Sex Stories on the Internet

Then there's the second reason why sex story writers could face spoiled identities. The stories aren't just about sexual love, of the sort that are common even in some lines of mainstream romance novels. Because they represent sexual fantasy and are shared anonymously with strangers, there are few limits to how extreme the stories can be. People can -- and do -- include in their stories activities they would never consider undertaking in real life. Stories include romances, sexual interludes, and loving, marital sex, but they also include homosexuality, adultery, and such hot-button themes as sodomy, incest, kidnapping, rape, bondage, domination-and-submission, sadomasochism, torture, scat (feces), water-sports (urine), mind-control, bestiality, pedophilia, mutilation, and snuff -- sometimes in complex combinations.

To allow one's spouse, child or associate to know that one not only has had such a fantasy, but that one has taken the trouble to develop it into a story and post it on line, could be disastrous for the writer. This concerns not only the writer of extreme stories but -- for example -- the husband who posts stories of gay soldiers or the wife who writes lesbian romances. In either case, the revelation of this hidden side of one's partner can spoil his or her identity and ruin the relationship.

This is not just a hypothetical problem. Posters on a.s.s.d. and elsewhere have complained that their spouses have called the police to accuse them of sexual crimes, and the fact of having posted stories has been used in divorce proceedings. Being "outed" is a terror for many. One of the most famous sex-stories writers from the mid-1990s wrote that having her identity revealed was "my own very worst nightmare."

Probably the very worst outcome of sex-story writing is arrest. Americans may not consider that likely, since in the U.S. writing has substantial Constitutional (First Amendment) protection. In other countries, even ones that seem more sexually liberal than the U.S. (Canada; the U.K.) writing does not have the same explicit protection, so that, for example, stories of sex with teenagers might subject one to criminal sanctions. Still, even within the U.S. there are examples of arrests and seizures for posting sex stories on the Internet.

In 1995, Jake Baker a University of Michigan student, was arrested and prosecuted for a story on Usenet about kidnapping, raping, and murdering a woman with the same name as a UM classmate. The prosecution was ultimately dismissed by a Federal judge. In October 2005, Pittsburgh-based "Red Rose Stories," a site that specialized in pedophilia and extreme fiction, was effectively closed through seizure of the owner's equipment by the FBI. In October 2006, "Rosie" (Karen Fletcher) was charged under Federal statutes with posting obscenity on line. The outcome is undecided. Last month, Frank McCoy of Minnesota, a long-time writer (and a.s.s.m. poster) largely of pedophilia, was apparently arrested on a Federal obscenity charge, because of a complaint filed in the state of Georgia. The circumstances and outcome are unclear as I write this.

Anonymity and Sex Stories

Because of such possibilities, most people in the sex stories community work hard to protect their anonymity. The two major ways of doing this are via the adoption of pseudonyms (nyms) and the use of anonymous email addresses. Both grew along with the sex-stories movement and may be intrinsically connected to it.

Many early sex-story posts actually appeared with the writers' real names and email addresses -- usually provided by universities. People began adopting nyms to hide their identities, but a person's email still carries her address and the path by which the message came to its destination, allowing a savvy person to track the message to its source. That is, in fact, how Jake Baker was identified. To provide more anonymity, by the late 1980s people began offering anonymous posting services, or anonymous remailer. These are vendors that receive an email or post, strip away all identifying information, and re-transmit the text of the message to the intended recipient.

The most famous anonymous remailer was "anon.penet.fi," which operated out of Helsinki, Finland in the mid-1990s. The ease of running one is clear from the fact that Penet was the largest remailer in the world at that time but was run on a pre-Pentium PC. I have seen claims that most people who use remailers are part of one or another Internet sex community, but Penet's demise had nothing to do with sex. It came about because of a 1995 lawsuit by the Church of Scientology, in California, over church documents released to a Scientology discussion group. The poster had used the Penet remailer to mask his or her identity, but Finnish authorities enforced an Interpol subpoena requiring the administrator, Johan Helsingius, to release information about the person, and he then closed the site because he could not guarantee the anonymity of users.

Long-time netizens have told me about widespread speculation that the demise of Penet would mean the end of sex stories on Usenet, perhaps of Usenet itself. Obviously that did not occur. In fact, a large number of Web-based email systems that do not require either a verified name or access from a particular location have developed in the past decade (e.g., Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.). These serve hordes of posters today.

Not all sex-stories writers are concerned about release of their real-world identities, but the enterprise would probably not exist without anonymity. Recent FAQs to authors, from the a.s.s.m. moderation team, include a "special" note:

"When posting to A.S.S.M., please take care to use an email address that will neither reveal your real name nor can be tied to your real name. Many former A.S.S.M. posters email the ASSTR administration years after they originally posted a story requesting the removal of their name or the story in its entirety. While ASSTR will always gladly comply with such requests, it has no ability to get the story and associated poster's real name removed from search engines' search results. For this reason, ASSTR highly recommends that posters use a pen/pseudoname when posting to A.S.S.M.."

Playing up the Community

Following anonymity, story posters deal with the stigmatized nature of their practices by various forms of community-building. There is much talk, for example, of the writers' "community" both as a body of personal acquaintances and as authors. Though few will ever know each others' real names, locations, or sometimes even genders, posters come to be familiar and comfortable with each other, and share personal information. In some cases posters drop anonymity with one another, at least in emails. It probably will not surprise one to find that netizens' identities may be far from those of their everyday lives.

On sex-stories newsgroups and discussion sections of sex-story Web sites, birthdays, illnesses, marriages, divorces, or deaths are announced, and there is ongoing bantering. In my experience, conversation is almost never seductive. People argue over issues such as whether sex story writers in the U.S. need to worry about crackdowns by the government, or the meaning of research showing that more women are having lesbian experiences. Because people who communicate via pseudonyms tend to appear and disappear quite suddenly, there are occasional posts asking if anyone knows what has happened to X. The quality of interaction is no different from that at non-sex sites, including the occasional flame war.

One theme that marks discussion is a focus on writing. People often share lists of favorite authors or stories -- both sex stories and "mainstream" stories. There are reviews of recent stories. The most famous reviewer, "Celeste," discussed and rated thousands of stories between 1995 and 2000, after which, complaining that writers were too thin skinned and hostile, she disappeared. There are story festivals on different themes. There is an informal "Hall of Fame" at a.s.s.d. There is discussion of the nature of writing and an abiding concern with being taken seriously as a community of writers. There are awards. On the a.s.s.d. site (now moved to SOL), there are monthly and annual awards -- in various categories -- called respectively the Silver or Golden "Clitorides." There was an institutionalized forum on a.s.s.d. for reviewing and polishing stories, called "The Fish Tank." Its founder and administrator, Desdmona, has moved it to the Web, where it is modeled on mainstream story review sites like Francis Ford Coppola's "Zoetrope." There are other review sites as well.

Despite all the risks, privately-written and posted sex-stories flourish in a large corner of cyberspace. The moment it became possible to write and post their fantasies, a large number of people rushed to do it, and the flood has grown over the years. Sex stories aren't the only sorts of stories posted on-line. Every genre is represented in cyberspace -- though all of them seem to have big dollops of raunch. It must have been that there was a vast reservoir that only needed tapping, that once released is hard -- impossible? -- to stop. We're riding the wave at this moment.

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[NOTE: On request I will provide links to all posts and Web addresses that are mentioned in the essay]