The Dog Collar Murders (6 page)

I had wondered what tactic Loie would adopt to counteract the generally favorable impression of down-to-earth skepticism that Grade had just made. Would Loie be righteously angry or coldly negating? She was neither. She was simply sad.

“Sisters,” she began, and her tone was infinitely weary and yet warm. “I wish I could tell you how much of what I have heard and seen here at this conference today has disheartened and distressed me. There was a time once—years ago now—some of you may not even remember it—when to say you were a feminist was something to be proud of. You knew what it meant. It meant standing up and speaking out against the things that hurt you and hurt other women. It meant being laughed at and jeered and dismissed by men. But not caring. Because you knew what you were up against. You knew what the odds were and that they were stacked against you. They had been stacked against you for centuries. Yet this time you believed that you—with the help of hundreds of thousands of other women—that this time, at this precise historical moment—you would manage to change the world.”

Loie’s voice had been gradually building up, but now it sank again, despondent and almost wistful. In spite of myself I felt drawn into the mood of it, hypnotized by the soft, almost elegiac quality of her voice.

“In those days—oh, it seems like a million years ago now, doesn’t it?—it seemed so easy to talk about ‘sisterhood.’ We knew what sisterhood meant and we knew who our enemy was. Our enemy was the patriarchy, in all its various forms, the patriarchy that had dominated our lives for all those many thousands of years. In spite of what some women—the revisionist historians—now say, we never divorced issues of race and class from our analysis of women’s oppression. How could we? After all, many of us had
come
from the civil rights and student or peace movements and it is
clear
that things are always worse for poor women and women of color. It’s just that we found, and hundreds of women found, that traditional assumptions about the nature of power were no longer
sufficient
to explain what we saw in our daily lives—which was
systematic
subordination of women’s rights to the male desire for power and control.”

Loie’s voice dropped again and now the sadness was that of someone who has been very deeply betrayed. “Yes, in those days the world was a simpler place. We knew who our friends were, we knew who our enemies were. But increasingly it has become apparent that women who were once our friends are now our enemies. (Loie looked meaningfully in the direction of some leather-jacketed women down right.) They are women who have, instead of turning their backs on pornography, chosen to embrace it, to pretend that their degradation or their imposition of degradation on others is based on choice, on ‘consent.’ They have eroticized their subordination and called it ‘freedom.’ These women have allied themselves with male-identified heterosexual women leftists, with male civil libertarians and pornographers, and with gay men, to fight us on the very issues it once seemed we all agreed on.

“I don’t deny that it hurts. It hurts politically—and it hurts personally—to have former colleagues, women you
thought
were feminists, turn against you and revile you in public. I’m sure that on many occasions a lot of us have thought of just giving up. It often seems just
too hard
to be attacked from both sides.

“So why don’t I just give up? Why don’t all of us just give up? We’re never going to see the end of abuse against women in our lifetimes, so why not just give up now, why not call it a day and just say, I’ve done what I could but they were stronger, better funded, had better connections. Why not just accept that there has always been rape, pornography, prostitution and violence against women and be done with it? Why not just accept that every time, for the rest of our lives, when we go to a film, open a book or magazine, turn on the TV, that there is more often than not going to be some image or some incident that confirms male power over women, that confirms that women exist to be used by men? Why not just accept that every time we go out on the street that we can be raped? That we can be humiliated and battered and raped in our homes and on our jobs? That our daughters and our daughters’ daughters will grow up in the same way, afraid, terrified underneath, and that our sons and our grandsons will grow up knowing that they have the power to terrorize….

“Well,” and Loie paused and looked at us like a big Nordic goddess looking down on a pack of frail human beings, with a mixture of tenderness and resolve, “I’ll tell you why I don’t give up, and why many of us refuse to give up. It is because of women like Karen Ann Jones, once known as Dolly Delight, who lives with the knowledge that her forced degradation in dozens of films is still being shown everywhere in the world, making millions of dollars for the men who forced her into such degradation. It’s because of all of us, and I’m including myself, friends and relatives, who were once in positions that we imagined were freely chosen, but in fact were forced upon us, positions where our humanity was degraded, where we were used to make messages that conveyed pleasure in degradation, where…”

Loie seemed to be looking down at someone in the audience, and then she abruptly broke off. For an instant she appeared confused, almost angry, then she recovered herself and quickly brought her speech to a close, with a trembling urgency that had some of the audience wildly clapping before she had even finished. What had Loie been about to say? And what had stopped her? I strained my neck to see who it was she’d noticed in the audience, but I was too far back.

“I work against pornography, in spite of enemies on the right and on the left because I can’t do anything else. For my self-respect and for the self-respect of the millions of humiliated women who depend on me to speak for them. Thank you.”

The applause was thunderous, and cries of “Loie, Loie” filled the air.

Penny nudged me. “You really think there are millions of humiliated women out there, with no one to speak for them but Loie?”

“Shhh!” said the woman behind us.

During the dinner break before the panel discussion was to begin, Penny, June, Hadley and I went to an Ethiopian restaurant nearby. It was packed with women from the conference. I saw Nicky and Oak and their S/M crowd come in. Nicky hung up her leather coat on the coat rack by the door. She was no longer wearing her dog collar, but looked highly excited.

We were lucky enough to get a table right away. Between sopping up the sauces with that spongy sour white bread they serve, we discussed the different styles of Gracie and Loie.

“The thing I hate,” said June, “is that speakers like Loie who are doing the doom and gloom number on us always have to throw in phrases like, ‘And for black women, the situation is even worse.’ We’re not a statistic to be tacked onto the general discussion. And besides, why is it worse? Abuse is abuse.”

“It’s because they can’t deal with racism other than further victimization,” Penny said. “So if things are bad for white women, who are supposed to be the norm, they must be
really
bad for black women.”

“I liked what Gracie said,” mused Hadley. “I’ve been asking myself why I haven’t had a clear position on pornography, like I should have one, and not why this particular discussion has become so important all of a sudden.”

I didn’t know why, but I suddenly had the urge to defend Loie. “She’s incredibly sincere, Loie. I had the feeling that she’s been through a lot herself, that it’s more than a political cause for her, that she really identifies with women who’ve been victimized.”

“Do you think so?” June was skeptical. “I think she’s just got a big mouth and she likes to hear herself talk. She’d be nobody if there was a really was an end to pornography.”

“That woman Miko has a bigger mouth,” said Penny. “The panel tonight should be interesting. I heard that her workshop today practically turned into a riot. Did either of you go?”

“Uh, well…” Hadley mumbled, avoiding my eyes. “I stopped in.”

“I went,” I said. “I was surprised actually at how little Miko had to say. To the workshop anyway.”

“Oh,” said Hadley.

When we got back to the auditorium just before seven-thirty it was packed. A slightly different crowd was here now; in addition to many of the straight and lesbian feminists there were men, the sort in beards and flannel shirts and the sort in suits. There were also more working women in heels and jackets.

Events like this never started on time, so I didn’t think anything of it when seven-forty-five came and went with no panelists appearing at the long table covered with pitchers of water and microphones. The four of us talked, though actually Hadley and I didn’t talk too much to each other. We weren’t having a Fight; we were having a Little Distance.

But as it neared eight o’clock and there was still no sign of anyone on the stage, the audience began to get restless. People stood up and walked around, started conversations with strangers or with friends across the aisles. I saw a lot of familiar faces. Nicky and Oak, who had still been finishing their dinner when we left the restaurant, came in and joined a small crowd of leather dykes down in the front row. I wondered if they were planning to heckle Loie. I saw Hanna Sandbakker with a tall, white-haired man. I wondered if it was her father, Loie’s uncle. They also came in a bit late and had to stand in back. Standing near the stairs that led up to the stage were the panelists: Elizabeth, serenely pregnant, chatting with various people; Miko, in a black jumpsuit and a red turban, vibrating with energy; Gracie looking a little tired, as if she wanted it all to be over.

Finally one of the conference organizers, looking worried and apologetic, came out on stage. “We’ll be starting in just a minute,” she said. “Thank you all for your patience. We’ve been waiting for Loie Marsh, but unfortunately she seems to have been delayed. So we’ll just begin without her and hope that she joins us soon.”

The panelists went up on stage and took their places at a long table. The three I knew were joined by Sonya Gustafson. I’d never seen her before and had been expecting a mousy-looking woman wearing a flower print dress, but she strode after Elizabeth, as poised and as striking as any of them, in a linen pantsuit, expensive scarf and gold earrings.

Gracie started things off by giving a capsule version of her speech earlier that afternoon. She seemed more subdued, but still very cogent as she asserted that anti-pornography activists had gotten off on the wrong track.

Sonya Gustafson was next. In a calm, authoritative voice she talked about child pornography rings and the things done to children in the name of porn.

“Many liberal and otherwise decent people like to pretend that pornography is created by consenting adults for consenting adults. Since relatively few of us ever consume hardcore pornography, we may assume that it hasn’t changed much from the days when
Playboy
first appeared, or that the issue is one of free speech, reminiscent of the era when books like
Ulysses
were banned from sale in this country. If you do assume that pornography is relatively harmless and that the issue is one of puritanism opposed to more liberal sexual values, I urge you to take a trip to one of the stores downtown and to take a look at what really is for sale. I think you will be as shocked as I was. In addition to the usual fare of bondage, domination and violence, you will find pictures that are guaranteed to turn your stomach: photographs of small children, four and five years old, mounted by huge men, very tiny children forced to have intercourse, and yes, even babies, girls and boys, with their genitalia exposed and vulnerable to penetration.”

Sonya went on relentlessly with descriptions that did indeed turn many of our stomachs. She didn’t mention the fundamentalist belief system that underlay her arguments against porn, she didn’t bring up some of the other goals of the moral majority to which she belonged, like putting homosexuals in concentration camps to prevent them from spreading AIDS and making abortion and contraception illegal. Sonya only talked about pornography’s abuse of children, and when she got to her stories of the little blond Minnesota girl who was kidnapped off her playground and sold in Los Angeles for use in porn films, there wasn’t a mother or a father in the house who felt easy in their seats. Penny, beside me, was completely agitated. “I never knew any of this. I never knew any of this.”

Elizabeth, if anything, was even more persuasive. Not only was she cute and pregnant, but she gave off the aura of vast experience, which indeed she did have. She talked primarily about the contract work she’d done with sex offenders, both sexually abusive fathers and other relatives, and rapists.

“Most of the offenders I worked with were exposed to or involved with pornography at a very early age. They tended to have an obsessive relationship with porn. Sometimes their families have found stacks of magazines in their closets, their basements, their garages. It’s taken over their lives, it’s become their entertainment, their way of life. Let me tell you the results of some studies we made. In psychological testing most of our offenders seem predisposed to violent acting-out behavior. Many of them state that they think pornography is directly responsible for where they got their ideas about women and about what sexuality is. Many of them say that the exposure to pornography early in their lives had a direct effect on them and contributed strongly to their need to act out.”

My stomach was churning and tense, but I had to keep listening.

“Let me talk a little about adults who sexually abuse children. A recent study reports that one of the major reasons why children don’t report being sexually abused is that the abusers convince them that such activity is normal and pleasurable. They routinely use pictures of child pornography to convince the children of how enjoyable it is….”

I could see that I wasn’t the only one who felt sick hearing this. In any audience full of women it’s probable that at least one out of four will have been sexually violated in some way. At some point in Elizabeth’s careful recounting of statistics I realized I couldn’t listen any more and just shut down. As far as I was concerned, everything she said made sense and was true and horrible and frightening. And I didn’t want to hear it.