alt.sex is a Usenet newsgroup — a discussion board inside the old Usenet network — devoted to human sexual activity. It was a 1990s mass audience, not a niche listserv. Brian Reid’s October 1993 survey put worldwide readership at an estimated 3.3 million people, about 8 percent of all Usenet readers, with 67 percent of Usenet “nodes” (the news servers people logged into) carrying the group. Traffic at that point ran around 2,300 messages a month. Under that top group sat a whole hierarchy, including alt.sex.bondage, which is where a lot of early online BDSM talk actually lived. For kink-history readers this is the pre-web room: ASCII, killfiles, and the first place many people ever typed out a scene.
The child groups, from Playboy-adjacent to “extreme”
The hierarchy under alt.sex included several newsgroups. The biggest after alt.sex itself was alt.sex.stories. Others were alt.sex.pictures, alt.sex.blondes, alt.sex.bondage, alt.sex.bestiality, and alt.sex.rape. The first four generally ran text and images in the same neighborhood as mainstream adult magazines such as Playboy or Penthouse. The last three are the set that dealt in more “extreme,” less socially accepted subjects. Still other groups wore joke names on purpose: alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat, alt.sex.boredom, and alt.sex.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape. By 1998 there were more groups aimed at less mainstream topics and subcultures, though those usually carried far less traffic than the boards about more conventional sexual behavior. The tree was not a single taste. It was a stack of rooms, some of them indistinguishable from a newsstand skin mag and some of them hosting talk no magazine would print.
alt.sex.bondage and the word BDSM
Maureen Furniss, in a 1993 look at the alt.sex hierarchy, argued that sexually oriented boards worked as a kind of support group for the people who posted there, especially people whose sexual orientations sat far outside the mainstream — she named sadomasochism and bestiality as examples. That is the kink-history point: alt.sex was not only porn traffic. For posters whose practices had no local bar and no legal bookstore section, the newsgroup was the room where they found out they were not the only ones. The first Usenet BDSM newsgroup, alt.sex.bondage, was created in 1991. The term BDSM itself was first recorded in a post on alt.sex.bondage that same year. The acronym that now sits on every dungeon flyer showed up in this hierarchy, on this board, in 1991. Reid’s 3.3 million figure is for the parent group, not for bondage alone, but the bondage child group is why this page belongs on a BDSM site. In 1994 the University of Waterloo stopped carrying alt.sex.bondage, alt.sex.bestiality, alt.sex-stories, and alt.sex-stories.d after its ethics committee said the content of those groups might have violated the Canadian Criminal Code. A university news server dropping the bondage group is as much a part of the history as the 1991 coinage: the discussion existed, and institutions already wanted it off the feed.
Spamtraps and the Melissa virus
alt.sex.cancel is a newsgroup built specifically to fight spam that had been cross-posted across the whole alt.sex tree. It is a simple spamtrap: a place to collect samples of unsolicited messages so an automated anti-spam system can act on them. Under its charter, any message posted to alt.sex.cancel may be cancelled automatically. The well-known mass-mailing macro virus called Melissa was first distributed through the alt.sex newsgroup. It was hidden inside a list that claimed to hold passwords to pornographic websites. The messages carrying the virus went out with headers that said they had been written from the America Online account of Scott Steinmetz, username “skyroket.” Kizza reports that those headers were probably forged by Melissa’s author, David L. Smith. The board that hosted early bondage talk was also, by the late 1990s, a delivery chute for malware dressed as porn passwords — which is as 1990s as the 3.3 million readership figure itself. Reid’s 1993 Usenet readership summary, issued from the Network Measurement Project at DEC’s Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, is the source for the 3.3 million / 8 percent / 2,300-messages-a-month numbers. Furniss’s essay, “Sex with a hard (disk) on: computer bulletin boards and pornography,” ran in Wide Angle 15, no. 2 (1993): 19–37. Those two citations are how we still know how large alt.sex was, and how clearly the bondage child group sat inside it as a support channel rather than a sideshow.
