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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.
Opening one felt less like entering a chatroom (an experience still a year or so away for me) than wandering into an infinite, specialized library being built collectively in real time. Each group was a bulletin board made of ongoing threaded discussions that accumulated over days, weeks, and months. People argued, flirted, debated, confessed, theorized, and told stories. Every active group developed its own customs, tone, and emotional weather.
Somewhere within that branching map, I found alt.sex.spanking.4This happened after reading alt.sex.personals.spanking for several nights running and then clicking on a crossposted groupWhat I found there wasn’t simply reading material on my favorite erotic subject, although there was plenty of that. The most startling find? Recognition. Desire too, yes, but also language, humor, argument, storytelling, and the astonishing realization that I wasn’t alone. Moreover, it was clear that a lot of these people knew each other, were friends.
Until then, the fantasies about spanking I’d had as far back as I remembered existed in private.5Telling my then-husband had been a disaster. These posts belonged in the same hidden internal world as my fantasies, diary entries, and the many unfinished stories tucked into old notebooks as things intensely imagined but never spoken aloud. I’d looked up the same words6So many words – especially the “s” word and all its many synonyms. in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and academic journals7 Some of us joked that our academic formation started with research looking for the word “spanking” and its synonyms everywhere possible. without ever imagining I might someday encounter other people, living communities using them casually in conversation.
And suddenly there in my Mac, in my quiet apartment was alt.sex.spanking, ASSville, alive, a community growing as I read.
People there discussed spanking not simply as fantasy, but as culture, sexuality, identity, narrative, memory, humor, and craft. The 1995 FAQ described the group as unusually friendly and proudly high in “signal-to-noise ratio,” language that now feels both charmingly retro-technical and deeply communal. The goal wasn’t agreement so much as coexistence and, perhaps, understanding and empathy.
ASSville’s residents argued about ethics and spoke of early experiences. They wrote stories, reviewed parties, and co-wrote scene reports. They developed reputations, running jokes and communal histories. Flirted badly and formed friendships. Broke each other’s hearts. When I entered through my screen I felt like Alice. What I’d thought were fantasies I held in solitude revealed themselves instead as part of a chorus.
Until then, I’d never used a computer for connection beyond my university email. My Mac was a glorified typewriter, a place for drafts, footnotes, and panicked essay writing.8Also 100 pages of a historical romance novel ironically called “Abandoned Dreams.” But now, as posts accumulated and my eyes hoovered them, I could feel a different kind of literacy forming, one built not simply on argument but on attention and participation.
My memories are undoubtedly rose-colored, especially for this period. I know alt.sex.spanking was imperfect, sometimes dramatically so. There were flame wars, trolls, misunderstandings, long silences, personality conflicts, and occasional eruptions of astonishing stupidity and cruelty. In other words, it was populated by humans.
But beneath the noise was something remarkable.
The group held itself together not via formal authority (none was possible) but by a communally written FAQ and interconnection. Like other Usenet FAQs, the one for alt.sex.spanking explained terminology, expectations, etiquette, boundaries, and norms of behavior. It wasn’t law nor even rules. Nobody could force compliance. The group operated more through collective disapproval than censorship, through censuring rather than censoring. Looking back now though, what fascinates me is how much labor and care went into constructing those shared norms. Years before formal moderation existed, people were building systems that balanced freedom with responsibility, arguably because there was no moderation, because no one was in charge.
The FAQ itself ran more than 7,000 words and listed multiple contributors. The discussions that shaped it were ongoing and happened publicly on the group itself through argument, revision, negotiation, and collective reflection. They also happened in private between friends. The community was actively writing and rewriting the terms of its own coexistence.
At the time I didn’t yet have language like “digital governance” or “affective labor.” I only knew that reading the FAQ felt strangely familiar. I recognized in it something I already understood and researched in courses about feminist and communal spaces. There was an ethics of care articulated collectively and maintained through participation and social agreements.
For months, as was considered good practice,9And also because I was SO CONFUSED. I remained entirely silent, lurking in the original sense of the word. On Usenet, lurkers were invisible unless and until they chose to speak. There were no visible follower counts, usernames, avatars, or presence indicators. No means of monetization.10Though I guess someone somewhere must have fallen for SPAM and its inevitable penis enlargement promises… To lurk meant simply to read, to observe without announcing yourself. Since once a Usenet post of any sort went out there was no way to either edit or delete it, posting anything, especially for the first time, was a huge deal.
The alt.sex.spanking FAQ encouraged newcomers to “delurk” with introductions that included stories, histories, tastes, and reflections, treating participation less like profile creation and more like entry into an ongoing communal conversation.
Eventually I wanted to post. I reached out privately by email to “Bea,” a woman whose posts struck me as warm, funny, and welcoming. She wrote back. Then, still in private correspondence and with my agreement, she contacted another member on my behalf, someone with more technical knowledge, to help me figure out how to post to the group without exposing my legal name and university email address. Free webmail accounts were still novel enough then to feel faintly miraculous.
What followed wasn’t one dramatic leap into visibility but a careful, staged process. Instructions were exchanged, including discussion of a strange new free email platform called Hotmail.com. Precautions were taken and tested. Technical mysteries were solved one step at a time.
Only then did I finally make my first public post in early 1997.
That was how “Mija” came into being, a name selected by the sweet poster who initially helped me.
When I look back now at that younger version of me sitting at her keyboard late at night, newly named and newly tentative, I feel enormous affection and tenderness toward her. She was exhausted, lonely, curious, intellectually hungry, and profoundly unsure of her place in the world, but still brave enough to hope.
She was also doing something historically familiar, something I knew about because it’s part of what I research (then and now). Like many women before me, I was joining a textual community. I think that may be one reason the space felt immediately legible to me despite Usenet’s technical unfamiliarity. The Chicana feminist writers and editors I studied and researched as an undergraduate and graduate student, (and still do) also built their networks through writing: newspaper, mimeographed journals, collaborative anthologies, newsletters, ‘zines, letters passed hand to hand and city to city. Different technologies, but recognizably similar forms of labor. What I encountered on Usenet was that same communal impulse rendered in code.
People like me often speak nostalgically about the “old internet,” usually meaning the internet before platforms consolidated power, tracked clicks across platforms, and monetized identity. Some of that nostalgia is misplaced. Early online life could be cruel, exclusionary, chaotic, and naïve. Whatever else it was, however, it was important. Formative.
That’s one reason for writing these posts now.
Another related and more ambitious one is to try and find a way to research and write about newsgroups more generally. Given its importance, there’s still little written about the history and significance of Usenet. I believe that’s because Usenet itself isimpossibly large. At its height, it contained thousands of active newsgroups devoted to every imaginable topic generating vast quantities of text, thousands upon thousands of posts. No single scholar can hope to get their arms around”Usenet” as a whole.
The Usenet archiving situation only complicates matters. Although services such as Deja News (later Google Groups) created the impression that Usenet had been comprehensively preserved, the historical record is uneven and incomplete. Many posts have been lost. Others survive only in fragmentary form. Accessing older material can itself require considerable technical expertise.
Communities like ASS face additional challenges because they existed within the anarchic alt.* hierarchy. Unlike the more formal “Big Eight” newsgroups, alt.* groups weren’t uniformly carried by all servers. Many institutions and internet providers chose not to carry them at all, or only carried selected portions of the hierarchy. By the late 1990s, increasing storage costs, spam, binaries, and concerns over sexually explicit material led many providers to reduce or eliminate their alt.sex* feeds altogether.
As a result, much of the history of early online sexual communities has simply disappeared.
The irony is difficult to miss. Communities that depended on Usenet to overcome isolation and stigma may be among the least well preserved in the historical record.
I can’t fix that, nor am I trying to do so. What I’m posting here is neither a comprehensive history of Usenet nor a definitive history of ASSville. Instead, it’s a series of notes from one former resident of a very particular town, reflecting on what life there might tell us about community, technology, desire, and the early internet.
For all ASS and SSS’s faults and flaws, something genuine and valuable existed there. For decades.
These communities weren’t built for visibility or branding or commerce. They emerged because people needed spaces to think together, desire together, argue together, and sometimes simply keep each other company through the long loneliness of being, especially of being unusual.
In late 1997 alt.sex.spanking became the first alt.sex.* group to migrate into a moderated hierarchy, soc.sexuality.spanking.11This was a huge deal, involving months of discussion, work, and a Usenet-wide vote. The move was a response to the increasing flood of spam and binaries overwhelming Usenet. Moderation had to become a technical infrastructure rather than purely social negotiation. Yet even then, the foundations remained communal and ethical before they became procedural.
Looking back now as a scholar of digital and print text cultures, I realize how much those years shaped me intellectually.
I learned how to read text closely in emotionally charged environments. To understand that sometimes people had to post rants before they could discuss anything. I learned how communities negotiate conflict and language creates belonging. I learned that infrastructure can never be neutral — someone must always perform the labor of maintenance. Most of all, I learned that care itself can be a technical practice, that social problems can’t be solved by technology. Those lessons stayed with me long after the communities I was part of disappeared.
And disappear they largely did.
Usenet still technically exists; however, much of its earlier history is lost, fragmented, privatized, or rendered inaccessible. Entire emotional worlds vanished along with old servers and neglected archives. Communities that once felt enormous now survive mostly in memory, scattered text files, partial captures, web archives, and the stories former participants tell each other. Even the group’s oft-cited FAQ now survives only precariously through scattered archives, aging mirrors, and websites modern browsers flag as “not secure.”12That need for stability and preservation is one reason I added the 1995 version to the Mija’s Room site.
Lately I’ve wanted to document the bits of that history that I can, partly out of intellectual curiosity and, ultimately, out of gratitude.
The result is a new project, still in proposal form, currently titled Hearts in the Machine: Love, Usenet, and the Digital Commons. Part digital ethnography, part archival recovery, and part memoir, the project explores how early online communities attempted to build systems of governance, care, intimacy, and collective responsibility before the rise of platform capitalism and influencer monetization reshaped the internet around visibility, commerce, and extraction. At its center is a question that feels increasingly urgent: what can these early experiments in communal digital life, citizenship, and governance teach us now?
These spaces were decidedly not utopias and that’s not a bad thing. All utopian projects eventually fracture under the weight of human contradiction, the paradox of generosity and selfishness. Still, as communities the groups mattered and left traces that are still visible. Bits of code. Stories. Names. Arguments. Words. Charters. Websites. Friendships. Forms of care improvised collectively by people who often had very little institutional protection elsewhere, people freely gave hours, days, months, and years of themselves to maintain them.
In some ways, this project is an attempt to build an archive of gratitude, to thank the strangers who taught me how to think about consent, community, storytelling, governance, and love not only as emotional experiences, but also as collaborative structures people build with and for each other. It’s also a reminder that behind every interface, every network, and every machine, there are human hearts: hopeful, imperfect, imaginative, and still trying to make worlds where more of us can live.
Note: Another goal is for none of these posts to be more than 3000 words. We’ll see how that goes
- 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.
- 4This happened after reading alt.sex.personals.spanking for several nights running and then clicking on a crossposted group
- 5Telling my then-husband had been a disaster.
- 6So many words – especially the “s” word and all its many synonyms.
- 7Some of us joked that our academic formation started with research looking for the word “spanking” and its synonyms everywhere possible.
- 8Also 100 pages of a historical romance novel ironically called “Abandoned Dreams.”
- 9And also because I was SO CONFUSED.
- 10Though I guess someone somewhere must have fallen for SPAM and its inevitable penis enlargement promises…
- 11This was a huge deal, involving months of discussion, work, and a Usenet-wide vote.
- 12That need for stability and preservation is one reason I added the 1995 version to the Mija’s Room site.