Effects of Usenet on Discussions of Sexual Assault in the BDSM Community in the 1990s

Abstract

Unequal roles in sexual and erotic practice are sometimes thought of as inherently abusive, especially to women. Although informed consent between adults is a mainstay of BDSM— bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadomasochism—its practitioners have had to fight accusations to the contrary. Though BDSM practices are generally consensual, assault undoubtedly occurs within the BDSM community. This paper focuses on how the idea of assault has been handled by BDSM community members; how survivors and perpetrators have been treated, how assault and consent have been defined, and how communities have approached preventing future assaults. In order to explore these issues, this paper historicizes the issue of rape in the BDSM community by examining academic and activist writing from BDSM focused community organizations and online forums throughout the 1990s. The growth in participation in online BDSM communities had a huge impact on social violence awareness within these communities. Community books, newsletters and conference materials from the 1980s suggest that prior to the existence of groups such as alt.sex.bondage on Usenet, nearly all conversations around rape and BDSM came from a subset of the feminist community (particularly kink organizations focused on queer women) interested in proving the consensual nature of BDSM practices. In the 1990s, for BDSM practitioners who were able to access the Internet, forums such as Usenet provided a new opportunity for anonymous and safer spaces in which to process and discuss assault within the community. Specifically, the alt.sex.bondage newsgroup was home to some of the first documented conversations about trigger warnings, BDSM specific anti-domestic violence resources, and community wide conversations about the existence of rape and abuse in BDSM. This paper will document the evolution of these conversations from the advent of BDSM specific newsgroups on Usenet through the late 1990s.