Alt.sex.bondage

Alt.sex.bondage was created in 1989, when a moderator of alt.sex tried to create a flame-war by asking in several newsgroups for users to share their fetishist fantasies. The flaming did not work, but he received many sincere answers that he decided to create the newsgroup. The newsgroup was hosted by the University of Waterloo. On 28 December 1996, CompuServe closed 200 forums, including asb, without warning after the company was held accountable for illegal pornographic material, including child pornography, in Munich, Germany, and sentenced to use "every means available" to delete such materials. After its termination, similar forums, such as soc. and soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm (s.s.b-b) rose on popularity. ==Functionality and popularity==

One of the main functionalities of the newsgroup was the possibility of sending anonymous messages. In this case, the return address displayed would be one belonging to the forum, such as anon.penet. Another feature was the "Spivak gender", where gendered pronouns were replaced to genderless ones. ==Content==

Differently from similar newsgroups, asb was focused in specific and fetishist topics. The newsgroup was broad, and ranged from discussions about fetishism to stories, that could be minimalistic or "multipart sagas". One of the main features of asb was alt.sex.bondageFAQ, that featured the first registered discussions about topics related to BDSM. The forum was moderated by Rob Jellinghaus and many topics were translated to several languages. The translations in Portuguese were made by the website Desejo Secreto (Secret Desire). One famous topic was the so-called "Holy War", a discussion about the amount of power a S&M relationship should have. Other terms created by the users are "Total Power Exchange" and the maxim "Ugol's Law", where "to any question beginning with 'am I the only one who...?' the answer is 'no'". ==See also==