Macho Sluts (8 page)

It's a feminist cliché that women are divided into virgins and whores, and set against each other. There is no mention in anti-porn rhetoric of how much the hatred voiced by “respectable” women puts the slut in danger, how much “nice” women's jealousy and fear of being identified with her isolates the slut and makes it possible for her to be exploited and abused.

Some of us hate this polarization, and would like other choices, something in between virgin and whore. Sexual exploration would be so much easier if this were not such a highly charged arena. But it is, so even if we ask for “just a little freedom,” even the lightest bit of sexual agency, experience, desire, or speech, we are going to be branded sluts and whores. And so most women remain identified with the virgin, the woman who looks on and suffers, who refrains from action, who always forgives, who heals wounds and gives birth, but will do nothing to halt violence or murder. It's too frightening to be the brazen hussy, the woman who travels, who wants to go where men go and see what they see, who wears their clothes and appropriates their pleasures and mannerisms, who carries a razor, who has a hustle of her own going, who dresses to attract attention to herself, who will take care of her friends and stab her enemies in the back. She is not free, but she deserves to be.

Ironically, the word “virgin” originally didn't mean sexually inexperienced; it meant a woman who was consecrated to divine service, and therefore unmarried. Some sacred virgins probably had ritual sex with a representative of the god or with men who visited the temple to make an offering. They were, therefore, prostitutes. Today, a woman's will, her self-image, her integrity mean so little that all it takes is violence to turn her into something that is despised—a slut, albeit a victimized one. There is no safety in virginity, actual or feigned.

Macho sluts are supposedly a contradiction in terms, like virgins and whores. The slut is, in Dworkin's parlance, male property—a victim of male violence—a woman who accepts male definitions of her sexuality. Instead, I believe that she is someone men hate because she is potentially beyond their control. If she has to pleasure many men briefly to escape belonging permanently to one particular man, she will. Whores are always accused of being lesbians because they get men to part with some of their property instead of becoming property themselves, and because they are more interested in how thick a man's wallet is than the length of his dick. The whore does not sell her body. She sells her time. So she has time that is not for sale, that belongs to no one but herself. Domesticated women don't dare put a price on their time. They wind up with no demarcation between business and pleasure, public and private, so they have no time and space of their own. They do everything for love, but nobody gives them the same care they lavish on others. If they are used and despised, they can't protect themselves. They are poor because they give everything away. But it's the john who has to give something away to the whore. He must tell her his secret desire if he is to get his money's worth. The whore in turn gives nothing away, laughs at him while she keeps her secrets and pockets his cash.

In this country, machismo is a survival mechanism by which minority men try to preserve their self-esteem and their culture. In the best sense of the word, it describes a person who is outnumbered, misunderstood, and outlawed who nevertheless strives to preserve a sense of pride and honor. Someone who has machismo insists on his right to dignity, and defends himself and what belongs to him even if it is a hopeless cause, even if he will be punished for making the attempt. Women are not supposed to have machismo, to be macho, but then, we're not supposed to be sluts, either. And without machismo, a slut is just a commodity. In the midst of theoretical discussions, it's important to remember that the state has power to take action against obscenity, and does not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value; appeals to prurient interests; goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters; and depicts or describes in a patently offensive way, explicit sexual conduct of a specifically defined nature—that book is obscene, and it is contraband. Reading this won't make you an outlaw (it's not that easy, sweetheart), but if you enjoy it, you might think about why the law is trying to get in between you and your prurient interests.

I'm afraid that the opprobrium of right-wing, pro-censorship feminists is not the worst thing that will confront this book. We are in the middle of a crackdown on porn, especially S/M porn. For my birthday this year, I took a trip to Times Square to watch some loops in the peep show booths at my favorite porn store. This store used to feature a great diversity of material, and was always friendly to women. But all their S/M stuff was gone from the peep shows and the magazine racks. They had moved all their kinky magazines and videos to just one store, to protect the rest of them if that one got busted. If I wanted to look at an S/M movie now, I would have to buy the whole tape. I checked out several other adult bookstores on Times Square. Most of them were not selling any S/M material.

I was very upset, but not because this meant I would be cut off from a primary source of arousal. The typical commercial S/M flick or magazine does not turn me on. Most of it is made by people who think S/M is weird and sick, and just want to make some easy money off the leather freaks. Many of the actors and actresses perform in S/M movies or pose for bondage photos because they get paid as well as they would if they did hard-core (penetration, cum shots, cock-sucking), but they don't have to do any genital sex. Most S/M porn doesn't even require full frontal nudity. I check out adult bookstores for the occasional gems—the movies that star friends of mine, the magazines that feature professional dommes who really enjoy what they do and do it well, the '50s books put out by Mutrix, magazines illustrated by Stanton and other classic bondage and fetish artists, F. E. Campbell's novels, reprints of John Willie's drawings. Even this comparatively rare, high-quality material doesn't include many of the staple images of my eroticism. The kind of woman I try to be and the kind of woman I cruise just isn't sexy to straight sadomasochists.

What is most upsetting about this sudden disappearance of all the corny magazines full of sloppy bondage and the grainy movies about leather-corseted women who don't know how to aim their whips is the message it sends out that S/M has become even more forbidding, beyond the pale, and dangerous for me to pursue. It's as if it suddenly became even more abnormal. This dearth of images will make it more difficult for novices and beginners to realize there are folks who share their scary fantasies and know how to act them out with care and safety. If you don't know that there's a whole group of people who engage in a particular sexual behavior, it makes it much more difficult to imagine yourself ever being able to do it. And porn is one of the most common ways that people discover there are other folks out there who like to do cunnilingus, anal sex, gay sex, get tied up, have threesomes—in short, that there are others who want more than awkward and guilty sex in the dark, bare skin only, no birth control or safe sex, no dirty talking, no artificial lube, no shifting to another, more comfortable position, no toys, no special requests, and usually no orgasm for the woman and a pretty unsatisfactory one for the man.

S/M fantasies are usually much more lurid and perilous than the games of real-life sadomasochists. Standard Mafia bondage porn doesn't instruct people in the finer points of S/M technique, but it at least shows the reader that this is a sexual deviation, not an elaborate form of suicide, because the models who do these things appear to be enjoying them, and survive to pose for more pictures in another magazine. Before this crackdown, the genre was marginally improving because leather and S/M people were starting to make sexually explicit material for our own consumption. Legal hassles and the risk of public exposure will discourage that. And more people will remain convinced there is something terribly wrong with them because they have these awful fantasies about being restrained, dominated, or punished, and if they ever dare to look for someone who will do any of those wicked things, they will “get what they deserve”—i.e., snuffed.

Two distributors of S/M videos—a small business in Florida that sold wooden bondage devices and a handful of movie titles, and Centurions in Los Angeles—have been busted. The LAPD has reportedly visited gay video companies and warned them to stop distributing S/M movies.

Vice cops in Grand Rapids, Michigan, went on a campaign against kiddy porn early in 1987. When they couldn't find any, they went outside their own city limits into another town to arrest an S/M couple who frequently entertain folks in the scene and market movies they've made of themselves and some of their friends. In the process, Faye Marie (“Marquise Marie”) Bond and Gerald Bond reported that their home was trashed, all their business records and personal address books were confiscated, and their bank accounts were frozen. This has made it difficult for them to organize support and impossible for them to continue to make a living. Until the police killed all of her fish by emptying ashtrays into the tanks, Mrs Bond had raised and sold tropical fish. Her husband ran a straight video production company. They are charged with obscenity and running a house of ill-fame. They may succeed in getting acquitted, but the arrest alone has punished them in a way that having their charges dismissed will not repair.

In 1986, local police raided an S/M party held in the home of a heterosexual couple in a small town in Pennsylvania, and arrested nearly thirty people. Marie Morrell and her husband had to endure sensationalistic publicity and high legal costs to fight the resulting prostitution charges. They were acquitted, but many of their belongings have not been returned, and their privacy, happiness, and livelihood (they ran an Italian restaurant) are irreparably damaged.

Drummer
, a gay male S/M magazine, has run into so many distribution problems, they have decided to remove most bondage photos so they can keep the magazine on newsstands. The venerable S/M contact publication,
SMAds
, has ceased publication, reportedly because the producer feared prosecution for obscenity.

A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia is probing interstate transportation of obscene materials, and has subpoenaed the corporate records of two New York porn distributors, one distributor in Los Angeles, and some local corporations. These businesses handle S/M material along with other types of porn. The subpoenas were handed out after the FBI raided Washington, D.C. area video rental stores and confiscated tapes and “marital aids.”

This stepped up activity against sadomasochists and S/M imagery by the feds and local vice squads is a direct response to the Meese Commission's report on pornography, which claims (in language provided by the feminist anti-porn movement) that “violent pornography” (i.e., S/M material) is itself violence against women and fosters it in the rest of society. After the report was issued, Attorney General Edwin Meese committed the Justice Department to an intensified campaign against pornography, and called for federal prosecutors to go after “child pornography, sadomasochistic scenes, rape scenes, depiction of bestiality or excretory functions and violent and degrading images of explicit sexual conduct, and other similar hardcore material.” He specifically exempted “soft-core pornography” from this vendetta. (He also vowed, “There will be no censorship while I am attorney general.”)

Well, this is one woman who doesn't feel that these law enforcement officials are making my life safer. It may seem odd for me to include information about specific cases in a book introduction since it will quickly become dated. But this anti-S/M moral panic is not being covered in a systematic, comprehensive way in the gay press or other progressive publications. Gayle Rubin has given a series of lectures about these disturbing events at several S/M and leather conferences, but it appears that nobody outside of the sexual minority that is under attack knows what is going on—or cares. The same anti-censorship forces that mustered to protest the dangerous biases of the Meese Commission have not called any press conferences, written any articles, or issued any public statements to denounce this witch-hunt.

It would please me to be wrong about this, but I get the impression that most anti-censorship feminists are just relieved that it's “only” S/M material, which they never approved of anyway, which is being threatened. When they attacked the Meese Commission or criticized obscenity legislation authored by anti-porn activists, these women were repeatedly characterized by their opponents as sadomasochists, supporters of child abuse, advocates of rape, pimps, fascists, etc. They resented being associated with what they think of as the sexual lunatic fringe. I don't think many of them will have the guts to risk getting smeared again by trying to arouse some public indignation over gross violations of S/M people's First Amendment rights and right to privacy. But somebody needs to say that this is censorship, that it is not okay, that we cannot afford to ignore it. It seems that the sex debate in the women's movement is right back where it started—the only people who dare criticize anti-porn crusades are perverts, because we are the ones most at risk and we are the ones with nothing to lose. Meanwhile, it's business as usual back in Women's Studies and the ACLU.

The written word—thus far—receives protection under the First Amendment in this country, even if the words are about “violent” sex. But in the rest of the English language market—England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand—no such protection applies. It may be very difficult for a citizen of any Commonwealth country to buy a copy of this book. And we should remember that censorship is not always a matter of state intervention. It can be a matter of which books are ordered by a bookstore, in what quantities, and how they are displayed; which books are reviewed (and how); what your friends' reactions are when they see you own a particular work; how far publishers dare go with their next book.