This post is part of a new series about the history of kink online.
If you’ve spent enough time hanging out on the Internet as a bored feminist kinkster, chances are somewhat high, you’ve seen some iteration of this Domestic Violence in the S/M Community educational post. It is somewhat timeless looking, and nearly always appears on websites that look like they haven’t been updated since before geocities became uncool.
In fact, as some editions of this document note, it was written by a certain Jan Hall, for a kinky event/conference called the International Celebration in the mid 90s. Many contemporary kink magazine quoted portions of this document during a brief “let’s all public about rape in the kink scene” frenzy in the late 90s.
While it is not clear how it wound up online, it eventually wound up on Usenet, and dozen, if not hundreds, of sites have cribbed it’s language. Jan Hall did not write it for the Internet, but they did invite it’s re-use, and that is certainly what happened. Not only is it seemingly the #1 document for anti-abuse S/M education online, as recently as 2009 (15 years after it was originally written!) it was being re-posted, mostly unaltered.
Also interesting: Whole segments of this document used to be included in Usenet FAQ’s for kinky newsgroups.