Susie Bright's Journal

Farmer in the Dell

The farmer wrote to me, " You must be weary," and he was right. His message was one of a hundred e-mails a day I received on the road: six weeks, twenty-eight stops, the full package book tour.

I invited nearly everyone I met on the road to write to me about their own sexual philosophy. His was a little different.

See, those other 99 messages, they said things like, "I can't get enough of you." It was the sweetest praise I could hear, and yet that yearning that exhausted me: there was never enough of me;  they always wanted more. I was a girl who couldn't say no, and couldn’t register “empty.”

By the end of the day, though, I was turning into toast. I didn't want to be Susie Sexpert anymore; I wanted to disappear.

This man— who addressed my tired bones instead of my credentials—read my exhausted senses. He said he farmed for a living. He lived an hour from one of the university hamlets I was visiting. He he could drive me out there to the fields where  I could watch the new garlic grow. We could walk in the woods, or sit at the lakefront and do absolutely nothing at all.  I salivated reading his offer.

My home is in the central farming community of California. Some of my best friends are farmers, and they feed me well. Writers and farmers share the sensibility that you might as well go broke doing something you love. 

I liked this man already, just to know what he did for a living, and for extending me the best invitation I'd ever received on a book tour: to run away.  Still, I had to decline the temptation. I had interviews nearly every hour I was in his vicinity; there was no way I could make a polite escape. 

The farmer read my online diaries, and he wrote me again. This time, he said, that truth be told, he did fantasize about making love to me— but that my doubts were as real as his own. He liked that I promised fans to be “bad in bed.” He said it was a relief.

I couldn't dismiss him as easily as I had the other e-mails, like the one that said: "I am a 43 year old atty. in Las Vegas who is well-endowed. Call me when you arrive." 

No, the Farmer wrote well, and that always touches me. He was lyrical about his environment, and his kindness was a genuine aphrodisiac. Still, I was wary— this could  be a ruse, an Internet pose job. I wrote him back:

"Things are always so different face-to-face. I hope when I speak in town that you'll come and introduce yourself to me."

A week later I was at another Big University, signing books at the back of an auditorium. He came up to me at the very end. The end of a glorious night, a SRO crowd of readers, and many autographs on both breasts and books.

On my ninth glass of ice tea, he walked up to the table, and in my mania, I'd forgotten entirely about my invitation to him. What I saw was a six-foot tall man, with graying, curly long blond hair, waiting at the end of the line. He was so shy, that despite his height and looks, he didn't stand out in the crowd. He put out his hand and said, "Hello, I'm the Farmer. "

For a second, my mind recognized nothing; he sounded like a recording from a child's pull toy. I almost replied, "Hello, I'm the Author!"

Then my mind's eye uncrossed and I leapt from behind the table to greet him. He was real, and I gave him a great hug. He embraced me back, and I remembered that although he wrote me that his hands were rough, they weren't harsh at all.

That night I went back to my antiseptic hotel room, put the starched pillow over my head, and started to fantasize about the Farmer: his body over me, fucking me, his hands on my breasts. I pulled myself out of my reverie long enough to grab my laptop and find his address:

Dear Farmer:

I liked meeting you so much tonight. Now I can't get you, or your invitation, off my mind. If I postpone some of my media junk tomorrow, I can get away for four hours— is that ridiculous?

I went to sleep happily, knowing that if nothing else, I was going to have him in my dreams. In the morning, I checked my messages: 

Continued here in Mommy's Little Girl, "Farmer in the Dell"

The Hippest Conversation You've Ever Heard About Porn. Yes.

 

Mike White interviews Susie Bright on the The Projection Booth about vintage porn and her new book The Erotic Screen, Volume 1.

It was such a treat to talk to Mike, who's eminently knowledgeable  about the erotic and indie movie history.

Listening to our interview three months after our first meeting,  I'm taken aback: this is the most frank and wide-ranging conversation I've ever heard about sex movies, from anyone, anywhere. 

Listen to us get down and detailed about our favorite classic XXX films, early erotic video innovation, legendary erotic directors and actors, including:

Greg Dark's Let me Tell Ya Bout White/Black Chicks era, 

Rinse Dream (aka Steve Sayadian) with Cafe Flesh and Nightdreams,

Veronika Rocket's Smoker,  

Pirates, and why it was produced for Disneyland lovers

Radley Metzger's Score,

Joyce Snyder's Raw Talent, ("the Portlandia of Porn!")

Kink.com,

Directors Michael Ninn, John Stagliano, Andrew Blake,

Jack Baker,

Porn theaters in Detroit and London,

Stalag porn that flourished in Israel in the 50s/60s,

Segregation and race tropes in porn, ("people would talk to me, a reporter, as if it was Pig Night at the Ku Klux Klan rally"),

Bernard Purdy's Lialeh, 

The G-spot Fraud Detection Squad,

The veracity of the letters I got to my Penthouse in-box, (all real, handwritten or typed and snail-mailed--- and more than I could ever answer),

Edward Penishands and other porn satires ("It's the same whether it's Catherine the Great fucking her horse or the GOP primaries"), 

What it takes to cut it as a Woodsman, ("Viagra doesn't make you come on camera... it's a very particular kind of 'hitting your mark.' To hell with the drugs...There's always been a million ways to hide the soft sausage.")

How the best films of the Golden Era got literally cut to shreds by their own copyright owners, ("You're dealing with IDIOTS"),

And what really matters to me in sex cinema:

"You know how I am, Mike. The girl's gotta come, and I've gotta know it."

 

Illustration: The cover of Mike White's must-read cult film book, Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection. White is a writer for CinemaScope, Paracinema, Detroit's Metro Times, and Detour-Mag.com. He's jury-served at Slamdance, Cinekink and MicroCineFest, and been featured in the documentaries David Goodis: To a Pulp and The People Vs. George Lucas.

The Politics of Senior Sex— "Wet is a State Of Mind"

 

I am a writer of erotica. I prefer words like smut or naughty stories— I find these words to be much more exciting and provocative.

Therefore, I was pleased one morning to find an invitation in my mail to submit a story for consideration for an anthology on Senior Sex.

"Wet is a State of Mind"

by Tsaurah Litzky

Now, I write what I like to think of as "rock your socks" stories about sex and love. I try somehow to always make that very important connection between sex and love.

I consider all sexuality, even what might be thought of as sexuality in its most abhorrent forms, as a manifestation of eros— the need to love, the need to connect with another being.

I believe what Schopenhauer said, that sex is the will to live. Therein lies its enormous incredible power. In writing my naughty stories, I take what I do seriously and am always thrilled when they are appreciated and published.

The editor of the Senior Sex anthology who wrote me, I will call Cora Chemise, for the purposes of this essay.

Cora wrote that I was highly recommended by a prominent erotica editor whom I had worked with on several occasions. She went on to say she had checked my out my website and was impressed. She included her "Call for Submissions."

I read the call for submissions and was not impressed. In fact, I was turned off.

I wrote Cora a brief note telling her the reasons why. To my surprise and delight, she wrote back, saying she wasn’t offended!

She invited me to write an essay expressing my views that could possibly be published as an alternative to her point of view. I set to work and the essay I sent her is reproduced below.

Dear Miss Chemise.

In your call for submissions, you posed a question:

“Will this be the usual erotica anthology except that the lovers all have white hair?

"No, the truth is that we seniors don’t get excited by the wet, juicy vaginas or the big pulsing pricks that are the backbone of the usual young-person-oriented erotica.  Instead, we want erotica that we can relate to, that talks about the alterations that are part of the aging process, that credits how we like to be stimulated. Aging is regarded as a state to be celebrated and enjoyed.                         

Ms. Chemise, I have to tell you that I am a senior, a proud sixty-eight-year-old senior who still responds to and is excited by big pulsing pricks; be they real, virtual or imagined.

I don’t consider my golden years a time to abandon faithful and fulfilling fantasies but rather a time to cherish them and acquire new ones. While it is true my "violet" rarely gets wet enough to be considered “juicy” or even damp, my mind is as wet and wild and ever, maybe even more so.

As editor Rachel Kramer Bussel says on the back cover of Best Sex Writing 2011, the brain is the largest sex organ. Whatever physical challenges my increasing years may present to my body, the full enjoyment of my sexuality has only inspired me to exercise and strengthen my mind further.

I read voraciously and particularly enjoy books that trumpet the cause of sexual liberation such as Nicholson Baker’s recent House of Holes and Nedjma’s The Almond.I subscribe to Penthouse, Playgirl as well as the New York Review of Books.

No matter the disappointments the temporal world may present to my sex life, in my mind I can have any kind of sex I want any time I want with out fear of rejection or failure.

According to the most recent U.S. census bureau estimates there are now fifty million American senior citizens. The U.S. Census only starts considering citizen “seniors” after they pass the age of sixty-five. We are now the largest age group in America.

I am sure among these legions I am not the only one who enjoys XXX-cinema and who will never part with their collection of naughty postcards. My collection is of smiling cowboys who besides their happy erections are wearing only their cowboy boots and cowboy hats.

Nor do I believe I am the only nice and naughty senior one who gets great pleasure out of reading erotica on any of the subtexts within the genre.  

Many of us are boomers who received very liberal sex educations in the sixties. In taking the injunction, “make love, not war,” we learned (and sometimes the hard way) much about our bodies, ourselves and our hearts and minds.

Mine was the first generation of women, (I was born in 1943) that due to the availability of the pill in the early sixties was able to change the biological curve. In the wake of the Stonewall riots of in 1969, “alternative” sexuality came out of the closet. Nowadays, many gay seniors live openly and happily with their partners and are accepted as valued members of their communities.

To suggest to such a wide and variegated audience that there is some kind of “age appropriate erotica” that we seniors “want,” to limit us in this way, (indeed, to limit us in any way at all) is an insidious kind of ageism, and a position I must challenge. I find it insulting.

I would never attempt to generalize for the multitudes of today’s seniors. Speaking only for myself and those among my friends who are seniors I can suggest, however, that what turns us on is whatever works. We “like to be stimulated” in any and every way that will help us, that will  help to get us through the night.

My friend Dounia, a former opera singer turned voice coach, is excited by bearded, hairy men, ample of paunch and haunch. She doesn’t care how young or old they are, as long as they are witty, kind and share her taste for opera.

My friends Eileen and Roberta, owners of a successful flower shop have been together for thirty-five years. They recently started to watch girly-girl Adult films to put more spark in their sex life.

At this point, you may be wondering who I am. Who is this person, encouraging wet, wild sexual liberation for seniors? What are my credentials?  Am I just another sex crazy nut or a sex researcher inspired by Kinsey or a learned psychologist with a doctorate in human sexuality from Harvard?

I am not a sex researcher or psychologist and the only doctorate I have received is from the School of Hard Knocks.

I am a poet and a writer of erotica. I’ve published two major poetry collections, fifteen poetry chapbooks. My erotic writing has appeared in over ninety publications including Best American Erotica, Best New Mammoth Book of Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica 2011, and the New York Times. As a member of the Creative Writing department at New York’s New School, I taught an award winning course, Silk Sheets: Writing Erotica, for eleven years. I also write fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, art criticism and plays.  

I did not start out as a writer of erotica. I began my writing career at the age of forty-seven reading my poetry at open readings on the Lower East Side. A new life opened for me. My work was published in zines and local papers. This led to a weekly column about my life and loves in the now defunct arts weekly, Downtown.

 When I split up with my longtime lover, I wrote a reminiscence straight from the heart about him, myself, and a great big dildo. This piece was too personal even for my personal column. I gave it to a friend who was starting a 'zine called Pink Pages, that would, I thought, be as obscure as his previous efforts.

But in December 1994, just in time for Christmas, I found a letter in my mailbox from Susie Bright saying "Congratulations, your story 'The Sacred and Profane Country of Desire' has been accepted for publication in Best American Erotica" along with a nice check. 

Thus my “career” as an erotic writer was born. I was fifty-one at the time. My early stories were based on my own experiences and my heroines were women who, like me, had been around the block.

I found I enjoyed the opportunity fiction offered to process my experiences and to better understand my life. My heroines fell in the gutter, picked themselves up, refreshed their lipstick and went back out again. Sometimes they learned from their mistakes, sometimes not, but they refused to see themselves as victims and took full responsibility for their choices because I do not believe in blaming or regrets. Both men and women liked my stories, and clamored for more.

As I progressed though menopause, I could not deny the changes in my body. I had to find herbal supplements to help get my juices flowing.

I started to keep a box full of lubricants next to the box of condoms on my bedside table. I needed more sleep and no longer had the stamina for long nights of sexcapades. Intercourse, per se, was not always the be-all and end all of lovemaking, but when it occurred, Wow!— it was fabulous.

My wishes, my yearning for the comforts of physical intimacy were/are as great as ever. I want to kiss and touch my lovers everywhere. I want them to do the same for me. Desire still moves me. Hallelujah!

When I passed sixty, I started to notice people looking at me differently once they knew my age. Men who thought me charming when they took me for fifty-seven, found me boring when they learned I was sixty-one. I didn’t get invited to so many parties. It was as if I was expected to stop playing the field and start playing bingo.

My father who was eighty-seven at the time, suggested I lie about my age. “All is fair in love and war,” he said, “women always lie about their ages.”

My life experience thus far had taught me that fairness is not a constant in any pursuit whatsoever and besides why should I lie? I actually felt better about myself at sixty-one then I did at forty-one. I had finally realized my lifelong dream of becoming a writer. I felt I was now a more interesting person.

Whether entering a new relationship— or just hoping to enjoy a casual romp— I didn’t want to play a game of let’s pretend. I wanted and want to be accepted and desired for who I am. Isn’t that what everyone wants no matter their age?

It was as if having become sixty, I was considered to be officially old, and soon to be elderly. After that, at some point, I would cross the line and become an alien.

In the erotic anthologies that published my writing there were hardly any stories about the erotic lives of people over sixty-five, scant descriptions of our hopes and dreams.This only widens the gap between the young and the old.

I started to write stories about the sex lives of people sixty-five and older. I did not write these stories especially for seniors to enjoy although of course I hoped they would enjoy them. Nor did I gloss over or ignore the particular anxieties that may beset a senior venturing out on to the fields of love.

I write these stories for everyone to enjoy, regardless of age, in hopes of showing that we seniors are not alien creatures— that despite physical infirmities that may slow us down, in affairs of the heart we can and do remain forever young.

One of my most popular stories is about Tony Tempo, a septuagenarian trumpet player who finds love in a home for aged and indigent music musicians. 

My beef with your Call for Submissions is that it is so off–putting. It is as if you are trying to herd us into a gilded galleon that is already sinking.

You suggest we seniors want to limit our sexual proclivities and in specific ways— a lecture telling us what we respond to, what we want. Rather, I turn to Plutarch, who described old age as a time to always be learning many things.

I suggest seniors mostly want and hope to stay open to and for whatever comes. I believe you will get many, many submissions for your anthology as "senior sex" is a subject that is just coming out of the closet. There may well be a volume two of the senior sex anthology!

When you are writing your next Call for Submissions, I hope you will remember this letter and include the suggestion that keeping an open mind is one of the best ways to accept, sensually enjoy and celebrate old age.  

Sincerely,

Tsaurah Litzky

 

The senior sex anthology turned out to be only collecting fiction, and didn't publish Tsaurah's essay after all... but I invited her to publish it on my blog, as I resonated with all she had to say. -SB

Rape Scenes: Anatomy of Forced Sex Fantasy Vs. Reality

I remember the first time someone stuck his hand down my pants when I didn't want him to.

My roommate and I were mugged and molested on Page and Ashbury while walking home from a movie at the Red Vic. I must have been twenty.

"Rape Scenes" from Susie Bright's Sexual Reality

What I remember most was that my assailant was a full head shorter than me. He looked to be about fourteen, and he had the tip of his knife pushed against my breastbone. I was scared stiff, unable to move, pleading.

Our two mugger boys were so inexperienced that one of them handed my roommate's keyring back to her so he could use both hands to unfasten her pants. She blew the silver whistle that hung off her keys— and as if she had fired a warning shot— the armed and dangerous brats ran like rabbits.

It was over. I felt like shit, and I continued to feel like shit for months. I moved out of the neighborhood.

I  also remember the first time I had a forced-sex fantasy. I was quite young and had gotten my hands on a naughty book, one of those "pseudo-textbooks" in sociology. It featured “true tales of juvenile delinquency,” and I found it in the library, mis-shelved.

I had never seen the word “delinquent” before, and it sounded pornographic to say the word out loud.

One story described a teenage girl pinned to a cross, just like Jesus, on a grassy hill outside her suburb; all the boys in her school had their way with her.

Another story was about a little girl who didn't obey her parents' warnings not to talk to strangers. She was kidnapped walking to school by a couple who sequestered her in their apartment and introduced her, day by day, to various sex acts which she first resisted and then (of course) became addicted to.

I was attending Catholic school at the time and my head was already filled with stories of romantic martyrdom and the wages of sin. The juvenile delinquents' dramas played over and over again in my head at night as I rubbed myself through layers of sheets, pajamas and underwear, always coming very hard. I never left that neighborhood.

I didn’t acknowledge having perilous fantasies until I was in my twenties. In a women’s studies college course, our teacher asked us if we had experienced arousing “rape fantasies.”

One girl tearfully raised her hand and said this was true for her. My heart beat so fast it was all I could do to stay put. I was just as ashamed as she of these fantasies, but I would never have admitted them. Our professor was quite kind to her, if misinformed.

Our professor comforted the girl by saying that, as women, we had been brainwashed by the patriarchy to eroticize our subordination to men. She said these fantasies were very common, which is true, and that we could "overcome" them by exposing our fantasies to feminist analysis and by our increasing self-esteem.

She was wrong on that count. In fact, I knew she was wrong later that same night...

Continued in Sexual Reality, "Rape Scenes"

The Best She Ever Had: Eavesdropping on Polyamory and the Open Relationship

    
I asked Jon to tell me more about Carrie. The wind carried voices from the cafe brunchers onto our beach spot, but I could pull another towel over my head and listen only to him.    

  “Well, she said a lot of nice things about me— she’s... complimentary.”

   “Like what?” I imagined what she might say— “Mister, you have a very nice cock.” That’s what I would say to Jeff if I’d just had a one night stand with him: nice cock, beautiful hair.

   “She said... okay, this is embarrassing— she said, I was the best lover she’d ever had!”

    “You’re kidding!“

    “Yeah, incredible as it may seem...”

    “You know I don’t mean— ”

    We both buried our heads in the beach towel and laughed.

    “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said, and nudged my crotch with his toe.

    I sat up in the sand so I could see him better. We were both struggling with  our straw hats in the wind.

     I decided to speculate. “Maybe what our friend said about her being so sexually inexperienced is true.”

    “But she’s thirty-two!”

   “Thirty-two-year-old sex today is what sixteen-year-old sex was in our day— just creeping out of their egg.”

    “Is it really that bad?”

    “Yeah, well think about it— if she was holding out through high school, and then ‘playing it safe’ in college, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for sodomy and wasted nights.”

    “That’s a shame... but then what about all those blow jobs she talked about? I guess it fits  though, doesn’t it?— She’s afraid of everything else.    

“Tell me that part again, about her first boyfriend.” I dug my toes into the sand until they hit the wet part.

“She said she just broke up with her first real boyfriend, and that when they got together, she promised him a thousand blow jobs. She got up to seven hundred and forty-nine in three years.”

    “Seven hundred and forty-nine!" 

  "Yes!"

    "Now that seems like a magic number. Like, we'll never forget it now, and we've only heard it once. But I don’t see how she managed to keep track... I mean, I tried to do that, when I was first fucking, but every time I went to bed with someone new, I’d change my idea about what good sex was, or what love was, and then my old system didn’t make any sense.”

    “Well, maybe it’s easier with blow jobs, if that’s all you’re doing.”

    “But she didn’t come, going down on you, did she?”

    “No, of course not! It was hard for her to come, she kept trying to block me. She couldn’t believe I wouldn’t try to fuck her, trick her, and afterward she said she didn’t want to do that— and then when I went down on her, she didn’t think I really wanted to eat her— and she kept not believing, not believing, and all that made her orgasm  remote.”

    “I bet the women who actually get off giving head don't count the number... If you want to swallow cock all the time, if that makes you come, you aren’t competitive about it, you’re just hungry, right? I mean, who keeps track of how many times they eat their favorite meal?”

    Jon dropped his voice. “She was kind of rare, you know— she swallowed everything, every drop...”

Continued in Mommy's Little Girl, "The Best She Ever Had"

"The Perfect Book for Intellectual Sex Freaks." - Sarah Silverman

There are certain lessons that are the catnip of erotic literature. "Be careful what you wish for" is a perfect example.

It's an axiom that must have originated in lust. There's no other crazy yearning besides sex that makes people so sure that if they could possess just one thing, their ideal, then their bodies would know true bliss and their minds, a final epiphany.

We imagine, with each new obsession, that our appetite will be sated for all time, and that our itch will melt into a sticky puddle. Free at last, and spent to peaceful exhaustion.

"Introduction" by Susie Bright

Three Kinds of Asking For It

 

What's funny about human beings is that in our search for the perfect sex thing, the partner/position/pornography of our dreams, we never stay in one place. There's nary a moment for reflection before we switch targets.

We laugh at teenagers who carry on as if one kiss, then one date, then one debauched prom night would make everything copacetic.

But really, adults are worse. We blow our fortunes, our families' patience, and our own fatuous minds with schemes to become the perfect object of desire -- or to capture one who is.

Sexual ecstasy is the prize that incites this madness. Once we conceive of our dream, and sample the first taste, we make the nuttiest promises. That's where the "be careful" part comes in. We vow, we forsake this and that, we say "nothing else matters."

We jump off the deck and act as if pulling the cord is just an option. Who's around to see us when we land? Often, we end up on the ground alone, bruised and bloody, still carrying that taste in our mouth...if only, if only, if only. It's salty, all right.

Thank Cupid for novelists, then, who can admit the painful truth we might not confess to our own diaries. A good storyteller will describe a sexual adventure that makes us crave passion and cower before its consequences-- in equal diabolical measures. It's difficult to find that chemistry in a novel. So many writers go overboard in one direction or another.

"Three Kinds of Asking for It is the perfect book for intellectual sex freaks."

— Sarah Silverman

 

In puritan America, there's a tendency to choke the life out of those who have too much fun-- unless of course, they get down on their knees and apologize for it later. The more rare, but equally cynical, experience is the story of the lovers who get everything they want, wrapped in a bow, and then sail off with their gift, undisturbed by the slightest breeze of conflict. They must be made of Spam.

Luckily, I've found three writers for this collection who bring uncommon originality and authenticity into the sweet mire of erotic trepidation.

In Charmed, I'm Sure by Eric Albert, a single man exasperated with conventional dating rituals meets a modern-day witch who sells him a sex-on-demand "Wish Contract." It seems to be the answer to his libidinous prayers, but then we all know how that fine print can screw you....Our hero is in for more than any megawatt attorney could have anticipated.

 

"The world is full of emptiness; without it there'd be nothing left": thus does a witch console a client left empty after Eric Albert's phenomenal sex spree.

— Publishers' Weekly

Albert's work is the fount of carnal knowledge. He knows exactly how badly behaved people will act in order to get their rocks off, and furthermore, he'll have you on his side to urge them on. There will be no easy reckoning or soft landings, but he'll have his reader gnawing on the same bone by the time he's done.

 

In Bending, by Greta Christina, we have the story of a girl who can't get enough of one particular thing. It's bending over-- literally. She's sick of having to say, "Okay, I'm through," when in fact she's never come close to her limit. Unlike most women, she's not prepared to fake and be demure. Her lovers and friends finally devise a scheme to test her endurance, and therein lies the tale.

The story seems so simple-- a girl fixated on coming in her favorite position. (Show of hands, please?) But our heroine's walkabout to understand her desire and her unusual relationship with her lovers are eye-opening in their design. Her romance is with a greater community than two, and her vision is even bigger than her ass-up appetite.

"A must-read in bed with towel nearby. I've been a longtime fan of Greta Christina's writing, and here she is at her very best -- and in excellent company."

— Annie Sprinkle

 

Finally, in Jodi K, by Jill Soloway, we are introduced to a teenage diary, penned by a dentist's daughter in suburban Chicago. Jodi, our narrator, is savvy enough to realize that grown-ups are fixated on protecting and simultaneously exploiting her every sexual feeling for the "dirty parts" -- but she's not about to leave any predictable droppings behind her.

Soloway has an uncanny ability to get waaaay inside the defiance, self-absorption, and havoc of the horny teenager's imagination. She makes it all seem as close as wet laundry— more than a little sweaty, and impossible to wriggle out of.

"Intense, unjudgmental, hilarious, and wise."

— Alan Ball

 

These three authors didn't let their hell-and-lust-bent characters get off with anything the easy way. Their bed-tossed struggle was my delight; my vicarious thrills were pushed to their limits. I'm pleased to say I was still left gasping, "Oh yes, I'd do it all over again!" Isn't that what we always long to say-- our parachute billowing around us, barely on the ground, the silk swirling at our feet?

Continued in Three Kinds of Asking For It

 

 

Illustration: Edward Hopper, “Morning Sun” (1952)

The Impact of "Nothing But the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image"

Wonderfully titillating, January 3, 2011

I bought this book as a gift for my girlfriend. I was looking for a book of photos; something like a coffeetable book and this was perfect! The images captured are fantastic and the subject matter is raw. It is not just pretty pictures of mainstream sterotypical beautiful girls. It has pictures of gorgeous women from all walks of life- femmes, dykes, heavy, small, perfect, scarred, soft and hardcore. I was impressed and she LOVED it. I highly recommend it for those who appreciate the real deal and love artistic expression.

 

This book could save women's lives, November 22, 2010

This is not "I kissed a girl and I liked it." It's certainly not the Cosmo lesbian (even though I like Cosmo just fine, thanks). Listen to this line from Jill Posener: "When I was 15...I had recently seen the movie "The Fox". I went to the movie theatre on my own, I came away with this blinding headache--you know, that throbbing when you've just been told you have a fatal disease." This is when she told her mother "I think I'm a lesbian." 
There is a fierce quality to that quote that defines the whole book: When loving between women is so raw, so unstoppable, that it can't be undone, and a life is altered. Our society would say the "blatant lesbian image" is not marketable, not pretty enough--but these photos show it is. 

They are very explicit, especially the BDSM, and the Butch Bois are so, well, BUTCH, that it made my eyes hurt. Even underneath that, the reader can see how gorgeous women are, even when they're dressed up like macho men. The female presence persists, in spite of it all. I laughed when I read that some of the women only watch Gay Male porn, because female porn is just too LOVING. 

I found the feminism refreshing, because it's not politically correct. Every photographer in the book agreed: women can't be liberated if our voices are ignored, made soft and sweet--because it's just another cage. It's not misunderstanding of sexuality that leads to violence against women, but hatred of women, period. At least that's what I got out of the essays. 
There's alot of grief, too, in the writing. The dedication reads:" for the lesbian artists who are not in the collection, because you fear for your job, because you fear abandonment..." and it's a relief that someone admits it. 

When I was in college, I read a pretty heterosexual feminist who wrote "The male body is my homeland." I wonder if she ever had to pay a price for loving men. Did it change her life? Her religion? Did her family kick her out? For the writers and photographers in this book, the female body and soul is the ultimate homeland, worth every fight and every price.

 

A different look at a classic vision, June 20, 2008

The female nude has been a staple of western art for at least the last half-millenium. More often than not, male artists and male viewers (me included) approach that vision with a rational esthetic edged with an animal desire. The thing is, others look at women's beauty with animal desire, too. 

Other women, for example. Sex being what it is to our species, even minor differences in approach take on large meanings. Likewise, even large differences can take on minor meanings, or none at all. This remarkable collection shows both aspects of that contrast (or lack) between the lesbian and the classically straight images of desire. That cover shot appeals to me, for example. I've always liked the woman's figure that radiates physical power so different from men's. 

All that said, I come away from this collection with mixed impressions. Parts of it seem more documentary. Yes, some ladies do have a muff nearly from knee to navel and fuzzy bits in other unfashionable locations, but the same hormones that tend toward body hair also tend to intensify sexual expressiveness, as at least one model demonstrates. I'm not one to take prettiness for beauty - if you prefer to think of it this way, "God doesn't make mistakes." There's a strong fetish element in this collection, often with leather and occasionally with pain, that does nothing for me, likewise the femme extreme of seamed stockings, lingerie unrelated to real underclothes, and tottery heels. Other exaggerations don't appeal to me either. I don't see that much distinction between the super-butch and the macho man, or control play no matter who controls whom or how harshly. But others parts attract me strongly. Gentle play always appeals to me, even solo or gentle-with-an-edge; given that, the specific players tend to matter less to me. And simple photographic statements that a woman's figure is a really cool thing, well, I'm right there for it. 

I'm not in this collection's target demographic, even though I'm in its target species, so parts of its esthetic passed by me. Many of the photos captivated me, though. Many others documented a view that I don't share, and so piqued my interest. 
-- wiredweird

Thank You Susie! from a Man, March 14, 2007

I do love this book! It's so far removed from the glossy, polished, airbrushed world so many perceive as the norm for Lesbians, all their (mis) information having come from the fantasy world of pornography, a world run by mostly male or compliant, obedient, submissive women. Real lesbians are more likely to have hairy underarms and vaginas, have their own behaviours and love rituals, possibly even involving hurting each other and the subsequent compassion of that shared pain and they mostly don't live in the Penthouses and Billion dollar properties that high gloss image creators can afford to hire for a day's photo-shoot. 

Real lesbians are often overweight by comparison (as are most of the straight peers to the glamour/fantasy industry's girls), living real and normal lives in real and normal places and suffering the same real and normal emotional harrowings the rest of us do on life's path. 

I enjoy the casual candour of this book, so accepting of everything from some pretty `out there' behaviours to the same casual acceptance of the possibility of lesbians wanting sex with a man now and then (often a demonized lust in the `scene' circles where we men are sometimes more perceived as `the enemy' by the militant). 

I don't care what your `thing' is, gay, straight, outrageously kinky, bizarre or whatever. What I will always applaud is open acceptance of anyone's behaviour that doesn't interfere with any other's right to the same (and that protects the aged, the children and the infirm-the responsibility of all of us who are blessed not to be in the vulnerable categories).

The other thing I love about this book is it so readily acknowledges the power and force of female sex drive-That connection to the sacred when in it's purest form there is no taboo-Where it can be Blood, saliva, vaginal fluid, menstrual discharge, where all is felt, expressed and experienced with abandon and total absorption in the fragility and momentary nature of our humanity and the indestructibility and eternity of our spirituality.

For all the books about sexuality and `guides' by people who write like it's a manual and provide pictures that are so sterile and unemotional they could make a red blooded bloke contemplate celibacy, it's almost a pity that the heights and power provided by abandon and surrender is found in a gay womens' manuscript, but who cares? At least someone is acknowledging it and maybe it's some compensation for Lesbians having to deal with being a marginalized minority most of the time. (Access to `the secret'?!!) 
Cheers 
Lloyd 

Larger than life compilation, September 12, 2006

This is an amazing collection. Explicit photos and top of the line production quality. 

I enjoyed how the chapters and photographs were presented. The introductions do a great job explaining to the reader what they are about to see and they should not be skipped. The first four sections (labeled Dyke, C*unt, Butch and Sex) carry a huge spectrum of images from the lovely to the not so lovely, from the sensual to the outrageous. I can't imagine the editors believe all the images would appeal to all the readers so I chose to enjoy what I found appealing, study those I didn't and move on. 

I initially bought the book as it has a wealth of material by the artist Tee A. Corinne and devotes 8 pages to her and another 5 of her images are carried in other sections. The other major artists profiled are Honey Lee Cottrell, Della Grace, Morgan Gwenwald and Jil Posener. 

I especially enjoyed the sidebar that accompanied many of the pages `Behind the Camera: Interviews with the Artists'. The candid replies by the artists made for exceptional reading. 

 

Provactive, Challenging, and Honest, July 11, 1998

A provactive look at real lesbian sexual life at the edge. Some of the photographs are artistically brilliant, some are fascinating, and some may be repellent, but all have an honesty and intensity which is refreshing and unusual. As a photographer, I highly recommend it. Some of the images are quite graphic and powerful.

A different look at a classic vision, June 20, 2008

The female nude has been a staple of western art for at least the last half-millenium. More often than not, male artists and male viewers (me included) approach that vision with a rational esthetic edged with an animal desire. The thing is, others look at women's beauty with animal desire, too. 

Other women, for example. Sex being what it is to our species, even minor differences in approach take on large meanings. Likewise, even large differences can take on minor meanings, or none at all. This remarkable collection shows both aspects of that contrast (or lack) between the lesbian and the classically straight images of desire. That cover shot appeals to me, for example. I've always liked the woman's figure that radiates physical power so different from men's. 

All that said, I come away from this collection with mixed impressions. Parts of it seem more documentary. Yes, some ladies do have a muff nearly from knee to navel and fuzzy bits in other unfashionable locations, but the same hormones that tend toward body hair also tend to intensify sexual expressiveness, as at least one model demonstrates. I'm not one to take prettiness for beauty - if you prefer to think of it this way, "God doesn't make mistakes."

There's a strong fetish element in this collection, often with leather and occasionally with pain, that does nothing for me, likewise the femme extreme of seamed stockings, lingerie unrelated to real underclothes, and tottery heels. Other exaggerations don't appeal to me either. I don't see that much distinction between the super-butch and the macho man, or control play no matter who controls whom or how harshly. But others parts attract me strongly.

Gentle play always appeals to me, even solo or gentle-with-an-edge; given that, the specific players tend to matter less to me. And simple photographic statements that a woman's figure is a really cool thing, well, I'm right there for it. 

I'm not in this collection's target demographic, even though I'm in its target species, so parts of its esthetic passed by me. Many of the photos captivated me, though. Many others documented a view that I don't share, and so piqued my interest. On the whole, I find this collection decidedly mixed in its match to my preferences. 
-- wiredweird

 

Reviews: Amazon Customer Page

 

Top to Bottom Photos:

Jessica Tanzer

Clare Garoutte

Jill Posener

Del LaGrace Volcano

Honey Lee Cottrell

Romy Suskin

 

 

 

Strip Tea Party: A Ladies' Literary Salon with Six Naked Silent Slaveboys

You know how hard it is to get good service nowadays. Chivalry is a corpse, discretion is unheard of, and elegance—elegance is currently defined by advertisements for discount furniture.

A wellbred woman might spend her entire maturity never once hearing the words "May I be of service to you?"—although she may spend her life waiting on others, particularly children and men. Such a predicament could make strong women weep and gnash their teeth, but when the going gets tough, the tough throw a party. A very unusual party.

"Strip Tea" from Susie Bright's Sexual Reality

It all started when I received an invitation to attend a salon of women artists. We were offered an occasion to read aloud, sketch, and indulge ourselves in a proper High Tea. Most intriguing of all, the invitation promised we would be served our scones and punch by naked slaveboys who would not speak unless spoken to. The aspect of social nudity was of course titillating, but would ordinary men actually keep their lips buttoned for an approximately five-hour affair? That had to be seen to be believed. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Upon arrival, I was indeed greeted by a nude doorman who took my coat. Alas, he was the only servant in sight, and in the meantime, guests were arriving by the score. What a delightful group of invitees they were, too. If I had been able to get a simple cup of hot Earl Grey, my afternoon would have been complete.

But unfortunately, although the company was sublime and the concept impeccable, only two slaveboys were on hand to provide services, and despite their best intentions, I don't think either of them had ever so much as poured a cup of decaf.

The guests were uneducated in the fine art of being served. Though a couple of us were dressed in literary salon frocks, some came in sweatpants. One lovely woman offered to get up and fetch me a scone, and when I gently reminded her she was a guest, she pleaded with me, "It doesn't matter, I'm a bottom in real life." Ah yes, but real life was what we were trying to escape.

The ultimate affront was the vision, midway through the party, of an attractive girl on her knees, giving a "slaveboy" a neck massage!

I departed with my friend, Laura. We reviewed the afternoon and agreed it had been a wonderful, yet insufficient, experience. Wouldn't it be perfect to have a party like that in a grand mansion, with slaveboys who looked like Greek gods and served like altar boys?

"I'll dream of it," I told her as we parted, but Laura wasted no time in wistfulness.

The very next day, she called me. "My friend Amy has a beautiful home in the Berkeley hills, and she would love to hostess the kind of tea party we have in mind. The living room is Byronic, and there are even special servants' quarters."

I blinked. The first hurdle, getting out of our filthy, tiny, crime-ridden neighborhood apartments, had been overcome in the twinkling of a phone call. Now where on earth would we find the slaveboys?

Laura was an editor of local weekly paper at the time, where personal ads of all persuasions abounded. She agreed to place an ad for four weeks, but I had my doubts about getting much of a response to anything so bizarre. I was more confident that in my Rolodex I would find lots of liberated men who would love to serve us tea.

Little did I know the raw nerves our search would scratch. I got my first glimpse of the reaction during a trip to my mechanic. "Look what I'm up to," I said, pulling into the garage and waving my carefully typed personal ad:

Genteel and Bohemian gathering of women writers requires comely slaveboys to serve at our tea party. You will serve nude and will not speak unless spoken to. Standards are high. Food and beverage experience a must. No sex. Please send photo and qualifications to Madam Tea Party.

"What the fuck do I want with waiting on a bunch of broads?" asked Tom, leaning against his desk. "You're not paying anything for this? No way."

Some little lost feminist emotion in me snapped. "Women have been waiting on you from the time you were born," I said. "And you can't imagine switching sides for a couple of hours?"

The next week, I saw Tom again, and he asked how my search was going. The ad had not yet appeared, and I was getting nowhere.

My gay friends said they wouldn't have any fun waiting on women. "Why not?" I asked. "Whatever happened to your sense of classic theater? This isn't a pickup scene, it's the tea to end all teas!"

My straight friends, even the most sympathetic, went into a panic about penis size and fantasized far more permanent humiliation than anything I had in mind.

All my reassurances were in vain. But fate was about to turn her head. The Wednesday paper hit the streets... 

Continued in Susie Bright's Sexual Reality, "Strip Tea"

 

Photo: Michael Rosen, of the late Tom O'Conner, our chef for the Tea Party, and Susie Bright

The Rise of Erotic Horror

Erotica is dead.

I've felt her cold little fingers tap-tap-tapping on my shoulder all year long, occasionally reaching over to pinch my tits and laugh at my irritation. Then just to show how really far gone she is, when Erotica got sick of all my denials and rationalizations, she'd take my head away from my computer screen, turn me toward a full moon shining outside my window, and begin to HOWL.

Best American Erotica 1996

Introduction by Susie Bright

You see, when I say erotica is dead, I certainly don't mean lifeless, quiet, or finite. I don't mean that the literary lovers are all wearing black, that what once was a stroke book is now a vale of tears. It's just that certain tenets of the genre have finally kicked the bucket.

Chief among those dead mysteries is "What is the difference between erotica and pornography?" No one can stay awake for that one anymore.

There's a new question about sex writing and it comes straight from the authors to the readers: "Did I move you?"

The Erotic vs. Porn debate is the modern version of an ancient set of class distinctions that are also wisely bowing out of the picture. That old chestnut was whether REAL literature could be sexually explicit, or if REAL porn could be literary.

A lot of writers have been in hiding for years over this taboo, their pseudonyms hovering like protective cover.

But now the bell has tolled. Those pretensions and snobberies are yesterday's hangover and no one wants to hear them anymore. The questions readers put to writers today are: Were you honest? Was it real? The sex doesn't always have to get us off, each and every one, but we damn well better believe it had its author by the short and curlies.

Erotica's death is a rebirth, a bonfire of old values and a kick in the pants to the end of the century. The artists writing about sex today are writing more prolifically and competitively about sex than ever before.

There is a spontaneous consensus gathering that contemporary erotic writing is not about a warm, trusting glow or "expert" lovemaking, but about the hair-raising, erection-bolting, clittingling chills coming at you from behind. Erotica is dead, not like a doornail, but like a grip that you can't shake.

Some of the new school of erotic writing does flat-out embrace horror and the supernatural.

In past editions of The Best American Erotica, we've seen Anne Rice's notorious vampires, Nick Baker's antihero possessed by a horny succubus, a werewolf making his match, and assorted other blood-loving Casanovas. Their adventures were a pure gothic delight-- and so romantic we couldn't help but fall in love with them too.

But now, naturally, the ante has been raised. Many characters in this volume of The Best American Erotica 1996 are non-gothics, as alive as you and me, but like their supernatural predecessors they are not afforded redemption. The flame is never extinguished. Neither the protagonist nor the reader ever makes it off the hot seat.

When I first read Lucy Taylor (her story "Choke Hold" represents her work here), she had me so bug-eyed I didn't know whether to call a cop, a priest, or just turn the vibrator up a notch.Taylor's work represents a new genre-- erotic horror-- that takes every precious notion of the intact body and punches right through it.

Another example this year is Aaron Travis's story "The Hit," which mixes a grisly crime thriller with hungry sadomasochism. (Travis is famous Roman historian Steven Saylor's pen name in erotic fiction).

Travis told me his story was rejected by the gay leather mags that he routinely publishes in-- not because of the sex, but because of the "crime"-- the moral outrage out of the bed rather than in it.Travis was ahead of his time, a predictor to the pop cult sensations of films like Pulp Fiction. 

Another prime example is this past year's most talked-about erotic crossover novel, in the cut, by Susanna Moore. Moore is just as relentless as Travis in her deliberate-- and heterosexual, this time-- mixture of suspense, fatal attractions, and the erotic persuasion of submission and domination.

The power of sexual desire to take us out of ourselves, our normal behavior, is legendary. The very nonsense of "normalcy" is really what the erotic funeral is all about here, because authors of the new school are spitting on the grave of conventionality, of moribund expectations.

Sometimes I think this volume is one angry answer to that chart-topping rightwing bestseller, The Book of Virtues, by William Bennett. Bennett, the "Drug Czar" under President George Bush, offers a list of character traits that make a man great, the qualities that make for a stand-up sort of life.

He's got the WASP work ethic down to a "T," but his list is a list for a toy soldier, not a person. It completely omits the fire that makes us creative: our sexuality, our erotic thumbprint our desires so fierce they defy what is expected of us.

If William Bennett were to critique the turn in erotic fiction today, I think they would say that the reason there is so much PERVERSION, VIOLENCE, and CYNICISM man in today's fiction is that "this whole country has gone to hell" in a handbasket woven of MORAL DECAY. If everyone would just take a good hot BATH and refresh themselves in the Ten Commandments, GET A JOB AND STOP BELLYACHING, then we would see stories about good old-fashioned romance and marriages that last.

Blink.

But there are no jobs— not the way Americans ever understood a "job" to be, a place of security and opportunity. The very notion of "job" sounds like a retro item, something to pitied and escaped from, as writer Doug Tierney's protagonist does in "The Portable Girlfriend."

As for bellies aching-- well, they are. We have the ache of need and betrayal among the have-nots, and the ache of fear and loathing among the haves. Bellies are churning, period.

"Perversion" is the right-wing code word for gender chaos, the alarm that boys and girls are not keeping their pink and blue uniforms on at all times. Ken and Barbie don't live here anymore, and there's no putting that fragile little relationship back together again. Women have had it with the Madonna/Whore game, and authors in this volume like Amelia Copeland, Camille Roy, Linda Smukler, and Shar Rednour prove it.

Over on the boy side, there's a similar antipathy for the double standard. Men know that the only thing more terrifying than being swept away is to never have been lifted off their feet. See this year's authors Estabrook, Robert Glück, and David Shields for more persuasion. Word is out; to succumb is bliss.

Next up on the conservative's naughty list of literary topics is "violence." Liberals are similarly alarmed. Sex-and violence is that two-headed dog with a wet and very sensitive nose that won't go away. Every time we try to push him away, say he's not right, he comes back even more persistently-- he can smell you and knows you're hiding something.

You've heard all the standard explanations about the whys and wherefores of sex and violence's allure. Wonder why they still leave you doubting? That's because no one has really got this number pinned— not the shrinks, not the cops, not the media executives. They're equally desperate to keep the lid on, with their various punishments, medications, and dubious statistical reports. Whatever their lid is, their suppression has become one of the most important elements in proving the power of sensation's appeal.

The erotic combination of sex and violence has this in common: they both assume an entrance into our body.

Before sex, before a violent act, our bodies are closed, there is no tear in the fabric, we are intact-- a safe, but impenetrably blank, place to be. It's only when a thread comes undone, when we unravel, that our peril and pleasure spill out: the come, the blood, the tears, the shit, the cries. We can't not be affected, and of course, our real bodies can only spill so much.

In our erotic storytelling, though, we spill over and over, on a vicarious level that we can't live without.

Finally, we have the smudge mark of cynicism, the black humor in erotica that I find so prevalent in all fiction these days. Cynicism begs the question "Ask me if I care?" and the thing to pay attention to is not the question, but the begging.

My favorite book title in 1996 was The New Fuck YOU: Adventures in Lesbian Reading (from which I've excerpted "Morning Love" by Linda Smukler, in this volume). I can't help but smile every time I pass the title on my bookshelf. My sex pistol is in my own pocket, loaded, ready to squirt at all the lies and delusions I'm asked to digest on a daily basis about what is great literature, great beauty, great politics, great religions.

Mainstream media agit-prop has reached surreal proportions. Who honestly believes that supermodels are the essence of feminine power, or that the White House is the leader of democracy, or that Christianity is about the righteousness of one man over another?

Our literary cynicism is a necessity-- because the gap between the advertisement of our culture and what's really going down is so gigantic that all we can do is free-fall, laughing and bellowing all the way down.

Some corners of our erotic minds are still soft and precious. In a story like Bonny Finberg's "Light," the erotic experience is about being so innocent, such a pure infant in the world, that all love is erotic, all body is sensuality, there are no definitions yet. Sometimes erotic love is that 

Continued in Best American Erotica 1996, "Introduction"

 

Photo: Phyllis Christopher, Nothing But The Girl

I Am Curious (Butterball) & The Legend of John Holmes

I Am Curious (Butterball) —March, 1987 The honesty of fat appeal in fat-fetish videos is a slap in the gaunt cheekbones to every diet-crazy lecture on sex appeal. As soon as the 150-pound reviewer, such as myself, gets over the unexpected image of fat lust— fat girls who are supposed to hide themselves in sackcloths until Oprah Winfrey liberates them – it’s apparent that there are a lot of sex-positive pornographic myths about fat ladies, and these fetish videos exploit every one of them. Porn never dictates social convention, but it follows it like a bloodhound, showing us the stereotypes that no one has the nerve to talk about in public. The cliché about white men is that they are supposed to be the ones who are the most uptight about fatness. If you aren't a WASP, you are "allowed" to have a sensuous appreciation of the female form that is bigger, wider and more earthy. White porn studs are "supposed to" consider it degrading to work in a fat video. This is all just PR; it has nothing to do with their private lives.  They’ll say "in public" that fat couldn’t get them hard, even though what they’re mainly worried about going soft is their White Woodsman reputation. It pisses me off... It seems that fat appreciation is being compromised by the constant snooty dig that this kind of sex is deemed tacky, an embarrassment, and that if the viewer had any class they'd be watching “normal” women.  Fat sex is portrayed as something that couldn’t be truly passionate – it’s just a frat-house joke.  It's quite the opposite once you get to the actual sex scenes. Contined in "Susie Bright's Erotic Screen, Volume 1" Photo: Laurie Toby Edison's book, Women En Large   Saint John & the Art of Going Down —June, 1988 John Holmes was not the only man in the world with 12 or 14 inches, but his art is the reason why he is the only one who became the king of blue movies using it. Instead of watching a movie about inches, with the "Angel in Mr. Holmes," I’ve witnessed a virtual orgy of devotion to women’s pleasure. I rewind and look at my favorite sequences to see if I’m imagining things, but it’s true. There’s a man on that screen actually making love to a woman. It’s not aerobic humping, it’s not intercourse as posing, it’s not metronomic close-ups. ... Holmes’ encounter with Nancy Suiter, following the one with Seka, is extraordinary, worth having forever. Nancy and John begin between the sheets, no plot device or punch line. John has obviously prepared Ms. Suiter for this moment. You can feel her softness; it transcend the camera. When he enters her, she melts. He never takes his eyes off her; he carries her like a wave. His attention to and sympathy for what she’s feeling never diminish.  The next sequence pairs Holmes with Taylor Evans and Muffin MacIntosh, and this scene focuses not on John’s cock, but on his tongue.  He eats pussy like he’s sucking his own. The cameraman obviously recognizes a fellow artist, because he captures the oral lovemaking as delicately as he would a butterfly. You can follow all the changes in Taylor’s clit and lips. It’s beautiful. So many video makers give cunnilingus the “ugly treatment” or the gynecological-survey approach. But the difference here is a treat to behold – and to feel. Contined in "Susie Bright's Erotic Screen, Volume 1"