.

The bad thing they were doing was not BDSM, everybody! What is bad is stealing! One doesn’t have anything to do with the other. Some Christians who never have sex steal. Some dungeon masters steal. One of the prettiest doms I know does charity benefits and is a nurse for wounded soldiers.

But if you ran into the heroic nurse or the dungeon master con man in the poly or kink community, you might never know who was naughty or nice — because we don’t name names. Anonymity and confidentiality shield them both equally.

From the photos online, the former chancellor appears put together very well, and if I met him at some gathering, I might spend some time talking with him, though he’s not really my type. I’m hoping that at that theoretical meet-and-greet, if such a person volunteered information about his line of work, I would be able to detect the whiff of angling Amway salesman behind a description of himself as “university chancellor.” But we probably wouldn’t talk about work, because one isn’t supposed to ask personal, leading questions in an environment of anonymity. I’d like to think I’d pick up a vibe that something wasn’t right. But who knows?

I’m skeptical, cynical, guarded and evasive in nearly all my interactions. I have Saturn conjunct Jupiter in the 8th — my favorite writer is Raymond Chandler, and when I can investigate someone or something, it makes me hum happily into my computer. I’m often told that this skepticism is bad, damaged or mean — in fact, I was told that just today, by a person with a username and an unidentifiable profile photo online who was ticked because I wouldn’t reveal everything about myself. Sure, sweetie, come on over for scones! I’m sure you’re a nice guy.

Women are told over and over not to be hard, suspicious or untrusting. We’re supposed to be open and receptive to all, to open our heart centers. Men and women alike are often chided for using common sense among new age communities. And con artists of both the male and female persuasions use this cultural expectation of women to be soft and yielding to their advantage.

At the same time, neither my fears nor my suspicions stop me from doing almost everything I want. While traveling recently, one night I was in a nearly all-minority downtown full of crumbling buildings, cars throbbing with bass, and the occasional person drinking on the street, and the next night I was in a ritzy college town full of frat boys and thick, sun-baked country clubbers, and which town do you think scared me most?

I’m not going to live as if I’m in a Lifetime Movie, with a horrible man around every corner who wants to marry me, no, strangle me, no, marry me, no, steal my money, no, marry me, no, steal my children, no, marry me, no, seduce me, abuse me and abandon me.

I’ve found the sweet spot in simple, relaxed, curiosity. Tell me about yourself, let’s talk, interact, play in some easy way, and give me a chance to pick up your scent, your cues, your signifiers. And it’s here that I can hit a wall, in environments where confidentiality and anonymity needs to rule.

There is a flip side to the anonymous encounter — one that’s liberating and wonderful. At Burning Man events, for instance, playa names — nicknames — are the norm, and you don’t ask people “what do you do?” Nudity or costumes and the emphasis on logo-free, DIY gear, art and music strip many of the signifiers of class and wealth. Many Burners say they find it lets them get a look at people at their most real. If you stripped down Bernie Madoff, girded him with a fake-fur loincloth, and rolled him in the dust, would those who encountered him be able to see him for what he is? If you’ve got the answer, I’ve got a degree for you.

Until now, I’ve thought poly and kink should not hitch a ride on gay rights — and it bothers me to even link poly and kink together, because I’m so vanilla-granola, let’s have a big free-to-be-you-and-me artisanal goat cheese commune and home school, I know I can’t presume to speak for the kinky people. I don’t want to draw parallels with us and LGBT people, because I don’t want to slow their progress down, but it’s getting more and more difficult not to see the similarities. Back in the day, if someone in the government or anyone else looking for a little power boost found out someone was gay, they could use that knowledge for cash, energy, leverage, all kinds of things. It was currency. That’s what accounted for the raids on gay bars, for instance — keep the world thinking there’s something to be ashamed of, and keep the people at the bars running scared over all they could lose from an arrest.

What would a world look like where you could mention being poly or kink as easily as you’d say you’re gay? Shouldn’t some things just be private? Are fairly vanilla polys like me more entitled to protection and to be able to be open than are kinks? When and how do you tell? How can you protect the children or others who would be disturbed or fearful about the information? What do you think?

For me, protecting children is a no-brainer and easy to do. Protecting myself against all the obvious problems and dangers is also very easy. It’s not even too hard for me to protect myself against con artists and basically unsavory people, whether they’re wearing a tie or carrying a nice handbag or not. I’ve got really good antenna for unconscious racists, for nice-guy sales-talkers, for bag ladies carrying a burden of drama and looking to dump it somewhere.

But for a lot of people, self-protection appears to be, well, a challenge. The chancellor/dungeon master apparently couldn’t protect himself against a simple Internet search. Some students may not have been capable of doing a simple Internet search that could have revealed that their diploma wouldn’t even be worth wiping a counter with.

Or they could have been on that high that tells you that you’ll never ‘get caught’. Or they could have rationalized that someone was going to do it, so why not them? Or they could have weighed the risks and the benefits, taken a breath and jumped.

Anonymity is a two-edged sword, and a damned blunt one. It protects both the creepy and the kind. When we come to a day when there’s nothing to be ashamed of in sexual life among consenting adults, when we’re protected in both law and social structures for acts among consenting adults, shielded from both prosecution and persecution on the basis of sexual behavior among consenting adults — when those particular cobwebs of secrecy are cleared away — we should be able to see clearly whether there’s the kind of behavior people should really be ashamed of happening.

Commenters on some articles said the chancellor should not be punished because he was on a sex site, that he should not lose his job over his dungeon, and that his private sex life shouldn’t have been exposed, and they’re right. But he should be punished if he was in on the enterprise of ripping people off — and not the kind of punishment he might enjoy, but the kind that involves taking your dungeon, along with the rest of your unearned assets, away. And that process of justice should be fully exposed.