If you have a sick, perverted mind and also like to share, there's a place for you.
It's called the Internet, which is, among other things, a message board located somewhere in cyberspace. It's easy to locate. All you need is a computer with a modem.
You can, of course, find anything on the Net -- as the cognoscenti call it. You can find competing recipes for vegetable soup. You can find instructions for how to build a bomb in your backyard.
Politics is a hot topic. But it's sex, of course, that puts people in the seats.
I took a trip on the Net the other day. It was my first time. Believe me, you always remember your first time.
My trip was prompted by a news story about a particularly sick dude who's now in jail for posting a story on a message board called alt.sex.stories about -- and this is typical of the genre -- raping, torturing and killing a fellow student at the University of Michigan.
Jake Baker made his mistake by putting the victim's real-life name in the story. Also by using his own name (most authors are anonymous). Baker's victim was in his Japanese class. He'd never met her, he said. He just liked the sound of her name, which is being withheld.
Maybe he liked more than that.
In a message discussing the story with a computer reader, he would say: "Torture is foreplay, rape is romance, snuff [killing] is climax." In computer correspondence with a guy from Ontario, he said: "Just thinking about it any more doesn't do the trick. I need to do it."
A sick, but basically harmless, fantasy?
Possibly. That's certainly his lawyer's contention.
A threat on somebody's life?
That's what they thought at the University of Michigan, which suspended the 20-year-old sophomore. That's what the feds thought, too. They arrested Baker for interstate transmission of a threat to injure. You can do five years for that.
How Baker got caught is a story for our time. A Michigan alumnus, signed on from Moscow (the one in Russia), contacted the school after reading Baker's little love story on alt.sex.stories. The school contacted the FBI.
Baker's lawyer says it's all a mistake, that his client suffers from nothing more dangerous than an active imagination. Of course, what is more dangerous than an active imagination? Usually, though, imagining is not against the law.
The lawyer points out that you should know what you're getting when you read alt.sex.stories, which is badly written stories on topics that would give Henry Miller pause. Like fantasy stories about raping boys. And a 15-year-old and his 8-year-old sister. There's one called "Mom's Panties." There's also, God help us, an audience.
As a preface to the stories, the authors always provide a cautionary note. On top of Baker's story was the warning that what you were about to read was "pretty sick stuff." And you can't argue with that, since the story ends with the victim tied to a chair and a guy lighting a match.
The warning on a story called "Perils of Batgirl II" begins, "This story contains as much bondage, lesbianism and fetishism as I ** could possibly fit in . . . If any of this offends you, please DON'T READ IT."
As I was scrolling, I saw how the Net worked, at least the alt.sex.stories part of it. There are stories, most of which make the Penthouse Forum read like "Little Women." Actually, there are a number of missives relating to little women. Then there are computer round tables discussing these literary works.
One critic of a story about pedophilia -- a common topic -- wrote that he was "pretty sick" of this stuff and that it makes him "fear for my daughter."
This criticism was not greeted exactly warmly. The writer was ripped by people from as far away as New Zealand.
"Maybe we can get you to kill yourself," one man wrote.
Yep, it's a high-class group, all right. The tone reminds me of talk radio.
Actually, the Net is talk-radio plus. It's even more anonymous. The topics are even more varied. And people are even more bold.
Where does that leave Jake Baker? He didn't actually threaten anyone directly. The woman he named didn't even know he existed. He used her name in a story. Maybe he is a time bomb, as the prosecutors say. But has he done anything to this point that ought to put him away for five years?
There is room for discussion. And, of course, you can discuss it on the Net.