That Time I Was A Woman On The Internet

So, I’m going to do something I may very well end up regretting, but as a fire elemental, I suppose it’s only fitting I set my “career” aflame at some point. No time like the present, I suppose.

As I was putting together my Recommendations list, there’s one name I held off placing there. Long time readers on the Orgasm Denial forums may recall a certain female author who wrote stories of supernatural femdom quite similar to my own. One could even say she created the first true Sex Mage style character; Pancake even cited her as his other inspiration for his first Sex Powers story. This woman likewise mysteriously up and vanished right around the time I started posting on the OD forums. If you’re familiar with her work, then you probably have already guessed my confession: I was her.

I was Magic Lina.

To everyone this angers and hurts, I’m sorry. I really am. I regret ever taking on the persona, I regret tricking people, and I regret keeping it a secret for this long. I want you to know that nothing I did as Lina was with malicious intent or out of some perverse pleasure at using people. I did not enjoy tricking others and leading people on. I lied about my gender, but everything else I said was sincere, be it genuine thoughts and feelings on a subject, or just being a goofball to entertain people. I know that’s probably pretty disingenuous sounding after such a revelation, but it’s the truth, for whatever my word is worth right now.

So why did I do it? Lack of confidence, plain and simple. At the time I first posted any erotic work online, I was only eighteen and had little exposure to the sheer depths of perversion that existed on the internet. I genuinely thought my fantasies of super powered women dominating me with said powers would be received as too weird, and put off a lot of people. I wanted my work to be seen, but I was afraid I would be rejected, and I was too ignorant to know how to seek out better solutions.

However, at time, I was already into femdom and had recently gotten into orgasm denial. This led me to some early femdom and orgasm control communities, like NTCWeb and the Orgasm Denial forums. I thought that if I posted as a woman, people in those communities would not only be much more eager to read my work, but also much more likely to give it a chance, even if the premise initially turned them off.

There was also a small part of me that figured pretending to be a woman online might give me some better perspective on how to write a dominant female character. I don’t know that it ever did, but what I did end up doing is turning my female persona into a character in her own right, and I found myself playing that role on the forums as a means of promoting my work.

I ended up doing this twice over: my first online erotic identity was as SilkenBunny, first on the NTCWeb forums in 2000, then on OD later that same year. I switched over to LinaInverse after one of OD’s many site hacks jacked up my SilkenBunny account, and I stuck with the Lina identity for a couple years. Then I disappeared for a while, came back briefly as a man called Peniswithoutacause, but disappeared again. Both disappearances were due to frequent moving and losing home-based internet access, as I did many times in the early 2000s.

Then, in 2008, I eventually came back to OD for the long haul. I had actually intended to return as Peniswithoutacause, but once again, site problems had screwed things up; that account apparently got erased, and for some reason, I was having trouble making a new account. Likewise, the SilkenBunny account still didn’t work. However, the LinaInverse account was still active and accessible, so I just said fuck it, and logged back in as her.

Then I started talking to people again, and just fell back into the role. Perhaps because I knew Lina/Bunny already had an audience, I suppose I convinced myself it would be better to keep writing as her and promote my work through her forum character. I decided to write “Magic Lina” as the main character of several supernatural erotic stories, and I kept playing the character on the forums. This time, I really went all in on the magic theme, definitely roleplaying a more fantastic version of the character this time, but I still maintained that I was also a woman in real life.

And then I started making friends and getting a little too close again, and I felt disgusted at myself for having fallen back onto the crutch of being Lina. I did not enjoy deceiving people like this, I wanted to be able to just be myself, and I hated having to keep up the mask. I was ready to just out myself, for better or worse, and publicly switch identities back to man. However, around this time, a big scandal arose as the OD community had recently discovered several of the dommes were either duplicate accounts from women pretending to be different people, or more egregiously, men pretending to be women. This latter discovery had a good amount of the community quite furious, and a couple of the people I befriended as Lina made it clear they would be very hurt if they discovered I’d been lying to them about being a woman.

I didn’t want to hurt them and I didn’t want to cause more problems for the community. But mostly, I was being selfish: I didn’t want to be shut out by the OD community. OD was the first real online community I was ever a part of, it was a place where my crazy sex story ideas were accepted, and I didn’t want to lose either. So, I quietly “retired” Lina, waited a few weeks, and then created my current identity as Salamando, pretending to be a new member. Now, eight years later, here we are.

I’ve debated outing myself before, but fear of the backlash kept me silent, especially as I started building an audience through my new line of stories as Salamando. However, it’s been a long time since I last took the role of Magic Lina. I could probably keep the lie going forever, and just let Lina fade to nothingness. For one thing, most of my newer readers probably don’t know who Lina was, nor are likely to care that much if they weren’t around when I was posting as her. Even on OD, nobody talks about her, no one ever called me out on how similar the two of “us” were, plenty of the community from back then aren’t even around anymore, and none of Lina’s old contacts have ever tried to reconnect with her since I stopped playing the role. Plenty apparently suspected that Lina was a guy, but no one made the connection between her and me, or at least no one called me out on it, which to this day I’m a little surprised about; I rather figured it obvious, given our identical interests and posting styles. So, I could likely have gotten away with my deception scot-free.

So what’s the point of even bringing it up? Well, aside from wanting to make this belated apology for a while now, there is also admittedly an ego motivation behind this. Earlier this year, I decided to fully commit myself to making erotica writing my creative focus, and to make it my “second job” of sorts. I have made my own brand in the form of the Sex Mage World, Civero, and other related concepts. I have created a considerable body of work by now, and have collected as much as I can onto my blogs and story archives.

It nags me every time that there are some stories I just could not mention without giving away my old identity as Magic Lina (aka LinaInverse aka SilkenBunny). I could not even talk about my earlier erotic concepts, because I used a lot of them for stories while writing as Lina or SB. But they are my Intellectual Property. They are my stories. They were my first steps to becoming the erotic writer I am today, and to be forced to disowned them just to keep up an old, outdated lie is ridiculous and tiresome.

So that is my confession. I realize this may cost me some readers. It definitely will not go over well with the OD community and probably others. I probably deserve some chewing outs coming my way. But the past is the past, I want to move forward, and I want to do it unhindered. And I want to say again that I am sorry.