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Once Upon a Time in ASSville

Note:

A caveat: Human memory is a notoriously unreliable archive. The ASSville I describe in these posts 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.

Introduction

At a munch in Culver City a couple weekends ago someone was asking if I knew what was going on with Laura’s site [I don’t but did post instructions on how to use Wayback Machine to find it] and we ended up discussing what early internet communities were  like before social media, a conversation that is becoming more and more familiar. Usually they imagine something primitive: anonymous message boards, chaos, trolls, isolated people typing into the void.

These posts under the “Notes from Assville” banner are my attempt to answer this. They’re also an exercise in memory that may connect my academic and kink writing. But mostly it’s because the Usenet spanking community (AKA ASSville) was my first and most profound experience of community on the internet.

Note: The first version of this his was written a few months ago. I’ve posted it today in part because I think it relates well to the discussion in the comments of my July 4, 2026 post: “Notes from ASSville: Introducing a Town Built of Text.”

What was this place?

I start with the idea of “space” and “place” because, for me, alt.sex.spanking/soc.sexuality.spanking (colletively known as “Assville”) was always more than a digital space. It existed (and in my memory still does) as a place. This makes it quite different from Twitter or any other electronic community I’ve ever been part of. It’s special. ²Actually “special” doesn’t even cover it. For me, it’s home in a way no space, vanilla or otherwise, felt before or since. This, even though it called itself “Assville,” something I’ve always found profoundly embarrassing.

“ASSville” as a town³There are early stories out there that refer to it as a university (I think that maybe was rude too), reflecting, no doubt Usenet’s pre and post Eternal September and the over-representation of academic and students in the community. grew out of the Usenet spanking community surrounding alt.sex.spanking / soc.sexuality.spanking in the 1990s. If you weren’t there, that surely sounds ridiculous already, a rude schoolboy joke – like I’m writing about a place called “Bumland.” Inside the community, we would mostly have agreed. Ridiculousness was intrinsic to the group culture. As a community we liked parody, satire, gossip, absurd public performances, elaborate inside jokes, and theatricality. We liked being funny in a groaning kinda way.⁴Example: I delurked right in the middle of discussions about moving alt.sex.spanking to the soc* hierarchy (a big fucking deal — more on that history later). The long long long discussion threads were under the subject line “Moving Assville.” A few months later that subject line had morphed into “Assville: The Movie.”

But looking back now through my old posts, roleplay threads, stories, websites, and contests,⁵What I have of those 1997-1999 posts are tiny tiny fragments of what I posted — mostly ones that were saved by being posted to Laura’s and/or The Treehouse, or that I’d sent via email often enough to have saved the document. Beyond that, no. I don’t have the posts or emails from those years. I wish I did. what strikes me most is not the kink itself. Rather it is how completely people inhabited the place. How that felt like belonging, to and from.

ASSville was not merely a discussion group or internet community; it was a town.

Not metaphorically, though yes, of course. But mainly socially.

The community developed neighborhoods, recurring landmarks, public institutions, local celebrities, newspapers, schools, running jokes, scandals, folklore, and, probably most importantly, a shared emotional geography. We had a newspaper called The Town Crier (I did mention the puns, right?). There were boarding houses, castles, flower shops, and a town square. People referred to “their end of town.” Spam was referred to as “trash.” Stories overlapped and referenced one another. Characters wandered between narratives and, sometimes, authors. Police chiefs and coaches, sock-puppets and trolls, muttering madmen. Shared settings accumulated lore.

When I started lurking on alt.sex.spanking in 1996 I genuinely half-believed there might be a physical ASSville somewhere. [I imagined it in Florida… of course. Assville as something like a spanking version of The Villages.]

That sounds so absurd now,⁶Okay. Not just now. The people I mentioned it to in 1997 also thought it odd. But then again they probably understood how newsgroups worked a lot better than me. but it also reveals something important. That for me and many, many others the place was experientially real enough that my brain modeled it spatially. I knew where people “lived” and who with. I knew where trouble tended to happen. I knew which personalities gathered together. I was part of a little posse of “brats” (women mostly) who wrote community posts when the muse took us. I knew where Pablo Stubbs and my own little corner of town, The Treehouse, was.⁷I wasn’t unique in this. There’s charming artwork out there. A poster, Z, did some some lovely stuff.

Writing for Readers, Readers for Writing

Because identity online (at the time) was almost entirely textual people became recognizable through their prose. You knew someone by their cadence, favorite genres, disciplinary philosophies, emotional tone, recurring jokes, or literary references. Our identities emerged through our writing.⁸This, and my not being the only newsgroup reader/writer who read and studied writing for a living, it wasn’t easy for people to hide by posting under another identity.

This was especially true because ASSville was deeply shaped by collaborative storytelling traditions. If someone wrote a particularly memorable school story, like, for example, Pablo Stubbs infamous, Such a Good Girl (which itself  nods toward British boarding school stories of the first to middle twentieth century) another writer would quietly borrow a surname, a fictional school, a headmistress, or a setting as a nod toward the earlier story. Readers who recognized the references experienced a small flash of communal pleasure: not plagiarism, but continuity. A sense of fitting. Seeing and being seen in this virtual world.

That was how the culture worked. Stories conversed with one another. Many were collaboratively written.

(more…)

• 1
  The 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.
• 2
  Actually “special” doesn’t even cover it. For me, it’s home in a way no space, vanilla or otherwise, felt before or since. This, even though it called itself “Assville,” something I’ve always found profoundly embarrassing.
• 3
  There are early stories out there that refer to it as a university (I think that maybe was rude too), reflecting, no doubt Usenet’s pre and post Eternal September and the over-representation of academic and students in the community.
• 4
  Example: I delurked right in the middle of discussions about moving alt.sex.spanking to the soc* hierarchy (a big fucking deal — more on that history later). The long long long discussion threads were under the subject line “Moving Assville.” A few months later that subject line had morphed into “Assville: The Movie.”
• 5
  What I have of those 1997-1999 posts are tiny tiny fragments of what I posted — mostly ones that were saved by being posted to Laura’s and/or The Treehouse, or that I’d sent via email often enough to have saved the document. Beyond that, no. I don’t have the posts or emails from those years. I wish I did.
• 6
  Okay. Not just now. The people I mentioned it to in 1997 also thought it odd. But then again they probably understood how newsgroups worked a lot better than me.
• 7
  I wasn’t unique in this. There’s charming artwork out there. A poster, Z, did some some lovely stuff.
• 8
  This, and my not being the only newsgroup reader/writer who read and studied writing for a living, it wasn’t easy for people to hide by posting under another identity.