Macho Sluts (7 page)

Sadly, a lot of the new lesbian porn (brave as it is) flunks what Dorothy Allison calls “the wet test.” When you are writing for free, which most of the contributors to the lesbian-owned sex magazines are, it's difficult to take enough time to transform a rough draft into an effective piece of stimulation. But there's another problem that all the money in the world won't solve, and that's the fact that many lesbian pornographers just aren't brave enough. I suspect that many of us aren't writing about what really gets us wet. We're writing about what we think should get us wet. Or we're writing about what we did last weekend, which might have been very nice then, thank you, but doesn't stretch the imagination. Journal entries make lousy fiction.

“Feminist erotica” that presents a simplistic view of lesbian sex as two women in love in a bed who embody all the good things the patriarchy is trying to destroy isn't very sexy. This stuff reads as if it were written by dutiful daughters who are trying to persuade Mom that lesbian sex isn't dirty, and we really are good girls, after all. It isn't challenging or stirring enough. The auto-erotically inclined lesbian reader deserves more bang for her buck. And Mom is never going to believe that nice girls put their hands in other girls' panties, anyway. It's much more inspiring for an aspiring pornographer to dispense with wearing her panties, or wear them on her head. Lesbian writers have got to loosen up, drop our drawers, spread our cheeks, stick out our tongues, get nasty.

Women—especially lesbians—exist under conditions that make us frightened to step out of line, frightened to challenge the status quo, almost unable to imagine what bold and brassy, peacock creatures we could be if we were free. Lesbian culture is impoverished. And if we are ever going to be free, we must have a vision of that woman of the future, including her ideas about what “sexy” means and looks like, and what “pleasure” is, and what it's worth.

Sex may seem like a trivial part of a radical, futuristic vision, but if we are not safe to indulge in this playful, vulnerable, and necessary activity, pleasure ourselves and the others who fascinate us, how safe can a society be for women? A world that guaranteed food, shelter, medical care, full employment, literacy, day care, civil rights and democracy, but denied us sexual license, would make us nothing but well-fed domestic animals with suffrage.

It takes a lot of guts for lesbian writers to push beyond our anger about what women aren't allowed to do. We are prey to the suspicion that it's our fault and women don't deserve anything better. We are afraid of more opportunity, because we might fail. This affects our ability to engender new (or at least accurate) sexual images that are genuinely exciting. The power of the censor within is awesome. The only way I could write some of these stories was to pretend I wasn't going to publish them. Nobody's an expert on women's sexuality; most women aren't even experts on their own libidos. I doubt anyone ever will be qualified to generalize about what all women want or proscribe certain sexualities as being anti-woman. But if enough of us speak out about our dreams and obsessions, a body of genuine knowledge can accumulate, and make all of us feel less crazy and less alone with what we cannot live without. When you are dealing with an area as permeated with ignorance and superstition as sexuality, it is more important to be honest than it is to be correct; to say “I want this now” before rushing to assert, “I will want this when I know and accept what is best for me.”

Lesbians are constantly being told by the rest of the world that we are ugly, boring, and unimportant. This kind of shit takes a toll on our self-esteem. The same cues that alert other lesbians to our availability and sexual prowess seem odd, annoying, and unattractive to straight people. And they don't have any tact about letting us know it, on the bus, at work, in the grocery store, on the street, in the gym, at the tie rack in the men's wear department. Lesbian pornography, especially if it has some humor, is a powerful antidote to this dehumanizing grind. It reassures us that it's worth putting on that white silk shirt and bomber jacket and polishing our boots before we go out, that somebody is going to get the message. It says, there's a woman out there looking for a girl in a magenta satin dress with spaghetti straps, so fluff up your hair, strap on those dancin' shoes, and go someplace where she can
find
you.

Seen in this light, lesbian pornography is “just” dyke entertainment, but I have never understood why anybody would think entertainment was trivial. If you live in a society that wishes you didn't exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible. Institutions that provide amusement always come under attack by puritans and fascists, partly because these people know they are pompous buffoons and easy targets for ridicule. The Cromwellians shut down the theater in England. The Victorians attacked the novel as a depraved and vicious literary form that was especially dangerous for women. Today, fundamentalist Christians go after MTV, and some women's bookstores try to incise pornography from the lesbian body of literature. There is no easier, faster way to transmit information or a system of values than by presenting it in a format that makes people laugh, dance, get turned on, or just feel good. What is it that they don't want you to hear?

I do not believe that sex has an inherent power to transform the world. I do not believe that pleasure is always an anarchic force for good. I do not believe that we can fuck our way to freedom. But this is not what the discourse of sexual repression tells us. In that discourse unleashed sex has enormous disruptive potential. Minority forms of sex have to be repressed or the social contract will hang in tatters. People will look to their friends and lovers for warmth, affection, love, and support instead of to their biological families. Women and children will have no protection from male violence. Work for the sake of work will cease to be valued. The nine-to-five, five-days-a-week wage labor that is the foundation of commerce will be disrupted by bored and frustrated workers who use any excuse to come in late, get high as often as possible to alleviate their tedium, rip off their employers, and spend their evenings trying to pick somebody up in a bar or going to political meetings organized by antisocial elements. Nobody will go to church. Children will be thoughtlessly conceived and carelessly reared, and venereal diseases will flourish. This is, of course, in wild opposition to our present system.

I suspect that what is really being protected by censorship, antiabortion, and homophobic campaigns is the self-image of the so-called majority. Consider how narrow the range of acceptable sexual behavior is. Nobody comes out looking normal once you know the whole truth about how they fuck and what they think about when they jerk off. The citizens are terrified of losing their heterosexual privilege, which will happen if the assumption that there is a sexual consensus, a few simple sexual things that are (or should be) enough for any normal person, is challenged.

Sex alone can't liberate us, but in the meantime, it comforts us. Women want and need the freedom to be outrageous, out-of-doors, out-of-bounds, out after dark, without being silenced or punished by stigma, battery, forced reproduction, or murder. We have a right to pleasure ourselves, and access to pornography is a part of that.

There's another reason why some of the new lesbian porn doesn't get me wet. My fantasies (and my library of bedtime storybooks) are not limited to women-only material. Before you throw rocks at me, you might ask your friends how many of them are lesbian separatist masturbators. Many people do not fantasize about the kind of sex that they actually have. Fantasy is a realm in which we can embrace pleasures that we may have very good reasons to deny ourselves in real life (like the fact that something might not be nearly as much fun to do as it is to think about).

Hasn't anybody but me wondered why porn produced for lesbian consumption has to be about women only? If the point is simply to turn lesbians on, why limit our sexy literature to lesbian sex? Straights and gay men take it for granted that they can use material about other groups of people to turn themselves on. Why should lesbians get tied up in knots because we have straight fantasies, faggot fantasies, fantasies about animals, and intense fantasy relationships with shoes and other inanimate objects? A straight man flipping through a “lesbian” photo magazine doesn't worry about his masculinity. Why shouldn't we feel equally free to exploit non-lesbian sex objects?

What we find erotic about gay men or straight sex is probably different from what gay men or straights consider important or arousing about themselves. They might not recognize themselves when they are dressed up for lesbian consumption any more than we recognize ourselves in the lesbian magazines produced for straight men. (Although I certainly have no objection to non-lesbian readers enjoying this book.) If fantasies about men aren't erotic at all for you, you might want to skip these stories (“The Surprise Party” and “The Spoiler”) or mentally change the male characters into women wearing strap-ons.

Lesbian writers must have the option to write about men. There ought not to be any subject that we cannot give our attention to. A lesbian perspective on the world is as valid and can be as interesting (or as trite) as anyone else's. Non-lesbians write about us without ever thinking about whether or not they are qualified. There is so little lesbian literature that the temptation to write only about ourselves, our own people, is understandable. And it is certainly possible to create a body of good work that is exclusively lesbian. But writers ought not to be ghettoized. We live in this world, and escapist fantasies about other worlds where we dominate or are the exclusive inhabitants can keep us entertained and in high spirits, but when we open our eyes, reality will still be here, and it cries out for comment, criticism, rearrangement, a mirror.

None of the stories that include men describe the exchange of body fluids because of Alyson Publications' policy against eroticizing high-risk sex. After overcoming my inhibitions about putting the smell and taste of male sexuality on paper, it gave me a bad case of cognitive dissonance to go back and write it out. I hope I managed to retain the highly charged emotional content of these stories without cum touching taste buds or mucous membranes. Porn can be a valuable way to teach people how to have hot and satisfying “safer sex.” But I don't believe “unsafe” porn causes AIDS any more than I think “violent” porn causes rape. Nobody ever caught a disease from or got assaulted by a book. Images and descriptions are forever getting confused with live acts. It seems a shame to me if people must relinquish fantasizing about all the aspects of their partners' bodies as well as experiencing them directly. Keeping these stories in this book was so important to me that I was willing to rewrite them, but I also need to say that it feels like a form of bowdlerization, even censorship, and if it were my choice, I would have left them in their original, sleazy form.

Safe sex porn (or guidelines) written for gay men aren't much use to lesbians. Most of the lesbian stories in
Macho Sluts
were written prior to the AIDS epidemic, and all of them include sexual activities that could transmit disease. I wouldn't want any of my readers to think that lesbians are magically exempt from AIDS. Please read “A note on Lesbians, AIDS, and Safer Sex” which follows.

The title of this book was a piece of graffiti that had been spray-painted by an anonymous street artist above the Broadway tunnel in San Francisco. I don't know the gender or the sexual orientation of the person who coined this phrase, but if the shoe fits, I'll go dancing. In
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
(Perigee/G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981, pp. 199-202), Andrea Dworkin writes:

The word
pornography
, derived from the ancient Green
porne
and
graphos
, means ‘writing about whores.'
Porne
means … the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens … The word
pornography
does not mean ‘writing about sex' or ‘depictions of the erotic' … or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores … In the male system, women are sex; sex is the whore. Buying her is buying pornography. Having her is having pornography … Seeing her sex, especially her genitals, is seeing pornography … Wanting her means wanting pornography. Being her means being pornography.

Never mind that the term “pornography” was coined by Victorians, not by the ancient Greeks. (This was first pointed out to me by Gayle Rubin. More information on the etymology of the term appears in Walter Kendrick's
The Secret Museum
, Viking, 1987.) Never mind that the anti-porn movement has done at least as much as “the male system” to make “whores” seem vile in the popular imagination. This book is available to anyone, male or female, who can pay for it or steal it. It will certainly seem vile to many people. Therefore, this book is a whore. And I wrote it, knowing that meant being a pornographer, being a whore. After all, “Being her [the whore] means being pornography.” What's one more stigmatized identity? In my time, I've even been a lesbian housewife.

Feminists who believe there was once a matriarchy say that prostitutes were once also priestesses. In some societies, every woman had to enter the temple of the goddess and receive payment for her sexual services before she could marry. Some women never left the temple. These priestesses did not simply perform rituals to guarantee the fertility of people, their herds and fields. They taught the receiving and giving of pleasure.

I don't know if I believe this. But I do believe the flesh should not be despised. If the flesh is not sacred, holy, then we are trapped in the muck of the profane, because the body is all we have. All knowledge, reason, truth, beauty, it is all reducible to physical sensation and actions performed by the agency of the flesh. Now that the goddess has no more temples, now that prostitutes are defiled women who represent the epitome of the patriarchy's power instead of sacred women who represent the power of the Triune Goddess, it is surely ironic that it is someone who resembles nothing so much as the Venus of Willendorf in overalls, who rises up to rebuke us.