The Cutprice Guignol

Please note that this article contains explicit discussion of BDSM practices, body modification, sexual abuse, and domestic abuse.

On December 1st, 2003, Delia Day published her final post on to her LiveJournal blog; the post, entitled “Locked Up Tight”, described what had become, to regular blog readers, a routine encounter with Day’s sexually dominant partner:

“He briskly marched passed me, ducking into the bedroom, then came right back out. I thought he must have been going to get something, and I was right but never could have guessed what he was getting or why when he commanded in that voice that begs immediate compliance like a drill sergeant, “Stand up and drop your pants.” I stood up then I saw the big brass padlock in his hand.”

The post then went on to describe how her owner inserted several brass barbells through holes in her labia, weighing several ounces: Day muses that her owner intends to leave the weights on for a long time, revelling in “a thrill from the inconvenience” he’s causing her with the intrusive piercings.

By 2am the next day, on the morning of 2nd December 2003, the man known as her owner would be dead, killed by a shotgun blast to the chest, and the shocking truth behind the fetish fantasy on Delia Day’s blog would unfurl in the following decade.

Delia Day was the pseudonym of Susan Anton, a woman from Choctaw County, Oklahoma, an artist, wife, and mother to two children. The Delia Day identity was initially created for Anton to share her self-portraiture on her site, Ideal Delia, in the mid-1990s – striking images that explored themes of bondage, restraint, and control in a less fetishistic and more artistic fashion.

But the name “Delia Day” would go on to gain a cult following in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Day, along with her unnamed “owner”, would start the website My Illustrated Life as a Sex Slave, combining her previous artistic endeavours with her real-life experiences as a submissive slave to her partner. While the pair had initially explored online BDSM content with an earlier site, Jussive, it was My Illustrated Life as a Sex Slave that would throw them into niche fame in that corner of the internet.

Behind a flurry of disclaimers and a paywall, the site laid out its premise, above several pictures of Delia herself: “I am a female sex slave. This web site [sic] is a documentary work of my life as an owned sex slave…This is not a porn site. This is real.”

The site combined graphic images of Day’s sexual submission to her partner, with articles musing on the functionality, politics, and meaning behind her titular Life as a Sex Slave. While much of the original site has been lost to the annals of the internet, some of the accompanying LiveJournal blog, named Delia Day, still survives – and makes for some shocking reading, even by the standards of the Wild West of the early-ish internet.

Day describes and depicts in detail the sadistic submission her husband – or owner, as she refers to him – inflicts on her over the course of their relationship. Though Day initially described being relatively independent at the beginning of their relationship, she likens her owners eventual domination of her to a country losing a war: “One side loses. I lost. I went as willingly as Germany or Japan…There isn’t anything natural or easy about loosing [sic].  It’s humbling when one is forced to admit that there is a superior force that cannot be over come [sic]. I’m not talking the little play pretend “ooh, tie me up” bedroom scene either. This is not make-believe, this is painful stuff, the stuff of armistices, prison camps, and nervous breakdowns”. However unwillingly she went into this dynamic, according to her blog, it was one she grew to value, and their marriage was built around a dedicated dominant-submissive dynamic, with her owner holding complete power over Day, and often using that to explore more taboo fetishes.

This includes, though was not limited to, branding, cutting, scarring, and piercing; in one post, she describes being bound with plastic wrap as she spent hours on the edge of “a claustrophobic panic attack”. In another, she goes into the stress of having her face covered in clothespins, while “THEY FUCKING HURT SO BAD you’re spasming just this side of a psychotic episode”. For their tenth wedding anniversary, in September of 2003, her owner instructed Delia to get a tattoo of a binding around her neck, “a permanent collar that clothes just won’t hide”. As part of her submission to him, she regularly discussed how she shaved her head, taking a razor to her scalp as part of her morning routine under his instruction. At one point, he threatened her with the removal of her clitoris, much to her distress.

While Day went into great detail in her writing on the acts she and her owner engaged in, it’s worth noting that this was not just an erotic fantasy – behind a paywall on her MILAASS blog, uncensored photographs accompanied her stories, verifying everything from her genital piercings and weights to bloodied marks and brands all over her body.

While the early internet BDSM scene was still taking shape as My Illustrated Life as a Sex Slave took off, Delia Day and her husband soon became mainstays in the niche; they contributed to the Body Modification Ezine, an online magazine dedicated to the eroticism of body modification, such as Day’s piercings and branding. Day often shared gushing fanmail on the LiveJournal page, from readers fascinated by their lifestyle and glad to find less polished and more naturalistic depictions of extreme BDSM lifestyle play. Comments on the LiveJournal lavished them with attention, holding them up as proto-#couplegoals – in November 2003, just a month before the final post, a commenter wished them “many many more years of accepting each other so thoroughly and having lovely painful intense experiences together :-)”. Interviews with Day – conducted via email – explored her relationship and the impact of her popular website of the community at large. In one post, Day remarks on the amount of daily visitors her Sex Slave site is receiving, listing around 30,000 as a fairly standard number.

And, through all of this, Day insisted that she was entirely consenting to their dynamic. “I don’t think he’s cruel and uncaring to do those things for me… I would think he was cruel and uncaring to not do them”, she mused in one of her last posts on her LiveJournal. She consistently wrote adoringly about her owner – “It would actually be hard for me to imagine anyone with more self-awareness and self-comfort than him. He exudes calm tranquility [sic] and stability. He is the most well rounded, emotionally well adjusted, and nice person I’ve ever known”. Though she described having to ask permission from Travis to do everything from crossing the road to going to the bathroom, she indicated that their life was a happy one – and that, outside of their intimate activities, their family (including their two young children) and friends knew little of their dynamic.

In the weeks leading up to the final post, nothing seemed amiss on the Delia Day page. She described getting her collar tattoo for their anniversary, and implored readers to “Hit me, hurt me, use me, abuse me, call me Edna, even. I won’t take it personally, will likely enjoy it. That’s me”.

One post, though, did stand out – entitled Annie Oakley, the blog recounts an aggressive encounter her owner had with a nearby neighbour, leading to her owner insisting on giving her shooting lessons, in case she needed to defend herself in future. Though Day initially started out with a revolver, she found that difficult to use, and learned to shoot with a shotgun instead, which she thoroughly enjoyed – “a breeze to load,” she remarked “and I liked the cha-chunk of the pump action”.

In the evening of December 2nd, 2003, Day published her last post, Locked Up Tight. She described a relatively standard interaction between her and her owner, as he applied weights to her labia and genitals, making walking “all but impossible”. Day bemoaned that she couldn’t post pictures on her public LiveJournal page, due to censorship issues, and signed off.

Silence followed. The blog and the accompanying MILAASS site were not updated, after years of consistent content. After more than three months, an explanation for her sudden vanishing surfaced – one that the community around her could never have imagined.

Seat of the Revolution, a site that had covered Delia’s work and life before (even publishing an interview they conducted with her via email), published a thread in March 2004 that shared an article from the Chocktaw Plaindealer, a newspaper local to Delia:

“Marital discord may have caused the violent death of Travis M. Anton, 33, of French Camp Tuesday, Dec. 2 around 2 a.m.

Travis Anton was shot in the chest with a shotgun at his home in the French Camp Community. His wife, Susan F. Anton, of French Camp has been charged with murder in her husband’s death.

Susan Anton was jailed with her bond set at $10,000. Susan Anton is presently out on bond as her initial appearance in court is upcoming.”

Furore rose over whether Susan Anton was truly Delia Day and if Travis was the owner referred to in her blog, but it was soon deduced that the Delia Day site was registered to Travis Anton; it seemed almost certain that the prolific author of this extreme fetish content was the woman described in this article.

Travis Anton, who was thirty-three at the time of his passing, was self-employed, the owner of Box Top Software Company, and was survived by three children, two from his marriage with Susan, and one from a previous relationship. And he was, by all accounts, Susan’s owner, featuring in much of the erotic content shared to the Delia Day account.

According to the article, Anton was the one who had called in the shooting to the local authorities; after she was taken to a nearby hospital, she was arrested, and promptly charged with the murder of her husband.

Following the exact chain of events that followed Anton’s arrest and bail is difficult – though it seems as though the story would have attracted a lot of attention due to the scandalous nature of the Delia Day persona, what remains online is mostly limited to forum discussions and emails exchanged with local journalists. From my research, the story I could piece together was that, by the end of 2004, a Grand Jury declined to indict Susan Anton for the murder of her husband Travis, deciding that she had acted in self-defence, leaving her to walk free.

Delia Day’s My Illustrated Life as a Sex Slave blog swiftly vanished from the internet, leaving a dedicated following baffled by what had happened to lead to Travis Anton’s death – and whether her involvement in the BDSM lifestyle they’d been a part of had been as consensual as Delia Day had claimed.

The story became something of a piece of internet folklore in the years following the death of Travis Anton, with much speculation surrounding the truth of their relationship, and many forum discussions and blogs being dedicated to the subject. One of these blog posts, by a creator who went by the name Noelle, speculated that Travis Anton may have been the one behind the Delia Day persona – and, after nearly ten years, Susan Anton re-appeared to comment on the story.

In 2013, she left a comment on a blog post by Noelle, in which she seemed to confirm that Noelle’s conclusions about the Delia Day blog were accurate – “you are correct in coming to these conclusions you theorize. Foremost, I’ve kept wondering if anyone would notice that Delia’s writing was not mine as sofar [sic] only the Choctaw County Sherriff’s office in possession of all the evidence, including computers, seemed to realize this”. This revelation lent credence to a long-shared theory amongst those interested in the case – that Travis, the “owner”, had been the one behind the Delia Day blog all along.

Later that same year, Susan Anton started a new blog, invisibl3survivor (since removed from the internet) and, in February, began to post there. Amongst these posts were new and previously unseen photos of the woman who had been known as Delia Day, displaying the collar tattoo she had received shortly before Travis’ death, confirming that it was really her. In these posts, Anton revealed her side of the story regarding the Delia Day persona – a name that she said had been “usurped” by her then-husband for use in creating the persona of a willing sex slave:

“I did live for several years being told that I was a “worthless slave” and treated as such under the guise of “the lifestyle”, but I never wrote in any LiveJournal or did any interviews. There were no “safe words” for me to use, and Travis left me no choice to leave our hardcore BDSM lifestyle.” She wrote that that she struggled to read through the posts on My Illustrated Life as a Sex Slave as she felt they were depictions of her life at the time “without the accurate emotions”. Anton describes the “fear and sadness” she still felt connected to that time in her life, due to the “level of oppression” she suffered at the hands of Travis while she continued to try and raise their two children, and that it was an attempt to escape this “slave mindset” that eventually led to her shooting of Travis.

And, to be very clear, what Susan describes here is abuse – emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, perpetrated over a number of years with the intention of breaking down her personhood and ability to fight back. BDSM lifestyles of the intensity depicted in the Delia Day blog are controversial even with consent, but without, it’s not kink – it’s abuse. What Susan describes here, with the absence of safe words (a term used in the BDSM community to indicate when a person has reached their limit or needs to stop) and no option to leave, is just violence.

Obviously, this revelation drew more scrutiny to the case, with many analysing the content of Susan’s writing in the invisibl3survivor blog versus that on the Delia Day blog. Travis Anton’s own LiveJournal blog (featuring, instead of “like” buttons, “suck my cock” options instead) was uncovered, and comparisons were made between his work and that on the public Delia Day LiveJournal blog.

Comparing what writing we have access to from both Travis and Susan, there seem to be some compelling connections between the writing style and opinions of the Delia Day persona and Travis.

There are notable differences between the style Susan used in her invisibl3survivor blog – such as the frequent use of emojis – compared to Delia Day’s writing style. I found it interesting that what remains of Delia Day’s blog features such different interactions with men supportive of the lifestyle versus women who are critical of it – including referring to a woman who expressed doubts about the safety of this lifestyle as a “mulatto, and that whole plight of African American slaves makes her think this is so terribly cruel and demeaning”, whereas, in the same post, a man who argues for the arrangement is described as “smart”, something that would seem to match with someone who was attempting to justify their own use of BDSM as a means of control over their partner.

On his blog, he also rants about posts from a LiveJournal user named crimsonbagonia (though he refers to her as “ignorant slut”) about the cultural context of female circumcision, specifically, the removal of the clitoral hood. He remarks in this post that crimsonbagonia was a typical poster child for “moral panic” due to her concerns about female circumcision and it’s application. Interesting to note here is that the Delia Day profile also comments in this thread in replies to crimsonbagonia, espousing similar opinions to Travis, even using the term “moral panic” to describe the criticism of female circumcision. In her replies to the post, the Day account argues that the removal of the clitoral hood can enhance sexual pleasure, mirroring, to some extent, Day’s posts about her owner’s suggestion to remove her clitoris.

Most notably, perhaps, is a quote that appears on Travis’ blog, one that he attributes to himself: “Is my trail bigger or is it simply left to see as the unabashed facts of a life lived, instead of swept away, conveniently forgotten, buried in shallow graves like the evidence of crimes?”. This quote was also used in the sidebar of the Delia Day site. It could be argued that the devotion Delia wrote about in her blog stretched to using his words for her own site, but the fact it’s a quote Travis felt was worth recording on his own blog and is featured so prominently on the Delia Day site is interesting to me.

Based on the admittedly limited information we have access to regarding this case, and the relationship between Travis, Susan, and the Delia Day persona, I found Susan’s claims that Travis was the one behind the blog, at the very least, plausible, especially matched with the information regarding the Grand Jury declining to take the case to trial.

And, with that in mind, the Delia Day blog takes on a completely different tone – the worshipful adoration of her owner, the screeds extolling the virtues of complete submission and sex slavery, the dismissal of those, especially women, who expressed criticism or concern – become exceptionally disturbing. In this context, they’re an abuser putting words in the mouth of their victim to normalize and eroticize the harm they’re inflicting, not just to their victim, but to the world at large and especially the BDSM community. The Annie Oakley post is also particularly dark in context, with a description of Susan learning to shoot the gun that she would (presumably) use to kill her husband in the coming months.

That said, there are those who find Susan Anton’s claims of Travis’ authorship of the blog questionable, believing that the murder was not in self-defence and that claims of Travis’ control of the blog were constructed as a defence against harsher punishment. If it’s something you’re interested in, I would encourage you to take a look through the content that remains online and draw your own conclusions. Please feel free to share them in the comments below; I’m really interested to hear from other people regarding this case, especially those who might have been involved in the online BDSM community around the time it happened.

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Sources and Further Reading

Choctaw Plaindealer archives

Delia Day LiveJournal blog

Bedlam’s Folly (Blog written by Travis) LiveJournal Blog

IdealDelia.com (via WayBack Machine)

Seat of the Revolution thread

(header image via IdealDelia)