"Normal" probably isn't.

I remember reading about Fortuny's Craiglist experiment when it first happened and remember thinking "That's what folks get for thinking privacy actually exists online," but this makes a really good point. These folks were trying to live in a subculture safely and ethically, hurting nobody, and got screwed pretty hard over it in some cases.

PopMatters Culture Feature | The Kink Continuum:

"You may have heard of Seattle web developer Jason Fortuny’s September 2006 “Craigslist experiment” in which he posed as a submissive woman and solicited responses from kinky, dominant men. Citing safety, he requested real names, phone numbers, pictures, and other contact information—and then took all the personal information these men gave him and posted it on a website. Some responded to this with a shrug: Too bad about the privacy violation, but that’s what happens when you’re a disgusting pervert. Presumably as a kinky person, you just don’t have the same rights as anyone else.

But what Jason Fortuny did was extremely unethical, not because he was a man posing as a woman—as vice squad detectives can tell you, 17-year-old virgin Jennifer in your chat room may likely be 40-year-old PTA member Steve—but because he took advantage of people who were taking care to be ethical themselves. As sex columnist Dan Savage has pointed out, those responding to Fortuny’s ad were trying to provide a nervous woman attracted to a murky subculture with the security that their personal information could afford, assuring her that if she did end up getting hurt, she’d know how to find them.

Instead, they got blamed for being kinky, “outed” to their families and communities, and had their professional and private lives compromised; one couple in an open marriage begged that their information be removed from Fortuny’s website, as their religious friends and family were unaware of their lifestyle. Someone else recognized a coworker from a Microsoft-based email address; another email came from a usar.army.mil address, not an organization famous for tolerance of alternative sexualities. Fortuny’s considerate response to the experiment’s “subjects” who asked him to remove their information from his website? “Sorry. Try not to freak out. Take deep breaths. Recognize that your friends will laugh at you for a little bit, and you’ll get some prank phone calls. Maybe a feminist will write you a nastygram. If this is making you cry then grow the fuck up. Be the real man you claimed you were on your response, faggot. You should be able to take a hit in the solar plexus without flinching.”

Why the hostility? Our culture is happy to grapple with sex-fetish imagery in the mainstream, where an ad for Altoids features a corset-clad honey bun and the tagline “Pleasure in Pain”, and Justin Timberlake moans suggestively about shackles and slaves at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. It’s a vocabulary we all recognize: chains, whips, ropes, Chinese nurses, rubber. We have some generic cultural connotations for kink: It can suggest, for example, that folks are more adventurous, more interesting, possibly even cooler than nonkinksters. How often does Cosmopolitan tell couples to spice up their relationship with some light bondage, handcuffs or a silk scarf blindfold? So how do we get from thinking kink is a fun and exciting way to add a little zest to your sex life to finding it disgusting on the Internet and persecuting those who sought to practice it privately and safely?

Kinsey’s sex studies in 1948 and 1953 revealed that we’re all a lot weirder than we think. Gay, straight, kinky, or vanilla, we’re all blips on a continuum that is wider than we typically imagine. While Kinsey didn’t specifically study kinky behavior, his studies did reveal that approximately 12 percent of females and 22 percent of males had an aroused response to a sadomasochistic story and more than half of both sexes responded erotically to being bitten. And the prominence of kinky images in the media—such as TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s cavalier inclusion of handcuffs, collars, and safe words, the recurring dominatrix character in CSI, fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s use of stilettos, rubber, and leather straps and even the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which has players disguise themselves in bondage gear to gain access to a casino, suggest a vast population with at least some interest in kink.

...Fortuny was able to create scandal because privacy laws imply that only shame provokes us to choose to keep certain things to ourselves. But if our supposedly taboo activities are increasingly being revealed with the help of the Internet as more and more commonplace, they will not remain potently taboo for long. How can you shame someone for being “other” when there is more and more proof that this otherness is in fact the norm?"