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Hello. Is this on? Can you hear me in the back?
Okay. Well. Let’s do this.
Most of my adult life I’ve kept my scholarly self and my kink/schoolgirl self in separate binders, carefully labeled, alphabetized, each with dividers organized by topic. Recently I’ve tentatively slipped into the same ring mechanism, as seen in my ever-so-long November 2025 post, The Music of Discipline: Notes Toward a Sonic Saint Clare.
This post, is an attempt to think seriously, historically, and affectionately about the early online spanking community that shaped so much of my intellectual and emotional life in the late 1990s. It is also the beginning of a larger project about Usenet, digital culture, communal governance, archives, and the textual world many of us once called “ASSville.”
Note:
A caveat: Human memory is a notoriously unreliable archive. The ASSville I describe in these essays is necessarily partial, shaped by my own experiences, friendships, conflicts, blind spots, and affections. My “golden years”1The term “golden years” refers to the newbie energy people tend to have when they first came on the group. Whenever it was, it was, in their memories, always the group’s *best* time. on the group were roughly 1996 through 1998. Other residents arrived earlier, came after, occupied different social circles, and likely will remember events differently.
I hope they will tell me about it, here or elsewhere.
One of my goals for this series of posts is not sharing and preserving my memories –that’s what The Treehouse is for– but to begin a conversation about our shared past or pasts. If you were there and remember things differently, if I’ve gotten details wrong, overlooked important people or events, or misunderstood something, please leave a comment. Likwise, share what you remember if it’s similar too. The history of ASSville, like ASSville itself, was collectively made. Perhaps the remembering it can be collective as well. Of course, if you weren’t there and have questions, please ask them.
Another note:
Memory presents other complications as well. Example? Between May and the end of August 1997, I had no internet access whatsoever. No Usenet. No email. Nothing.
In our “Always On” world this is almost unimaginable.2See my account of the uncanny experience of being offline for only a few weeks last summer (2025) In 1997 it was inconvenient and not unusual. Still, for nearly four months I disappeared entirely from ASSville. I could neither read nor post, send nor receive email, lurk nor participate. The only news I received about the group came second-hand through (almost) nightly3These calls required me to find a phone where he could call me. At times, that meant sitting in front of a pay phone at midnight. No, it wasn’t snowing. telephone conversations with Paul.
There are, therefore, entire stretches of ASSville history that I experienced only through retelling, summary, gossip, and memory. Even at the time, my understanding of events was partial and mediated. I barely understood how the technology worked. Magic, as it happened.
This is worth remembering because no one person, however active, ever experienced the whole of ASSville. We each inhabited particular neighborhoods, friendships, arguments, and moments. The town we remember is and was therefore always both real and incomplete.
Los Angeles, late Fall 1996, the top floor of a small four-plex on Mariposa Avenue.
I was in the first semester of my PhD program, learning how to live alone for the first time and trying to find my place in a city that was home but also new. On my desk sat a beige Mac Performa, the sort that purred more than it processed. Through PINE (a UNIX email platform) I dialed into my university to check my email one line at a time, black text against a soft brown-grey screen. Late one evening, almost by accident, I wandered beyond my inbox and into something called Usenet.
At the time, I understood almost nothing about internet architecture. I only knew that suddenly there were lists upon lists of discussion groups, arranged into sprawling categories that seemed to contain all human thought, or at least all human obsession. Some were political. Some technical. Some scholarly. Some were devoted entirely to television shows, recipes, obscure bands, or cats. Others seemed to exist solely because somewhere, sometime, two people wanted to keep talking to each other. Many were abandoned or even jokes.
- 1The term “golden years” refers to the newbie energy people tend to have when they first came on the group. Whenever it was, it was, in their memories, always the group’s *best* time.
- 2See my account of the uncanny experience of being offline for only a few weeks last summer (2025)
- 3These calls required me to find a phone where he could call me. At times, that meant sitting in front of a pay phone at midnight. No, it wasn’t snowing.
