How to Handle the Mistakes You WILL Make as a Smutlancer

Kayla Lords

Kayla Lords is a freelance sex writer, podcaster, blogger, all-around sex content creating human, and she really likes creating content. As a writer, she focuses on sex and kink primarily on BDSM and power exchange. She works with private clients to write their content and manage their social media, while also co-hosting two podcasts, running a YouTube channel, and managing multiple blogs. Let's just say, she stays busy and wants to keep it that way. Kayla is an international speaker and an award-winning sex blogger. She believes we are stronger together as a community than we are isolated and apart. We all deserve to get paid for the work we do, but until we understand our cumulative power, we'll all wonder if we're "the only one" doing this smutlancing thing.

7 Responses

  1. Sweetgirl says:

    This is an interesting post and while I appreciate what you are saying, I also think that there is a way of communicating to someone that you have found something to be upsetting. As you say in general people do not write things to cause upset or intentionally hurt someone, therefore if a person is upset, that should also be remembered and acknowledged in their communications.

    As a parent I have had to teach my children how to communicate about hurt feelings, and one of the things I have always said to them is, you are not in control of how someone else feels, or how they interpret what you say. You can control the way you say things and how you express yourself, to reduce the risk of misinterpretation, therefore you make sure you are kind, considerate, and polite, when taking to people. My other favourite is to treat others as you wish to be treated.

    A factual inaccuracy is another matter, and if I shared a fact that was incorrect, I would hope that this would be pointed out and I would of course amend it. At the same time, I would expect the person pointing it out to be polite and friendly in their communications too.

    For example, I am severely dyslexic and can misspell words, especially if they are not words recognised by a spell check (like someones online blog name) and when I have done this, I have been DM’d and it’s been pointed out. I have amended it and said to them, that I was sorry and that this is due to my dyslexia. I spell my own name wrong and I have had that for 45 years. I am sorry, can be a sentence but I would expect someone to take the explanation for why this error occured into account.

    Sweetgirl x

    • Kayla Lords says:

      I get what you’re saying, and in my own life, live that philosophy — if I speak up, I’m going to be as polite as possible in order to have the best chance of being heard — I think those are two distinct issues. The mistake itself is separate from the reaction the mistake causes. I’ve written a post on calling out, and how I feel about it (spoiler: I think that it rarely works the way we want it to, and I’m not a fan). But if we can’t/won’t admit we might be wrong because the delivery of the message wasn’t polite or was overly angry, that’s something we need to deal with. The politeness of the person letting us know we made a mistake doesn’t negate the mistake.

      In this post, I’m supposing that we’ve gotten past the point of being told about our mistake — in whatever form that took — and are working on dealing with the mistake/our feelings about it. And yes, receiving an angry, insult-filled message about what we’ve done “wrong” absolutely will impact whether we accept the criticism or not. But I would caution against only accepting criticism or hearing someone’s perspective when delivered in a “correct” or “polite” tone, too.

      Just like we can’t control anyone’s actions but our own, we also can’t control how our content lands — including our mistakes. We don’t know if a person was misgendered 10 times that day and they’ve reached the limit of their patience. We don’t know what battles someone else is fighting and dealing with every day. As an outside observer to another person’s mistakes (and fall-out from that mistake) we don’t know how many times the same mistake has happened (by the same person), which can drive people to be angrier in that moment than maybe they were the first time it happened. There’s so much we can’t know so can’t prepare for. (And yes, I know, that means the person yelling at us doesn’t know our situation either — but as you said, we can only control our own responses/actions.)

      That being said, none of us are required to engage with anyone yelling at us, calling us names, etc. Of course not. But when we’re calm and away from the heat of the moment, it IS worth looking at the criticism being made. And *if* we can see/admit a mistake was made, then we need to do something about it — even if all we can do is issue a blanket apology and do better in the future. Because our response to something we recognize as a mistake is the only thing about that entire situation we can control — not whether our apology is accepted, not if someone likes/follows us again, and not whether the person who was less than polite to us ever feels bad about being less than polite.

  2. Thank you for this, Kayla.

    Rebel xox

  3. Sweetgirl says:

    I agree, that when a mistake is made reparations are required…. I also think sometimes we forget to be kind to each other…

    One of the things I enjoy about the kink community is how we can talk about these things, and how to handle them when they happen.

    So much upset can be avoided by, (and aren’t we always repeating how important it is) communication

    Sweetgirl x

  4. I found this very useful – it was true and it spoke to me about ways I can improve. Thank you.

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