Nostalgic about finet.sex.

In 1994 finet.sex was an awfully amusing newsgroup. It's really too bad that Google has preserved almost no archives for it from that time.

Mostly it was full of AOLers who all declared that they are all also over 21 and they also want the video. I assume that it started with somebody promising somebody else some porn video if the recipient happens to be over 21, but I have never seen the original message, it was just an endless thread of responses of the "my name is Silly Bugger, I am also over 21, please send me the video" kind.

Besides AOLers there was a bunch of Finns who were making fun of them, sometimes in English but mostly in Finnish. AOLers sometimes wondered about being unable to read Finnish text even with rot13. At some point somebody caught on that it was a foreign language and asked Finns to stop writing in Finnish. Such request, of course, elicited a lot of richly deserved bilingual abuse, and the clueless newbie was explained certain facts of life, for example that finet.* is a Finnish hierarchy. His or her response was that finet.sex is just a sex newsgroup (I assume the wretched creature meant "english-language sex newsgroup") that got placed into a Finnish newsgroup hierarchy by mistake, which of course caused a new round of abuse.

The best moment was in the end of the year, when some unusually bright AOLer from California finally realized that it is indeed a Finnish newsgroup, and wrote an article about how much he loves Finnish women. Especially Pekka Mäkinen. IIRC he even wrote a poem about beautiful Pekka. Much hilarity ensued. After being rejected by the beautiful Pekka the AOLer decided that his second choice of a Finnish woman was me, which also amused everybody present. I thanked him for his interest and told him that I see no point in arranging for sex with a man who lives in California when there are perfectly good men right here in Helsinki, and in general Finnish men are on average the world's prettiest. He greatly praised my patriotism, which caused the next round of giggles.

That was an age of innocence. Then came the age of spam, and every newsgroup with "sex" in its name became a wasteland of advertisement.