alt.sex and alt.sex.bondage: The 1990s Usenet Room Where BDSM Got Typed

Before the web, Usenet newsgroups were the plumbing of online talk. alt.sex was a mass-audience board about human sexual activity, not a niche listserv. Brian Reid’s October 1993 survey put worldwide readership at about 3.3 million people — roughly 8 percent of all Usenet readers — with about 67 percent of Usenet nodes (news servers) carrying the group and traffic around 2,300 messages a month. Under that tree sat alt.sex.bondage, where a lot of early online BDSM talk actually lived. For kink-history readers this was the pre-web room: ASCII, killfiles, and the first place many people ever typed out a scene.

From Playboy-adjacent boards to the extreme set

The alt.sex tree was not one taste. It was a stack of rooms. After the parent group, the biggest child was alt.sex.stories. Others included alt.sex.pictures, alt.sex.blondes, alt.sex.bondage, alt.sex.bestiality, and alt.sex.rape. The Playboy- or Penthouse-adjacent boards — alt.sex itself plus stories, pictures, and blondes — mostly ran text and images in that neighborhood. The last three — bondage, bestiality, rape — dealt in more “extreme,” less socially accepted subjects. Joke-named groups sat alongside them: alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat, alt.sex.boredom, alt.sex.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape. By 1998 more boards aimed at smaller subcultures had appeared, usually with far less traffic than the boards about more conventional sexual behavior.

Support channel and the word BDSM

Maureen Furniss, writing about the alt.sex hierarchy in 1993, argued that sexually oriented boards worked as a kind of support group for posters, especially people whose orientations sat far outside the mainstream. For anyone without a local bar or a legal bookstore section, the newsgroup was 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 that board the same year. The acronym on dungeon flyers 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 the page belongs on a BDSM site.

Campus bans, spamtraps, and Melissa

Institutions moved in as the talk deepened. In 1994 the University of Waterloo stopped carrying alt.sex.bondage, alt.sex.bestiality, and related story groups after its ethics committee said the content might have violated the Canadian Criminal Code. A university news server dropping the bondage group is as much part of the history as the 1991 coinage: the discussion existed, and institutions already wanted it off the feed. alt.sex.cancel was built to fight spam cross-posted across the whole alt.sex tree — a spamtrap that collected unsolicited samples so automated systems could act, with a charter that allowed automatic cancellation of posts to that group. The mass-mailing macro virus Melissa was first distributed through alt.sex, hidden inside a list that claimed to hold passwords to pornographic websites. Headers said the messages came from the America Online account of Scott Steinmetz, username “skyroket”; Kizza reports 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.