[This post is continually updated as EdenFantasys perpetrates more and more unethical, obnoxious, and sex-negative things. See the bottom for the most recent stuff.]

Huge thanks to Juliettia for this image!

There are so many ways to overlook all the bullshit that EdenFantasys has pulled in the past. I know this because I did it myself. I knew that EF was rude to Essin’ Em and refused to pay AAG, but I stayed because EF has great selection, awesome searching features, and an active forum. I stayed because I enjoyed reading reviews, both the awesome ones and the terrible ones. And, selfishly, I stayed because I figured they couldn’t do anything to me. I didn’t work for them, so it wasn’t like they could fire me or deprive me of money.

Well, that individualized sentiment is a thing of the past now. So many unethical issues have piled up that it has become rather foolish, in my opinion, for anyone to continue to support EF. Let me explain…

All your links are belong to EdenFantasys

On Wednesday, Maymay wrote one of the most epic, damning, thorough posts in the history of the internet when he discovered that EdenFantasys has been fucking EVERYONE over with intricate, deceptive linking tricks. And, um, holy fuck, this is huge:

EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based. Taking willful and self-serving advantage of those not technically savvy is a form of inexcusable oppression . . .

Articles published on EdenFantasys websites, such as the “community” website SexIs Magazine, contain HTML crafted to look like links, but aren’t. When visited by a typical human user, a program written in JavaScript . . . intercepts clicks on these “link-like” elements, fetching their intended destination from the server and redirecting users there. Due to the careful and deliberate implementation, the browser’s status bar is made to appear as though the link is legitimate . . .

For non-human visitors, including automated search engine indexing programs such as Googlebot, the “link” remains non-functional, making the article a search engine’s dead-end or “orphan” page whose only functional links are those whose destination is EdenFantasys’s own web presence. This makes EdenFantasys’ website(s) a self-referential black hole that provides no reciprocity for contributors who author content, nor for any website ostensibly “linked” to from article content. At the same time, EdenFantasys editors actively solicit inbound links from individuals and organizations through “link exchanges” and incentive programs such as “awards” and “free” sex toys . . .

. . . They’re trying remarkably hard to make certain that all roads lead to EdenFantasys, but none lead outside of it; no matter what the “link,” search engines see it as stemming from and leading to EdenFantasys.

. . . EdenFantasys also actively performs link-stuffing through its syndicated content “relationships,” underhandedly creating an outsourced and distributed link-farm, just like a spammer . . . Articles published at SexIs Magazine are syndicated in full to other large hub sites, such as AlterNet.org . . . we can see that this content was republished on AlterNet.org shortly after original publication through EdenFantasys’ website . . . However, a closer look at the HTML code of the republication shows that each and every link contained within the article points to the same destination: the same article published on SexIs Magazine . . .

. . . This is no mistake on the part of EdenFantasys, nor is it a one-off occurrence. The amount of work necessary to implement the elaborate system I’ve described is also not even remotely feasible for a rogue programmer to accomplish, far less accomplish covertly. No, this is the result of a calculated and decidedly underhanded strategy . . .

. . . here is unmistakable evidence that EdenFantasys is doing literally everything it can not only to bolster its own web presence at the cost of others’, but to hide this fact from its understandably non-tech-savvy contributors.

Yes, some EF programmer spent hours and hours — if not days, and quite possibly weeks — concocting a code that would artifically make EF look like bigshots on Google while simultaneously fucking everyone else over. There is a reason that people buy paid links on popular sites (see those “sex toys” links in my sidebar?) — because merely having the link on a popular site helps the linked site’s pagerank. EF is denying their writers this tiny courtesy; any link on EF to an off-site review does nothing for its writer, since Google sees the link as one to EF. Bottom line: EF is saying “FUCK YOU” to everyone who provides content for them. This is not an exaggeration; shit like this is considered unethical by Google itself. (If you’re still confused, AAG has a concise run-down.)

This is even more terrifying when you consider how many people EF has roped into “link exchanges” with them. Link exchanges that benefit only EF. Nice.

But never fear, EF’s lead programmer can explain it all to our tiny brains: “In most cases modern search engines do not understand the dynamic information, although it would be highly beneficial for us if they did, since they are missing a lot of information.” Are you fucking serious? Yes, let’s wait for the INTERNET to catch up to your HIGHLY ADVANCED and NOT AT ALL SUSPICIOUS linking tactics. Right. Maymay dismantled EF’s “explanation” in 2.5 seconds.

EF’s “explanation” confirms that they think we are morons who will simply take them at their word. We are not technologically ignorant. We live on the damn internet. We have a “view source” option just like everyone else, and when we view others sites’ sources, we see code that makes sense. For example, here is Babeland’s off-site linking technique, taken from this entry in their blog:

<a href="http://www.sugarbutch.net/2010/05/review-jimmyjane-massage-stone/" target="_blank">The JimmyJane Contour M Massage Stone</a>

And this link, from Good Vibes’ online magazine, which leads to an off-site review of the Club Vibe:

<a href="http://randomcuriosities.blogspot.com/2010/05/club-hoppin-vibe.html" target="_blank">Random Curiosities</a>

And then EF’s version of “linking.” This is the “link” on EF that goes to Sundae’s off-site review of the Vixen Mustang:

<span ID="EFLink_72651_3e29de">Read the entire review</span>

Linklike. I shit you not. This is hysterical. This is unforgivable.

And EF knows it’s unforgivable. Why? Because they’re trying to continue doing it. If they actually cared about the community’s concern, they’d be fixing that shit right away. Instead, they have force-fed us a lie-filled “explanation” and muzzled the community from having a response. Now, anyone who dares to post something intelligent about this in the EF forums (or on Twitter, apparently) gets locked out of their account or has their post deleted. One blogger has said nothing about this hoopla, yet was still locked out. An entire thread was deleted, responses were deleted, and the relevant threads are now closed to new comments, effectively burying them among innocuous other threads and polls.

This treatment of their so-called “community” is condescending, malicious, and very telling. EF clearly wants to prevent people from knowing about this. They want this to go away ASAP so they can go on their merry way without changing a thing. Any bullshit EF or their people spew about community, accountability, and transparency is just that — bullshit. EF is not a community; it’s a fucking joke.

(Oh, and as if hijacking every link on their site wasn’t enough, they also link-spam on others’ blogs. Nice.)

And now I feel so stupid for staying as long as I did. Really, really stupid. I mean, I think we can all agree that they banned me with only a paltry amount of respect — with a cold, terse email and a slanderous forum post. But what EF did to me really isn’t that bad compared to what they’ve done to others.

Why pay employees when you can treat them like shit?

Several people have mentioned that they didn’t know about EF’s history of fucking people, especially employees, over. Thankfully, Essin’ Em wrote a blog post detailing the injustices she saw perpetrated first-hand on EF employees, which is far more concise and thorough than anything I could write. Click the links within the quote for more info about certain situations.

AAG had to take them to court to try and get the remainder of her pay which they denied her, and then they screwed her over by sending an expensive lawyer to the midwest to try and prove that she had to sue the company rather than the owner, and do it in NJ. I promise that cost them a lot more than the $1200 they owed her, but they did it. AAG STILL hasn’t gotten her last 2 weeks of pay.

They tried to get out of paying me hundreds in affiliate money, claiming they had shut my account months earlier. When I sent them screen shots taken that day of my open account with money in it, they had their current affiliate manager sending me a strongly worded hurtful letter, accusing me of slander and libel. Everything I said could be backed up by other employees, and I told them this. I got paid.

. . . That Toy Chick had to get multiple people involved to get her back pay. A woman from the government helping out TTC recused herself from TTC’s case because the owner (Fred Petrenko) was so vile and misogynistic to her.

Sarah Sloane left her full time position. I don’t know why, but I know Sarah and I know she is very dedicated to any job she does, so I’m going to assume (not say, but assume) that she fell victim to Fred’s common “I say one thing, in writing, and you do it, and I change my mind, and get angry at you” ploy, or to the “I’m not going to pay you what you’ve earned” schtick . . .

Matthew, so I hear, needed to take emergency time for family. I’m not sure of the details, nor will I share them if I hear them. It doesn’t matter — family emergencies fall in the same category as domestic violence emergencies in my mind. He was fired, just as I was yelled at for taking my friend to the ER and to file a police report (having told the boss I was doing so).

Delilah Douglas was there before I was — she hired me to help her out. She was “let go” randomly one day, about 4 months after I started. Why? Because he thought I was doing a better job and she was being “lazy” by fact checking and editing reviews, articles, etc.

In addition to all of this, I found three additional people who were burned by EF. One woman, who asked to be referred to as J.S., worked at EF doing live chat for a while (she was paid in commissions). Fred offered to sponsor some of her educational classes/events and to provide toys.

Fred gave me a ton of stuff – some samples, some new – which he prepared for me to pick up. When I got there I got whatever I wanted – literally walked around the warehouse with the warehouse manager and took what I wanted off the shelves. I got over $1000 worth of stuff.

Then came another email from Fred with some quite intense promises in it (take a deep breath): free samples for her classes, discounted products, an online interview with her to promote her events, publication of her event schedule, a possible cameraman to shoot specific classes, adding a “shopping functionality” to her website, help with her own website’s development, and payment for her help with the “guide” section of EF. All of this was promised in one email, but J.S. says, “Nothing ever panned out from any of this,” despite many meetings.

J.S. continued to do live chat and earn commissions. Then one day, her account was deleted. After contacting Fred, she received this email back:

The last time I saw you was almost a year ago when you took a box of toys from us.
You were supposed to report back, post some reviews, thank us at least.
Instead you just disappeared and now this.
Sorry but I doubt I can send you the recommendation.

J.S. says,

I did report back. I did thank them. I did have multiple meetings with them. I did post reviews and they did have plenty of people buying stuff from me. I asked for verification not a recommendation of any sort. and that was the basically what happened. That was the real reason I was sticking around. For the “hours” of experience I was accruing providing one-on-one sex education around sex toys towards my sex educator certification. They wouldn’t give me a letter when it was all said and done.

Obviously, being treated like shit is quite the pattern at EF. Another former EF employee wrote this to me via email:

. . . while I was off for a couple days to attend a family funeral with my mother, I got some upset emails from Fred about things I’d missed or things he wanted me to be on top of (during that immediate time period). After I got back, the pattern of communication for the rest of my time there was as follows. No contact for a few days, then some angry contact in which he’d tell me how I was fucking up or doing things wrong. No constructive direction. In fact, he didn’t say anything specific to me about what my job should encompass the entire time I was there . . . he asked me to hire another full-time person to take over some of my other duties . . . He told me she’d be the program manager, and didn’t tell me anything specific about what I would be doing, just that he had plans for me. I asked him for more information, got none. I started training her, but after repeatedly being blown off by him I decided he was likely planning on firing me as soon as she was trained, so I quit one morning, on the spot (which was a big deal for me).

. . . essentially, the owner of the company is an unprofessional, unethical, emotionally abusive boss (towards multiple employees).

I think that about sums it up, really. Unethical and emotionally abusive.

Added on 12/30/10: Another past EF employee and very well-respected blogger, Cecily, has come forward, recounting EF’s treatment of her in 2010. If you wanted proof that EF has not cleaned up its act, here it is:

I regret taking that job last winter working for a company that not only damaged my standing in the blogosphere by association, but also damaged my professional reputation. I regret not immediately quitting the job the first time the owner of the company lost his shit and started screaming at me on the phone . . . I regret, even, trying to maintain a tiny sliver of professionalism and not name the company on social media sites because I’ve watched them suck in other bloggers to rake them through the same horrible experience I had.

I regret all of that, of course, because it eventually led to a near four-month period in which I wasn’t paid anything. A financial set back that still is affecting our family to this day, leading us to have our second Christmas without presents for the adults in our lives, a bankruptcy on file, and us almost losing our house.

Cecily does not name EdenFantasys in her post, but she has given me permission to link and quote her here.

Sex-positivity: open to interpretation

Added on 12/30/10: While not as disturbing as EF’s failure to treat employees with respect, it is worth noting that EF chose to publish an article by a sex worker entitled “Yesterday, I Blew a 500-Pound Man.” This article is extremely fatphobic and ableist, painting the client as less than human again and again. This should not have been published on what claims to be a “sex-positive” website. But this is EF we’re talking about. Some choice quotes:

This guy looked like he had eaten the obese man. He weighed at least 500 pounds, and wore a big orthopedic boot. I was horrified, but I didn’t let it show.

He took off his shirt, which left lots of black lint in his chest and arm folds. He took off his pants (waist size: 60) with my help, as well as a pair of white underwear that looked like the kind you saw hanging in a kitschy museum with the sign, “World’s Largest Pair of Underwear!” I tried very hard not to look, for I really didn’t want to see, but there it was—a tiny brown stain in the back.

His legs were like rotting tree trunks. I could see through a sock that one of his feet was oozing and bandaged. He had two huge white scars on his belly. A row of big flowering bruises on his midsection were left over from a series of blood thinning injections he had a few days before.

He lay on my queen size bed and took up the entire space . . . He said, “I hate to tell you this, but you have something in your nose.” I explained it was the back part of my nose ring. I couldn’t believe that this guy was pointing out that I had a booger.

. . . Then he wanted me to suck him off. I was very scared to get my face in his crotch. I was worried it would smell. I tried hard to breathe out of my mouth, which was necessary anyway since my nose was buried in one of his belly fat folds as I attempted to get the little buttonhead of his soft cock in my mouth.

I thought how grotesque the scene would look like from a different perspective, a beautiful woman giving this freak of a man a blow job . . .

. . . as soon as he left, I anxiously checked my bed to see if he left a permanent impression of himself in my mattress.

Editors and the author have defended this piece, saying that this “journal entry” was written a while ago, and that the author does not feel this way now. Uh, sorry, NOT GOOD ENOUGH. There are ways to write less offensively about prejudice, and this is not one of them.

My banning, and the repercussions

And, of course, I was permanently banned from EF, for reasons I can only guess. Perhaps one of them was rating a mommy blogger review “not useful at all.” It actually had the line in it, “This surprisingly does such a number on the G-Spot ..Did I Say The G-Spot!!” Yeah, EF seems to be more concerned with showering their affections on “mommy bloggers,” who provide free advertising for them, than quality reviews that don’t make readers’ eyes bleed. And that makes sense — the more links that go to EF, the better they look. Good writing and readable text don’t mean anything.

Ultimately, many people have permanently and voluntarily left/shunned EF: Adriana, Britni, Carnivalesq, WomanTribune, Femenina Deliciosa, Juliettia, Elodie, Cinnamon, Saraid, AKinkyDichotomy, cand86, Ghouldilocks, Aurore, to name only a handful. And still others, who were never involved with EF in the first place, have vowed to never become involved.

AAG threw together an amusing image, which is actually kind-of depressing when you realize just how many people can identify with it now:

How to escape

Everyone has their own reason for staying, be it for the toys, the (sometimes) fun community, the gift cards, or for the commissions. But I want you to know, there are other options. You can start your own blog and review toys for other companies (I highly recommend Vibrator and Fascinations for their support in response to my banning). You can buy from more ethical companies. And I would be happy to help you do all of this.

At this point, if you still believe EF is a stand-up company with good intentions, you are incredibly naive. EF does not care about community. They care about money and dominating the market. They have been very successful so far, and their success will likely continue. That’s what makes this so frustrating. This is a company that pretends to care about its contributors, but fucks them over with insane Javascript behind their backs. Pretends to be fine with dissent, yet bans people for “overall negativity” and locks people out for simply contributing to discussions (or not even). And they think they can cover it all up with lies upon lies.

Let me make this loud and clear: EdenFantasys DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU. You are nothing more than a tool for them to acquire money and rank. Don’t drink EF’s Flavor Aid any longer. Leave them, boycott them, report them, spread the word. Let’s show them what the community we’ve built on our own can do.

[For even more on these issues, visit Wilhelmina's amazing link round up and Britni's run-down.]

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• What the fuck, EdenFantasys?

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Filed under Banter, Disingenuous Assholes, Epic Fail, Whine Time | 57 Comments

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