"Perverts Have No Sense Of Humor!" (And Other Lessons From '90s Trolling)
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
My '90s Kinknet trolling exposed the gap between Boomer/Xer resilience and the fragile "snowflake" culture we accidentally created.
My last attempt at online trolling was in the ‘90s. Nerds like me and my then-partner hung out on local BBS’s before we knew the Internet had been invented. Jerry and I trolled a sexual fetish discussion group, provided by our sysop friend Chris. I subscribed to a full feed of adult groups solely for the Pagan/Wiccan discussions, which occasionally veered into sexual discussions about the Great Rite, Tantric sex, and whether the Clan of the Cave Bear novels had the right idea about adults initiating adolescent virgins of both sexes into the Rites of Love.
I found myself fascinated, nevertheless, with the off-Pagan kinkazoids.
I’d venture into a particularly kinky area (Sadomasochism, Spanking, Water Sports, etc.) and nearly fall out of the chair laughing. I mean what else can you do when reading about people who fantasize they’re ponies? Or men who fancied themselves ‘adult babies’, which seemed sad and sick, in a certain way, but it was also—hilarious.
One bored afternoon I played a joke on the Bondage & Discpline group.
You people are all a bunch of perverts! You should all pray to Jesus Christ to heal you of your sins, if you spent as much time reading the Bible as you do fantasizing about your sick pleasures, you would be much better off! Repent now, sinner, before it’s too late, for the day of Judgment is at hand!
Signed, The Puritan
I didn’t get any responses, so I assumed they’d ignored me. A few days later, I realized I’d posted as ‘The Puritan’, whereas primitive BBS comment notifications came only to one’s established account name. I would have to return to the group.
Holy handcuffs, Batman! The echo had gone positively unchained.
The Puritan was all they could talk about. The regulars, when they weren’t analyzing why they were “doms” or “subs”, were having a field day. Some were offended, and responded indignantly to my intolerance. Others fantasized about what they’d like to do to ‘The Puritan’ if they got hold of ‘him’ at one of their parties—which involved tying him up with his pants down to his ankles and humiliating him or performing certain sexual acts. A perceptive few remarked, “Does anyone else get the feeling that someone’s just yanking our chain?”
(Yes, and if it’s attached to your John Thomas you’re probably enjoying it!)
Jerry, my then-partner, came home to find me in hysterics, and I showed him what I’d done. He also found it risible. But I’d begun feeling a little guilty—some of these people were really offended, and I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone.
So I posted a half-assed apology.
Hi everyone, this is The Puritan. I’ve gotten a lot of laughs out of your responses to my message about finding Jesus. It occurred to me that maybe I owed some of you an apology because you were really offended. (But not to those of you who enjoyed it <g>)
I am neither male nor Christian. Although I can’t see the point to B&D myself, I really don’t have a problem with whatever people do in the privacy of their own homes.
Still, I can’t feel entirely sorry for what I did. Some of you recognized it for the troll it was, some were obviously upset and I’m sorry. But admit it, some of you got some GREAT fantasy material out of this. I read what you wanted to do to “this guy” at your parties, or if you could get him alone. So enjoy, enjoy!
This is my last message here. I won’t bother you anymore. So let The Games begin again…<g>
Because Jerry worked the second shift at a newspaper, he didn’t look again until the next morning, after I’d left for work. He called me later.
“You are ALL they’re talking about here,” he said.
“Again? Why? I apologized,” I said.
“Well, I think it has to do with my message.”
Oh no.
“What did you do?”
“I posted a rant signed, ‘The Puritan’s Boyfriend.’”
When I got home, I read his lengthier addendum to my apology, responding to the blowback with, “I enjoyed watching my girlfriend have a go at you folks, but we promise not to do it again.
Because what we learned from this is that perverts have no sense of humor.”
“Jerry, I can’t believe you did this. Just when I thought I’d ended it!”
The moderator had just returned from vacation. She was obviously a “dom”—she ordered everyone, in flaming Nazi prose, to cease responding to any more of the Puritan posts immediately, under penalty of torture, or maybe in their cases no torture. She was livid—she insisted she was not only going get my BBS account cancelled, but also my provider’s access to Kinknet.
Now I was scared. I’d never meant to get Chris involved.
I called him. “I did something bad,” I said in a small voice.
“What did you do?”
“Well, um, I wanted to play a little joke on some of the folks in Kinknet, so I posted a Christian-style flame calling myself The Puritan, urging everyone to give up their sinful lifestyles and find Jesus.”
He laughed. “And?”
“Well, the whole group went bugshit, so I posted an apology, and promised not to do it again.”
“And?”
“Well, I didn’t know Jerry was going to do this, but he posted a message signed ‘The Puritan’s Boyfriend,’ saying, among other things, that ‘perverts have no sense of humor’. The moderator has gone totally ballistic. She said she was going to get my BBS account pulled—“
Chris was laughing at this point. “Don’t worry, I won’t cancel your account.”
“What’s going on?” his wife asked in the background.
“Oh, You-Know-Who posted a joke message on some Kinknet group and everyone went bananas.”
“But wait, there’s more! She’s says she’s going to get your Kinknet access pulled and make sure you never get it back! Chris, I’m really sorry, I never meant to cause you any trouble! It was just a little joke!”
Chris laughed again. “Oh, don’t worry, whoever she is, she doesn’t have that power. The most she can do is complain, I can handle it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Just don’t do it again. Mia’s looking through it now, giggling.”
We found out months later the moderator of the B&D conference was more talk than action, from Thomas, Jerry’s and my on-line acquaintance. She was a middle-aged woman from Long Island who ran a kinky sex toys distribution business. He remembered the Puritan fiasco—he was one of the members, apparently—and laughed to learn it was Jerry and I behind it.
From 90s BBS Freedom to Modern Cancel Culture
It’s hard to imagine today how seemingly Wild Wild West democratic free speech was thirty years ago.
Just imagine being able to say what was on your mind, without consequence until it was really crazy.
A group of mildly pissed-off fetishists expressed anger at someone who logged in and took a verbal dump on their playground. Ultimately, they moved on because not only did shitty people happen, but more importantly, it truly wasn’t a big deal. Their B&D forum was a safeish space for those with a particular pleasure to share with others, but it wasn’t a gated community. It existed in the Real World. There was no expectation that they would be, or had a right to, a bubble that protected them from alternative views.
I doubt I was the first ‘Christian’ to upset their apple cart, but possibly the only fake one.
I left, Jerry left, and maybe Chris emailed the dom lady and promised her it wouldn’t happen again. Everyone moved on.
Now, what would happen today?
You can troll all you want—viciously—but all one needs to do to ruin one’s own life is stating plain facts challenging someone’s self-constructed reality. The blustering descendants of the sex toy distribution dom rule the Internet today, but with a power she could only dream of to destroy others for refusing to validate a personal delusion, or a contrary opinion, like whether Blacks are living with oppressive, 24x7 racism every day.
Left-wing college campus cultures deplatform, cancel, issue the ‘heckler’s veto’, dox, swat, and swat down alternative opinions that challenge their narrow little pseudoreality. But evangelical Christian colleges decree and enforce their own strict boundaries, too, and have for decades. Thou shalt not speak in favor of premarital sex or the legitimacy of the homosexual lifestyle, or criticize campus leadership, or say bad things about a President they favor.
They stand on somewhat firmer First Amendment grounds on freedom-of-religion, as the whole point to attending a Christian university is to receive the perpetuation of a particular theological ideology which also sets limits on critical thinking.
Hillsdale College in Michigan, a non-sectarian Christian classical liberal arts college, sounds awfully ‘woke’: It bans ‘offensive’, ‘abusive’, or ‘disparaging’ speech on social media, websites, private email, even private texts. All while proclaiming an alleged commitment to civil and religious liberty.
Heterodox thinking is heretical thinking for the small- and petty-minded, worthy of social media crucifixion or explusion. And yet: It’s okay to abuse others or engage in ‘hate speech’ if it’s for a ‘good cause’. Abusive transactivists and antisemites applaud or ignore crimes against others as long as the perpetrators are not-white, not-Jewish, or not-heterosexual. Especially if they attack the ‘right’ sort of person, or are super-hot.
The Internet’s thought police attack protected speech while approving of and normalizing actual hate speech.
The even richer irony is that we Xers and tail-end Boomers are the culprits.
During the Golden Age of local BBS’s, we X’ers were jumping online between diapering Millennial bottoms and schlepping preschoolers to playdates. We raised the ‘Self-Esteem Generation’ who believed every thought they had was Marcus Aurelius-level and every desire demanded fulfillment. They really did get participation trophies.
While we championed free speech, we raised the thinnest-skinned people in the world to grow up and impose their authoritarian viewpoints on the rest of us, having successfully occupied and usurped our major institutions. And it’s not just the kids anymore; on the other side, ironically, we elected the thinnest-skinned human in America to the highest public office who imposes his own endless tantrums over minor slights challenging his own blinkered reality.
In mid-May, moral psychologist and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation I’m always going on about and terrorizing subway riders with, gave a commencement speech at New York University encouraging students to take control of their own attention, to think for themselves, to turn off their phone notifications, to accept and talk to other people who may not share their values, or feel differently about positions or policies.
Instead, he counseled, spend more time on human, face-to-face relationships.
You’d have thought he’d called for nuking the Gazans.
Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!).
The future of America, at least at that graduation ceremony, booed him before he uttered a single word, complained his views didn’t align with their values, expressed frustration and ‘disgust’ with his appearance, and complained in the campus newspaper.
“It feels like Jonathan Haidt is meant to scold the student body and belittle them,” complained one graduating whiner in an op-ed. The student government similarly waah-waahed to the university in a letter bemoaning their speaker choice.
They’d never consumed anything other than ideological pablum for their entire lives and they resented being asked to think for themselves now on Graduation Day.
They proved Haidt’s point, Q.E.D.
In the 1990s, the kinks mostly laughed off a joke and moved on. They actually did a sense of humor after all, but in the process they raised their own constipated, humophobic Puritans who didn’t.
It would be unfair to blame either them, or even Gen X, for the state of affairs today. Even seasoned adults now yell and throw tantrums if they encounter a position they don’t like. Our President is a snowflake. But he reflects everything wrong with both sides. And all of us.
What are we going to do about it?
Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!
Comments