On one level I am perpetually amused by the porn-company notion that a sale event at this time of year is specially appropriate. And yet, why not? Watching porn that we both like, together, has always been a fun thing that Bethie and I enjoy. And if you’re kinky — as who here at Spanking Blog is not? — there’s a lot to be said for joining Kink Unlimited. I can’t think of a kinky taste that’s not covered somewhere in their 80+ channels.
I was rummaging through my old directories the other day when I found this small trove of vintage spanking photos branded with the watermarks and branding information for the Amateur Action BBS. Amateur Action was one of the many dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS) that predated the modern internet. This one was in California, so it raised quite a stir more than 35 years ago when its owners got sent to jail by federal prosecutors in Tennessee and Utah for violating the much-more-conservative community standards in those distant states.
At one point Amateur Action had more than 25,000 porn images available for download. This may sound quaint and feeble to our modern ears. Any random porn tumblr of a few years ago, now RIP and just a memory, had more than that. Hell, you can find a lot more movies and movie clips than that on large porn sharing sites these days, and comparable numbers on any of them.
But for the times? That was an astonishing trove of digital porn. So much so that, with the consumer-grade modems then available, you’d never scratch the surface of the collection, trying to download them over the phone lines. Thus, many of the BBS of the era had a sideline in selling CD-ROM collections of their stuff through the mail. Most of those CDs were never published in volume, and are either rare or completely lost. (If you have one, I’d love to share its contents with the world! Email me, I beg you.)
The spanking photos in this post were old when I downloaded them from Usenet in (looks at file metadata) 2003. They had been, by then, been swapped around, cropped, uploaded, downloaded, stretched, touched up, sharpened, softened, and generally run through the online file-sharing wringer for at least a decade. In most cases the “originals” on offer from Amateur Action would have been clearer and sharper and possibly larger in dimension than what you see here. But not by so much as you would hope: file dimensions like 640×480 and 800×600 were considered “hi-res” in those days. 1024×768? A file that big was called “wallpaper”!
When I use the word “original” in connection with files from a porn BBS like Amateur Action, it doesn’t mean what you might think. Perhaps these BBS may have distributed “original” scans — meaning they were the ones who created the digital file from its paper-porn source — but they rarely, if ever, created their own porn by hiring models and taking new photographs. Most BBS porn was scanned, quite shamelessly, from paper porn magazines, whether new and contemporary at that time or already vintage. Mind you, all that scanning took prodigious effort: scanners were expensive, slow, and extremely finicky in operation. But it was a lot easier than making your own porn, much to the chagrin of the “real” porn publishers who were actually doing the work of making and selling original images.
If you’ve been around the spanking porn world for long enough, you may be able to identify the spanking magazines these images probably came from. Nu-West was a major publisher and a common “source” for BBS scans that had a spanking theme. But no porn magazine publishers were immune. I don’t personally recognize any of the photos in this post, but it would not shock me to have my readers start identifying magazines, shoots, and models in the comments.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this small nostalgic voyage into the early history of digital spanking porn!
This photo is from a BDSM swinger soiree at The Upper Floor. The caned blonde in the photo is identified only as “a petite little masochistic woman” but I think we all have to grant this obedient woman some props for her willingness to hold position while her thighs are caned like this:
