Pathetic Loser: Origin Story
Subraman
Car key and wallet dating your sister
How did SCers come to be known as PLs? Thought this is worth its own post, don't want the youngsters to lose their proud history 🤣 Every time I re-tell this story I forget more and more of it. If there are any OG ass-c'ers around who remember this, please add details or correct any mistakes.
Back in the dark ages before the world wide web, there was usenet. The way people communicated was through usenet "groups", basically simple ascii text based forums, and the first ever strip-club-oriented discussion group was alt.sex.strip-clubs aka ass-c (the alt.* domain was the domain used by everything controversial or that couldn't abide the governance of the rest of usenet). The group was US-wide but the center of gravity was SF, which at that time was arguably the best SC city in the country, with arguably the best strip club ever in the US. But I digress.
So during this time we were all trying to figure this discussion group thing out, this was back in the early to mid 1990s. The girls didn't know what to make of all this -- this was before all strippers hated "the internet guys", and there was a lot of co-mingling between strippers and the ass-c guys, who by this time had made Chez Paree (CP) in SF their HQ (the original ass-c HQ was New Century Theater). Some of the strippers and ass-c guys got close enough as a group that they'd head to Cafe Mason together for 2am breakfast after Chez Paree would close for the night, so there was quite a bit of socializing, and some strippers became known as ass-c favorites. We had an active mIRC channel, and I remember a number of strippers -- mostly from Chez Paree, but sometimes other clubs also -- would come in and join the chat.
Anyway, from memory, there was a stripper named Siren at CP who evidently had had it up to **here** with the ass-c guys, and vented her frustration in a private message to another stripper. The gist of the message was that they're all pathetic losers, but she depends on them for money so has to be nice them. This looks to have been 1996.
Plot twist: she TRIED to send a private message to another stripper. Instead, she publicly blast-o-grammed it to the ass-c usenet group, which you could post to via email. Of course we all thought it was the most hysterical thing ever, and we especially loved the "pathetic loser" appellation. It became an instant classic, and SC goers across 3 decades and lots of forums have been using that term to refer to ourselves ever since. I like to tell people we reclaimed the term "PL" just like the gay community reclaimed "queer". Makes us sound courageous :)
Back in the dark ages before the world wide web, there was usenet. The way people communicated was through usenet "groups", basically simple ascii text based forums, and the first ever strip-club-oriented discussion group was alt.sex.strip-clubs aka ass-c (the alt.* domain was the domain used by everything controversial or that couldn't abide the governance of the rest of usenet). The group was US-wide but the center of gravity was SF, which at that time was arguably the best SC city in the country, with arguably the best strip club ever in the US. But I digress.
So during this time we were all trying to figure this discussion group thing out, this was back in the early to mid 1990s. The girls didn't know what to make of all this -- this was before all strippers hated "the internet guys", and there was a lot of co-mingling between strippers and the ass-c guys, who by this time had made Chez Paree (CP) in SF their HQ (the original ass-c HQ was New Century Theater). Some of the strippers and ass-c guys got close enough as a group that they'd head to Cafe Mason together for 2am breakfast after Chez Paree would close for the night, so there was quite a bit of socializing, and some strippers became known as ass-c favorites. We had an active mIRC channel, and I remember a number of strippers -- mostly from Chez Paree, but sometimes other clubs also -- would come in and join the chat.
Anyway, from memory, there was a stripper named Siren at CP who evidently had had it up to **here** with the ass-c guys, and vented her frustration in a private message to another stripper. The gist of the message was that they're all pathetic losers, but she depends on them for money so has to be nice them. This looks to have been 1996.
Plot twist: she TRIED to send a private message to another stripper. Instead, she publicly blast-o-grammed it to the ass-c usenet group, which you could post to via email. Of course we all thought it was the most hysterical thing ever, and we especially loved the "pathetic loser" appellation. It became an instant classic, and SC goers across 3 decades and lots of forums have been using that term to refer to ourselves ever since. I like to tell people we reclaimed the term "PL" just like the gay community reclaimed "queer". Makes us sound courageous :)
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5 comments
A lot of usenet was echoed to the echos (so maybe that's where the name came from), including a lot of the spicier alt.* stuff. I didn't realize until after I moved here and found SCL and TUSCL, and having clubbed for 15-ish years before that without any online help, that usenet even had such.