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I am a sex educator who values self-defined sexuality, privacy and freedom of speech and freedom of information about sex. I honestly believe that when people disagree with me, I learn things. I have no idea if the person I found on the AB forums is the same as the Secure Computing person. But I wanted everyone to think about just what kind of person should be in the position of deciding what they should or shouldn't be doing, seeing or learning online. Now, fun with emails, links and comments:

"Fuck you, Violet Blue."
* Thanks, Suicide Girls member.

"I think you've hit pay dirt with that Tomo Foote-Lennox. He's in St-Paul (651 A/C in his security mailing lists posts) and the 1997 posts you found were posted from a St-Paul ISP (winternet.) The odds is name is unique is good, the odd that it's unique in St-Paul are, well..."
* Interesting.

"(...) What disturbs me is that you outed this person, for having an interest inconsistent with the responsibilities of his/her job, without appearing to have done more then rely on the name popping up on alt.sex.diapers. (...) I don't know if I hope you guessed right, given that it means this person is in the wrong job, or wrong, given that it means you potentially caused an innocent person a lot of grief."
* Bringing up this topic wasn't an easy decision to make, but when I made the discovery I felt like someone else was going to find it soon, too, and draw a lot of fucked up conclusions about ABs. I wanted to explain the discovery, explain that ABs are not incestuous child molesters, and give people information as to why people find this fetish physically and emotionally rewarding. This information was going to find its way into the blogosphere one way or another; granted, if your computer is under a Secure Computing censorship umbrella you'd get the information a lot slower, but you'd also get it without the explanation of what AB's *actually* are into because this site, and all its information, is blocked by Secure Computing. I thought it brought up a very, very important set of questions in regards to who makes censorship decisions. Basically, that these decisions should be made by people who can make the distinction between breastfeeding sites or BoingBoing or holocaust history sites and hardcore porn, and can show us that the threads of their lives in direct relation to the world they affect (ours) isn't woven with the threads of hypocricy. As someone whose site is blocked by this censorware, I deserve to know that Secure Computing, and all of the decision makers and representatives, practice what they preach.

* When someon is "outed", knowledge about their personal life is disclosed without permission from private sources. All I did was type the name into Google and hit "groups". Again, it may or may not be the same person. I did not ridicule anyone; fetishes are common and range form the boring to the far-out, and no one is a "bad person" for having any kind of feitsh -- as adults, we know the difference between fantasy and reality, and even when we have fetishes that others find disturbing, it doesn't mean we want them to come true.

* But I did point out if it was possible this was the same person, then *in my opinion* I felt that their interests would be troubling in regards to their job. here's a thought experiment: In Nick Broomfield's video "Fetishes" a white female dominant and black male submissive enact a southern plantation slavery fetish. Wouldn't it feel weird if we were to discover that one of the participants worked at the NAACP and engaged in online censorship activities directed at *anything* having to do with the history of slavery, slavery discussion newsgroups or where to buy copies of Roots? And if it came up that their names matched up, and it could either be mistaken identity or not, how exactly should that be handled?

* When writing my fetish sex book, I explored a lot of AB sites, many of which contain no nudity, no porn and no "adult" content. Many of the sites look like children's sites; the only way to tell that they are for adults is to look for the signifiers "AB" and "DL". On the right is how SmartFilter sees these very adult fetish sites.

* The important thing to remember here is that for once, on the topic of what people do with their sex lives and how it works with their public/professional lives, I gave my opinion.

* And no, I am no stranger to name issues. I know plenty of women who cringe knowing that their moms will Google their names and come up with a porn star (and others who don't cringe, and their moms are proud that their daughters are sex-positive porn performers). My name is Violet Blue; in April of 2001 a porn video was released called "Extreme Teen #14", with a perfomer in it calling herself "Violet Blue". Until that point, this performer had been in 10 videos simply under the name "Violet" (starting in July 2000 with "More Dirty Debutantes #140") and in May and June of 2001 performed in two more videos under yet a different name, "Violet Lust". She has performed in burlesque and appeared on Tribe.net as "Ada Mae", and her real name is something completetly different (I have detailed legal files on this whole situation, in case you're wondering). When she first decided to appear using my *first and last name* (April 2001), I was the Editor in Chief of Necromantic.com and the Good Vibes Magazine, had three online columns about porn (since May '00) and my first porn article was published in May 1999.

* The real point of all this explanation is that if my name was Nina Hartley, I'd react differently. The woman using my name to perform in porn has gone on record in interviews that resurface around the web saying things like "we should just kill the whole Middle East", along with "...there are a lot of Mexican scum who tend to live off the government and have a bunch of babies. I don't think we should be that open to immigration from Mexico", and some non-lovely Anti-Semetic comments. She has also come under fire for her on-air radio statements about black people in porn having higher STD rates than whites, which while it may not be racist is certainly careless to say (one black porn performer was quite angry). In each case she has retracted her statements and claims (in print) that her comments were "sarcasm". Is she is a racist? Personally, I can't ever imagine anyone making jokes like the things she's said in interviews -- the idea of saying it was all a big joke makes me a little more than sick to my stomach. But it is my *professional opinion* that I should make as much of a distinction between this person and myself as possible, and to raise awareness about the situation. Until she crosses the legal lines, it's all I can do. It's the way the web is; lots of name confusion. In the meantime, some meanspirited people make fun of me for it -- Johnny Maldoro at the Village Voice on three recent occasions, for instance. So I'm not saying what I posted about Lennox's name was right or wrong (probably both); my intention was to raise awareness. It took one person (Arlo Tolesco) confusing me with the porn performer in an article and an email from me asking for a polite distinction in the piece that made Arlo and I the good friends we are today. Too bad Maldoro went the other way with it.

"Valleywag picked up diaper rash and didn't cite you as a source."
* I'm shocked -- Sausagewag didn't credit a girl as a source?! No wonder all my friends call it "the outside scoop".

"that's crazy stuff. unfortunately, most people in 1996 had no idea that someday those small online communities would be completely open to googlization. usenet used to seem so completely barren and anonymous, and now it's 2 clicks away in google! yikes! all of this makes me want to watch my steps online..."
* Seriously -- one persepctive would have us think that censorship from companies like Secure Computing is necessary because the web is like this big anonymous wild west where anyone get away with anonymous stuff, and we're learning it's really not.

But wait, there's more: read Secure Computing: Fulfilling a Wish for the Censor