"It Was Twenty Years Ago....."

[fitzjameshorse]

It was 20 years ago today....Sgt Pepper.....no it was 9th August 1998 that I took delivery of my first computer. The Internet and going online in those days was highly expensive and cost a lot of frictin between my wife and me. The thing is that it changed my life...in the same years I started some therapy and the combination of counselling and the

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[fitzjameshorse]

Before I got online, I heard someone on TV explaining this "Internet" as a giant library but all the pages from books were scattered all over the place.
Certainly when I got online, it changed my life. I had confidence and discovered that people liked me...there was no physicality. I was just this funny and intelligent person. Even in the early days of AOL chat rooms such as the Irish and Irish_American hang out "Galway Bay", I had the reputation of being the nice guy, the philosopher who protected the women from cyber sex etc.
I also discovered that some of the women who I befriended were submissive by nature which in a way was dangerous for them. But I was able to talk to some who had partly been in that lifestyle or who understood it. And I was able to come to terms with my own "dominant" fantasies.
I don't think that I ever hurt or exploited anyone but certainly there was some shananigans. But basically I a proud of it.
The dynamic progressively (say) ten years ago was that I was a wise old man who was trusted by some women who were younger than me...........maybe a mentor relationship which I am actually good at. It is the area of my life of which I am most proud.
Those relationships were a sacred thing, even if cyber-spanking might be considerd inappropriate.
As those people have moved on, then I am happy for them but saddened for myself.
I have tried FetLife on maybe four occasions but never made more than seven friends over all that time. It is to me the darker side of the Internet and it does not suit me at all. It is not who I am.
I had no real life friends of course but I never liked co workers saying that the Internet was not real life. I always take the view that it is VERY real and that it is an extension of LIFE...not an "alternative" to life.
The other liberating factory was the discovery that I was not so weird...not just in terms of being a wannabe "dominant" but also in terms of hobbies and writing and vivid imagination.
The downside is that the Internet has not helped us in political terms. It has created a world where opinions are more valid than Facts.

[greeneyedsadie]

After I left Mal, who I was with for 5 years and lived together (it was like a marriage), I was manic for a long time due to a medication I was taking, and I had lots of sex with a lot of different men, and I tried kink and discovered that I loved being tied up and flogged, but I hated being a "sub" as I did not like being submissive and the doms saying nasty things to me and being dominant in an asshole way, so I discovered I was a "power bottom" and Doms don't really like those so I gave up when I couldn't find someone who would tie me up and whip me and fuck me and have fun with it and not be so serious.

This was over a decade ago. Last year I finally took my bag of bondage gear out from under my bed and took it to a dumpster in town and got rid of it. I didn't want to die and have my parents find it. So that was cathartic, actually.

When I was 21 and got the internet, I was an overweight loner nerd who had been celibate 3 years, and first AOL chat and then IRC after I got rid of AOL (after the first $600 bill, we switched to an unlimited ISP) and I LOVED the chat rooms and the relationships made there and like you, I now had friends and was considered witty and funny and attractive for my brain, and people got past my weight, and it was so freeing, so I totally get it.