Susie Bright's Journal

Aztec Classes with My Father: From Nahuatl to Yiddish

 

Dear Lise and Susie,

This email to you has been germinating for several years.

I was a student of your father's— or as I knew him,"Professor Bright"—  at UCLA in the early 1970s.

Since reading his 2006 obituary in the Times, I have wanted to write you a note expressing my condolences and telling Dr. Bright stories.

I can see the bandana'ed man as I write. In fact, even without knowing him, he was one of the reasons I chose UCLA for grad school.

I had been living in Mexico as a Fulbrighter, studying at the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia and working at the Museo de Antropologia.

After months of fieldwork where I would "run out of questions," I knew something was missing and that I needed to go to graduate school. UCLA came out on top because I wanted to study Nahuatl to do fieldwork with contemporary Aztecs, whose embroidery I had fallen in love with. This may seem a roundabout way to learn a language but you have enter one door or another.

The class was filled with serious people. One, in particular, was a professor, Dr. Lockhart, who wrote ethno-history and was deep into codices and all sorts of colonial Mexican research. Everyone loved going to class. I don't even remember if we took it for credit or not! It was a special time each week when we got to study together.

I was probably the youngest and least experienced in the class but my motivation was fun and alive. Dr. Bright let me know that he thought contemporary ethnography was still cool, even as other anthro types were beginning to think less of it. I recall taking him paliacates, Mexican bandanas, which come in great colors in additional to red. I think he liked them as his "dress-up" bandanas.

Anyhow, there is one day I shall never forget. Dr. Bright had asked us to translate a series of sentences into Nahuatl. We went around the table reading them. Each student would comment or correct the other. Not a big deal.

When it was my turn, I read my sentences. Fine. Dr. Bright asked me to read them again, and I think a third time, too. No grammatical errors. What was the matter?

He said he was just listening carefully to figure out the "accent that I had in Nahuatl." It wasn't English, not Spanish, not French.

He was stumped. "Jill, I just can't figure out what your accent in Nahuatl is."

"Oh, Dr. Bright, it's easy. It's Yiddish."

The man went crazy with laughter!

Later, I did go on to do research in a Nahuatl-speaking village in highland Puebla, learned an enormous amount of Nahuatl, and thought of him often. It was exactly like knowing "Latin in Florence" because everything helped-- to the point that people in the village actually thought I understood them all the time! Hardly the case, but it was a real icebreaker and essential to the whole endeavor.

In the course of writing my dissertation, I was back at UCLA on several occasions and always had the good fortune to have lunch or a coffee with Dr. Bright. Moments to treasure, for sure. Yiddish was the key to a special communication as it has been for countless others.

For whatever comfort it may be to you, his teaching and spirit infused my years at UCLA with that real "joy of learning" that one hears about. As much as I went to school, college, grad school and thought I liked it, at UCLA, I loved it. Dr. Bright was so special to me. It's amazing how great a gal can feel when a prof asks her to have coffee one day. Simple but a giant memory.

Thank you for letting me tell you this story. In the never-too-late vein, I am reminded of the Hasidic saying: "When you say the name of a person who has died, the person comes to life for that moment."

Bill was a marvelous professor and inspiration to me. I am truly sad that he is no longer among the living but he is very much a part of wonderful memories of the joy of learning at UCLA.

All the best with fond memories,

Sincerely yours,

Jill Vexler

 

 

My stepmother Lise and I were delighted to hear Jill's stories and we both wrote her back.

I told her that I also remember my dad's Nahuatl class because he said it was his very favorite, the one class he really looked forward to every week— during a time when he was seriously burnt out on university politics.

I told her he'd been wearing bandanas for as long as I could remember (see my 1959 photo above!)

She replied to me again:               

 

Dear Susie,

Wow; your response made my day, too! I mean, how many people really took Nahuatl who wanted to SPEAK it on the street?

Not many! But they were teaching language classes in Quechua (from the Andes) and Quiché (from Guatemala) down the hall, so why not give Mexico some time!

I can't tell you have many times here  in New York, by just sprinkling a few words of Nahuatl in my daily conversation, I've stopped people in their tracks. I mean, deer in headlights, stopped!

It isn't all that exotic, since the largest group of Mexicans to immigrate to NYC are from Puebla and Guerrero, both of which are states with large numbers of Nahuatl-speakers.

Mostly, it is their grandparents who speak the language, but many still speak a little and some are fluent.

I remember one night in a Belgian restaurant, I asked the waiter in Spanish for water. We chatted and he heard my Mexican accent. Something clicked when he said the name of his village, which I had been to, so I asked him in Nahuatl (also just called "Mexicano") if he spoke Mexicano.

Glad he wasn't carrying a tray of glasses! He was stunned and a huge grin spread across his face. Pity I didn't have more vocabulary at my fingertips but it was in the mid-70s that I did fieldwork in his region!

Nowadays I curate exhibitions related to the Holocaust and pre-war Jewish culture. That's the direction I took anthropology— museums, exhibitions, documentary films. I haven't done much work in Mexico or Latin America lately, but it is still the area I love. I'd rather just go to Mexico and visit friends and keep learning than work there. "Oaxaca to Poland" might sound pretty drastic but wonderful people and adventures are everywhere with the right head on your shoulders.  

And besides, a lot of Poles migrated to Mexico in the '40s and it's a real kick to tell them I've been to their hometowns— the reverse of the NYC waiter!— like Sosnowiec!

All the best and thank you for letting me reminisce.

Sincerely,

Jill

 

 

Bill's obit in the NYTimes, by Margalit Fox:

William Bright, an internationally renowned linguist who spent more than half a century inventorying the vanishing riches of the indigenous languages of the United States, died on Oct. 15 in Louisville, Colo. He was 78 and lived in Boulder, Colo.

The cause was a brain tumor, said his daughter, Susie Bright, the well-known writer of erotica.

At his death, Mr. Bright was professor adjoint of linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was also emeritus professor of linguistics and anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught from 1959 to 1988.

An authority on the native languages and cultures of California, Mr. Bright was known in particular for his work on Karuk (also spelled Karok), an American Indian language from the northwest part of the state. Shortly before his death, in recognition of his efforts to document and preserve the language, he was made an honorary member of the Karuk tribe, the first outsider to be so honored.

His books include “American Indian Linguistics and Literature” (Mouton, 1984); “A Coyote Reader” (University of California, 1993); “1,500 California Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning” (University of California, 1998); and “Native American Placenames of the United States” (University of Oklahoma, 2004).

Mr. Bright’s approach to the study of language was one seldom seen nowadays. With the ascendance of Noam Chomsky in the late 1950’s, linguistics shifted its focus from documenting language as an artifact of human culture to analyzing it as a window onto human cognition.

But to Mr. Bright, language was inseparable from its cultural context, which might include songs, poetry, stories and everyday conversation. And so, lugging unwieldy recording devices, he continued to make forays into traditional communities around the world, sitting down with native speakers and eliciting words, phrases and sentences.

Among the languages on which he worked were Nahuatl, an Aztec language of Mexico; Cakchiquel, of Guatemala; Luiseño, Ute, Wishram and Yurok, languages of the Western United States; and Lushai, Kannada, Tamil and Tulu, languages of the Indian subcontinent.

William Oliver Bright was born on Aug. 13, 1928, in Oxnard, Calif. He received a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949. After a stint in Army intelligence, he earned a doctorate in linguistics from Berkeley in 1955.

He began his fieldwork among the Karuk in 1949. At the time, their language was a tattered remnant of its former splendor, spoken by just a handful of elders. Since encounters with Europeans had rarely ended well for the Karuk, the community had little reason to welcome an outsider.

But Bill Bright was deferential, curious and, at 21, scarcely more than a boy. He was also visibly homesick. The Karuk grandmothers took him in, baking him cookies and cakes and sharing their language. They named him Uhyanapatanvaanich, “little word-asker.”

In 1957, Mr. Bright published “The Karok Language” (University of California), a detailed description of the language and its structure. Last year, the tribe published a Karuk dictionary, compiled by Mr. Bright and Susan Gehr. Today, Karuk children learn the language in tribal schools.

Mr. Bright was divorced twice and widowed twice. From his first marriage, he is survived by his daughter, Susannah (known as Susie), of Santa Cruz, Calif. Also surviving are his wife, Lise Menn, a professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado; two stepsons, Stephen Menn of Montreal and Joseph Menn of Los Angeles; one grandchild; and two step-grandchildren.

His other books include “The World’s Writing Systems” (Oxford University, 1996), which he edited with Peter T. Daniels; and the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Oxford University, 1992), of which he was editor in chief. From 1966 to 1987, Mr. Bright was the editor of Language, the field’s flagship journal.

The professor was also a meticulous reader of all his daughter’s manuscripts. He displayed the finished products — among them “Susie Bright’s Sexual State of the Union” and “Mommy’s Little Girl: On Sex, Motherhood, Porn and Cherry Pie” — proudly on his shelves at home.

Pinterest is Like Calgon, It Takes You Away

 

 

 

 

My first reaction to the hype about Pinterest was like many:"Why on earth would I want to be part of ANOTHER social blahdeblah... give me a break."

However! This is a place where you communicate almost entirely in pictures. It accesses ths other part of your brain... the visual gallery. The morgue files. I really like it. 

Here are my "pinning" boards so far: 

Wake Up Gay in the Morning ("I'd call you a cunt, but you don't have enough depth or warmth")

Graffiti

Nickelodeon

Love Them (people I love past and present)

Qué Me Ponga?

The Library That Wouldn't Quit

Recipes (one of the busiest places on Pinterest and a great way to keep an index)

The Book Tour Diary

Liquor Cabinet (this is actually how this started, I had a practical need for a visual inventory)

Oh, The Places You'll Go

Don't Be a Scab

O'Reilly's Daughter -- my new St. Patricks Day Irish Catholic in your face place

For Romper (ok, this is my cute animal and babybabybaby place)

The Voice I'll Never Forget -- audiobooks I've listened to a thousand times

My Grandma's Silent Movie Star Collection - From North Dakota to Hollywood

Around 1916-1919, my grandmother Agnes Williams was the piano player at one of North Dakota's first Nickelodeon Theaters.

A tremendous fan of early Hollywood pictures, Agnes wrote letters to every actor of the era— and they often replied to her fan notes, enclosing a signed photographic print of themselves.

There are names we still recognize today: Charlie Chaplin, the Gish sisters, William S. Hart, Theda Bara.

But virtually all these early picture stars were huge celebrities in their period, and you will find their "star" on the cement of Hollywood Blvd today.

I've included wikipedia or IMDB links where I could find them: I think you'll find their lives fascinating, and quite a parable for our own pop culture icons.

There are a couple photos I cannot identify, and if you are a silent film buff, please do add your notes in the comments-- I will be grateful!

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

 

 

 

A Brief History of On Our Backs, 1984-1991

A History Of On Our Backs: 

Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian

 The Original: 1984-1990

 

January, 2009: I wrote this very brief history because when I checked online for a history of On Our Backs, there was nothing at all. 

OOB was an influential and remarkable part of lesbian, feminist, and publishing history. I had to cobble something together, and this was a start.

I was the editor in chief from our first year, 1984, until early 1991.

The magazine itself has been long out of business. It had two owners and several staffs after I left. Hopefully, others will write their story someday!  

There is a complete set of On Our Backs magazines at Brown University library, available to scholars to review at the library.

 Update, 3.25.11: I have written a more complete and intimate history of my time at On Our Backs, called “Big Sex Little Death.”

For a photographic history of OOB, I'd suggest the book Jill Posener and I edited, "Nothing But the Girl."

Update, 9.1.11: OOB staffers, models, and contributors, from 1983-1991:  We have created a private Facebook group. Please contact Susie or Lulu or Nan, at their FB addresses, if you would like to join us.

 If you know of any other histories of On Our Backs in print, please contact me at susie@susiebright.com.

  

I moved to San Francisco in 1980, where I  lived the life of the femme diva starlet in an anarchist commune in the barrio. In other words, typical City living. 

One night, I read a poem comparing fisting my girlfriend to quantum physics at Modern Times bookstore in their newly title queer poets series.  Queer was a subversive word at that time. Afterwards, this blonde chick with a pageboy slipped me a personal letter. She said she loved my poetry, and invited me to be a part of the first issue of On Our Backs, "entertainment for the adventurous lesbian." 

 If anyone has ever been seduced by the mere title of a promise, that was me. I had been a voracious teen reader of OFF our Backs, the feminist newsweekly, and it had broken my heart when their staff turned so viciously against sexual liberation.  This new magazine offered the perfect antidote.

That blonde with the blunt cut falling over her eyes was Myrna Elana, one of the cofounders of On Our Backs.  Her "work wife" and partner in crime was Debi Sundahl-- they worked in the peep shows and strip clubs of the Tenderloin district, and shared a Victorian in the Haight Ashbury with Debi's lover, Nan.  

In the beginning, i was just a contributor waiting for the bells to go off. But after several months of silence, I sought out these mysterious OOB girls. When I found them, I told them I had been part of a high school underground newspaper, and I could perform any shit work connected with getting a magazine out--- what could I do to help?  I could see they were overwhelmed. 

The main problem was... you guessed it... money.  They asked me to be the "Advertising Director," which if you knew my communist past, was a real laugh. But I worked at Good Vibrations at the time-- in fact, I was the only employee at Good Vibrations. 

I earnestly called all the vendors  I did business with, and asked them to take out little $25 and $50 ads in our debut issue. Hey, buy the whole page for $100! I remember our two big advertisers were Last Gasp Comix-- Ron Turner told me it was a "fine lesbian humor magazine" and just handed me cash-- and the Mitchell Brothers Theater-- Debi, as well as many of our first models, all worked in their sex club, or starred in their movies.

Kathy Andrew of Stormy Leather, the first woman to tailor leatherwear for women, was another one of our first advertisers. Kathy had an antique sewing machine that she  operated like a crazed elf in a leaking basement on Sanchez St.  Gosnell Duncan, who invented the silicon dildo, paid  us to do a crazy beach/mermaid photo shoot with his "products". It was the first national advertising for dildos, and every issue he let us do another “campaign”, culminating in our Mapplethorpe-esque Perfect Moment where we modeled his favorite item, "The Susie," with a callalily and a beautiful round mirror.

My lover Honey Lee Cottrell, shot most of our first photography for the first issues, including those ads for Gosnell. When I think back, she might have worked harder than any of us-- the photo shoots were so hard to arrange, and then there was endless printing in the Harvey Milk public photo labs.  She and HER ex-lover, Tee Corinne, had literally invented lesbian erotic photography in the 1970s. Morgan Gwenwald in New York was another pioneer.

You look at the first lesbian sex books, "Sapphistry" by Tee and Pat Califia, and "Coming to Power" by the Samois collective, and there you’ll find the first lesbian women opening showing their bodies and their sexuality. 

 It was no coincidence that the S/M, punk-era women were the first to show their faces to the public... they were the first to have the nerve. It was as if you had to be a  career whore, a dedicated outcast, to show your face in a lesbian  magazine... let alone your pussy. 

When OOB debuted, some readers complained that they wanted to see vanilla, "bank-teller" type babes in the pictures.  We replied, "Well, come on down and let us shoot you!"  ---Because the punk strippers didn't want to put on bank teller outfits, they wanted to express themselves.

I'd like to mention some of the models that changed the way lesbians think about themselves:  Terri and Caerage--- the most beautiful punk /butch -femme couple  ever. Rachel and Elexis-- who turned the black lesbian community upside down. Kitty Tsui did the same in Pacific/Asian dyke culture. Pepper, and  Rock ‘n’ Roll Ramona were the darlings of the first lesbian burlesque--- the girls would drown them in flowers and shots.  Cassie and Raven, both now deceased, ( breast cancer and suicide, respectively)  were the sexist women I ever laid eyes on. They started the first women's escort service and without a doubt could make ANY woman’s dream come true between the two of them.  I haven’t seen such sexual charisma since.

I'm not kidding about the revolutionary effect they had on strangers lives. ONe woman told me she took one look at the OOB cover of Rachel and Elexis, packed her bags in Minnesota that evening, and moved to California. That story was multiplied many times.

Expressing yourself was what it was all about. I look back on that first year and just sigh at all that talent, and the rage that had pent it all up. Dorothy Allison, Joan Nestle, Pat Califia, Sarah Schulman, Sapphire, myself--- we couldn't be published in the lesbian presses because of our politics and sexuality, and we couldn't be published in the mainstream world because of its overt homophobia and misogyny.  These were some of the best American writers of their generation!

Honey Lee and I were very close to Nan and Debbie, like a little family. There weren't a lot of butch femme younger couples at the time— in fact, we felt like the new demonstration. Even though Honey and Nan weren't technically "editors" they worked on the magazine all the time. When Nan got mildly injured at her day job  we were  delighted, because she got disability leave, and she never went back. She took over magazine distribution and embarked on the first lesbian porn video production with Deb.

Myrna and Debi had a falling out after the first issue, and I honestly don't know to this day what it was all about. I could see that Myrna was not into working 24/7 on On OUr Backs like the rest of us, which in hindsight, might have been wise of her!  But she dropped out, in any case, and I became editor.

I remember writing my first sex column “Toys For Us”-- that was fun. Those columns eventually became the basis for “Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World.”

In my first paragraph, I tried to convince dykes to get over their sex toy phobias, especially about penetration.  I said, "penetration is only as heterosexual as kissing is".  I teased everyone about how they could revolutionize their sex life with a little humor and playfulness.  My sentiments were quite spontaneous, but I realize now it was a novel approach. People had been SO GRIM about vibrators and sex toys-- they were called "marital aids,"  at the time, as if they were some kind of awful crutch. Only hookers and sex workers called them “toys!”

 

 Everyone thought sad, dirty old men were the customer base for such “aids”.  I had lesbians come into my sex toy shop and actually start CRYING about how they worried that they were going to be kicked out of the gay universe because they wanted to get fucked.   No one would believe it now.

The early OOB writers came from a few places, including a lot of classified ads we placed around lesbian journals that would take us. We inherited the Samois mailing list, which was huge at the time. Even though Samois was a lesbian S/M group, it ended up attracting every kind of women who was into sex on any level, because there was nowhere else to go! Plus, it was stuffed with intellectuals and artists.  The east coast counterpart was in New York, the Lesbian Sex Mafia (LSM).  

The gay men who edited Drummer were our mentors in many ways. John Rowberry, John Preston, Jack Fritscher.  They had patience and wisdom for everything from printer nightmares to diva models who suddenly acted like they were going to run for Miss America.

The magazine started out with three pieces of fiction, one major feature, a few columns of advice and reviews, and three pictorials. Just like Playboy! We even had a "Bulldagger of the Month" in our first issue.

We were so controversial in the beginning, it completely defined us. There were about three women's bookstores in the whole country who would sell us. Instead, we were distributed by gay men’s bookshops, anarchist/commie bookstores, the underground comix people, and a few old porn purveyors who thought we were a kick in the pants. Prominent women's bookstores either banned us, or carried one copy with a big sign on it about how treacherous and gynocidal we were. Just try and ask them for a copy! 

 It was bittersweet when I watched all those same bookstores go out of business  as the years went by. Part of their misfortune was tied to the overall demise of independent bookstores --- but to some degree they had alienated their natural audience by being such elitists and censors.  They never relented.  I loved the stubbornness of lesbian separatism, I even miss it now, but the anti-sex germ within it was nothing but pure destruction.

We thought our scene was awfully smart. I remember composing an ad for UTNE Reader, which read: "The most intelligent sex magazine in the world just happens to be lesbian."  That was truly our point of view. We were witty and incisive and outrageous. The men's' sex magazines were a torpid bore, straight women hadn't crawled out of their egg yet, and the academics were only talking theory while we were DOING IT.  We attracted subscribers from a new hip strata of the counter culture.

Here's another marvel:  On Our Backs is the first-- the very first-- national magazine produced with desktop publishing. Debi was the Mac visionary. She though Steve Jobs was  a genius and bought us their first personal computer. I remember SOBBING because I thought I wouldn't be able to operate it because I was no good at MATH!  That makes me laugh so hard now. We used PageMaker 1.0 to design and typeset the magazine. It had TWO fonts, HElvetica and Palatino.  It just cracks me up to think of our design disadvantages.  But there was no way to pay the printer bills otherwise. But Apple put us into the nascent geek world, and as everyone discovered, geeks were very sex-positive, in fact, they came up with the word.

Nowadays a gay or sex magazine can make credible ad sales. But in the early 80s, it was like soliciting charitable contributions. No one except the old school porn boys were making any money in the sex biz and they didn't understand our audience or mission.  We got most of our content for little or nothing. I worked for free until the very end. We all made our nut in other ways. 

But because it was a sex magazine, we had to pay a premium to find a printer who would take us. This is the most clear example of how sexual expression is suppressed--- he who owns the press makes the rules. We had to pay 5-10 times the amount a normal magazine would pay who didn't have "dirty pictures." I am still furious about this discrimination to this very day.

The printers were afraid they'd be closed down by the federal government if they printed porn. In truth, they hadn't been bothered since the early 60s. It's just that the same old farts ran the place, like elephants, and they never got over the McCarthy era. Never.  I found that being treated like a pariah as a pornographer in America was very much like how I'd been treated  as a socialist in America.

I still remember a few other benchmarks...  one was that that we were the first lesbian press of ANY kind to run a real article about AIDS, and its risk to lesbians. The leading lights of the lesbian movement had their heads in the sand when it came to this disease. The standard issue was "lesbians cant' get it." Period.  What did they know?  

I can't believe how irresponsible they were. AIDS also inspired great dread among dykes because it exposed the fact that  the majority of lesbians had had some intercourse with men since the epidemic started. In fact, lesbians at that time were more likely to have sex with "high risk men"-- ie, gay or bi men-- than exclusively straight women were. (This was before AIDS became such a big issue for hets as well).  

Anyway, we ran the story that no one wanted to tell. ANother instance of speaking the unspeakable was something a bit more fun. At the end of the 80s, I met a number of dykes who told me they liked to watch gay pron. Funky!  I thought it was a hoot, since I'd never tried it.  But when I started talking about, I found that many lesbians thought this was another new low in dyke aesthetics. We decided to do an article about dykes digging gay porn, and Honey Lee shot our first pictorial with a real PENIS... two gay guys doing it on the floor while Kitty and BC watched. 

Not long after that story, we ran the first lesbian story  about female to male transsexuality, and Loren Cameron and Justin Green posed for Honey Lee again. I had no idea what a huge story that would end up being... how many women would be inspired and touched by their words.

On a more practical level, I would easily claim that On Our Backs created the first mainstream acceptance of "women's erotica', the practical steps to finding one's g-spot, and having a free 'n' easy attitude toward dildos and vibrators. We taught the world how to use a strap-on. We made sex fun and smart for women, something that was entirely in a female self-interest. It went way beyond homosexuality, it was really feminist sex liberation.

Lesbians have often asked me if I have any regrets about On Our Backs, and why I ended up leaving my work there after 6+ years. 

My regret is that very subject, the leaving. It was brutal. I couldn't' read On Our Backs at all for a few years after I left, it made me so upset. They might have been great issues, btu I was still heartbroken.

In retrospect, I see that when I had my daughter in 1990, even though I planned to go right back to work, I was naive about how my life would change, as many new moms are. 

I had a real baby on my hands, and yet OOB had always been my “baby” as well. It was really rough to divide my time without feeling like I was l was an utter failure at both responsibilities. 

At the same time, my business co-partner, and best friend, Debi, was going off in her own new directions. At the time I would have told you, “She’s nuts, she’s inside her office screaming about wallpapering her bedroom!”-- but nowadays I wouldn’t presume to judge. 

We were all way overdue for a first-rate nervous breakdown. The entire lesbian establishment hated our guts. Mainstream publishers and pornographers ignored us or cheated us. The money pressure was hideous and any moment I expected to be taken away to debtors prison. We had  a couple thousand starry-eyed fans who had no idea what kind of trouble we were in, and we didn’t want to spoil their illusion. The reality of our impossibility was devastating, and it didn’t help anymore to hear we were “ahead of our time.”

When I decided I needed to change the balance of my tightrope act in favor of Mommy-ness, Debi hit the roof. She hit the roof, of the roof, of the roof. If only I had let her wrap herself in wallpaper first, maybe I could have avoided the whole thing!

Debi served me with a subpoena for subordinating my corporate responsibility. She had a meeting with me and a lawyer where she said she wanted me to pack my bags in a week (I had in mind a yearlong, find-the-new-editor process) and she wanted a stipulation that I could never write professionally again, at least without paying a hefty portion of my income.   

To this day, I have no idea why she went so vengeful I walked out with nothing but my baby in my arms, but that was the reason I had to leave anyway.  I don’t regret it, because my motherhood improved about 5000%-- I actually took care of her and saw her little face when I wasn’t one my way to or from work, crabby and exhausted.

But my OOB breakup was gutwrenching. We really did love each other, and I guess that was what made it so bewildering. If everyone had taken a chill pill, I would have loved to work 20 hours a week and find the next new hottie editor. My only solace when I look back on this nightmare is that I hear many other creative teams have had similar fireworks when they broke up. So we were not unique!

Debbie got married to a man, then divorced, and continued to promote her Female Ejaculation video along with other sex education and spiritual projects. She had always wanted the magazine to make money-- real money-- and it must have galled her to ultimately sell the whole operation for a pittance. She realized that videos were where the profits were. I never saw her again after the lawyer nonsense. 

Nan got a new girlfriend and moved to Minnesota, working at one of the women's bookstores that used to be a hard ass about On Our Backs, but then changed their ways!  She looked me up one year a decade later and when we reunited, we hugged each other for an eternity. She and her lover Christi Cassidy, run Fatale Video, still the original lesbian video company.

Nan and I, along with Debi and Honey, are the only ones who truly know the hair-raising, insane stunts we pulled, day after day, to put out our beloved bit of revolution. 

Honey Lee and I broke up after 7 years, and subsequently I was a most fickle and gadabout gal about town for a few years before I settled down with my current lover, Jon.  My “baby” is now a grown-up artist herself. and her godmother, Honey Lee, taught her a great deal about photography and film, just as she did with me.

 I’m very close to many of the artists I met through OOB-- they’re my family. Aretha has shown photo prints from the early On Our Backs to show her classes. I’m so touched she sees the beauty and authenticity in those things that made me feel so powerful in the very beginning.

 

Photos, top to bottom:

Phyllis Christopher, Honey Lee Cottrell, Honey Lee Cottrell and Tee Corinne, Honey Lee Cottrell, Cathy Lee Prochazka, Jill Posener, Jill Posener, Tee Corinne.

 

Annals of Bessie Street: From Revolution to Eviction

 

 
This Friday I am losing my long-standing home in San Francisco: 25A Bessie Street.

My first books Herotica and Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World were written inside this little nest. I grew up as a young woman in this apartment, my daughter grew up here from infancy to adulthood. 

The best and most outrageous of On Our Backs pictures were conceived and often shot at Bessie Street. This is where Honey Lee Cottrell, my partner, and OOB's staff photographer, became a legend.

We had a tiny garden that got a few rays of sun. We turned a roving green briar into a wandering rose. I held my first porno pajama parties there, which later became my big screen road shows: How to Read a Dirty Movie and All Girl Action. The thumb-size cactus we planted outside on the sidewalk grew into a behemoth.

We raised kids here— Honey Lee captured so many of our children's best moments.

Some things I can't get out of my mind. Fanny Fatale demonstrated "how to female ejaculate" on our kitchen linoleum one afternoon, and I said we should never clean that spot again. I think our apartment should be made into a feminist historical monument. 

I moved to Bessie Street with my girlfriend, Honey Lee Cottrell, when I was 23 years old— and she was 37. It's a tiny basement apartment on the steep north face of Bernal Hill. The bathtub is in the kitchen, which looks out over all of downtown and the Mission district. The kitchen windows are the one place where the light pours in.

Our first landlord was unsure if I could qualify as a tenant, because at 5'10", I had to duck to get into some of the corners of the low-ceilinged apartment. I assured her I could— at $400 a month, the price was just right for the two of us. In the early 1980s, Bernal was still a poor and working class, multi-racial neighborhood, adjacent to "Needle Park," which nowadays is filled with bouncy houses and miniature-dog birthday parties.

I moved out of Bessie Street when I was 30— we broke up after seven years— but I never "left." I moved a few blocks away, and when Aretha was born, she went back and forth between our two homes. That never ended, no matter how many miles I moved away. The last two years, my daugther lived at Bessie Street with Honey, graduating from college.

Early this winter, the Bessie Street building was sold to a new owner, and after 30 years the changing of the guard is here.

Honey Lee is 66 now, Aretha 21, me, 53.

I went through my collection of On Our Backs magazines yesterday to scan some of the published highlights from the Bessie Street Revolution, which you'll see below.

Note: These pictures are from a radical, fine-art, lesbian feminist erotic magazine. The links lead to, in some cases, more revealing photos on my Flickr site.

Summer, 1984: The original, unheard-of "Lesbian Burlesque Show" at Cesar’s Latin Palace on Mission and Precita, to raise money for the first issue of On Our Backs. The most memorable party I ever attended and the very definition of sisters doing it for themselves.

 

Spring, 1985: Cassie and Raven’s cover for On Our Backs. The two most seductive dyke strippers in the world decided to start a "Lesbian Escort Service," and Honey shot their "advertising" in front of the garage.

More Cassie and Raven here.

 

 

Summer, 1985: Honey Lee took two of our models/readers (all OOB models were readers or contributors or all three) down to the nearby 3rd Street railyards to shoot one of our most arresting pictorials: "Desperately Seeking Rachel and Elexis." I've had women from back East tell me they moved to San Francisco because of this spread.

Elexis was our first out trannie model, we met her at The Black Rose cabaret in the Tenderloin where she performed.

(More Rachel and Elexis here.)

 

Fall, 1985: The "Born in the USA" Scorpio Products advertising shoot. In the early 80s, I got a handwritten and illustrated letter from a Granadian inventor in Flatbush, who told me he had a spinal cord injury and had created an item out of silicon that he thought might change the world. He was right.

Honey Lee and I asked him if we could make advertisements to do his inventions justice. He gave us artistic carte blanche and $200 per ad.

No one— and I mean no one— had ever advertised dildos, period, or sex toys to women. We did a seaside mermaid shoot in Bolinas, we did a Mapplethrorpe-inspired "Perfect Moment" shoot with calla lillies. But this one, my favorite, was an homage to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" album cover. Those are my jeans and my grandmother's handkerchief.

(More Scopio ads here.)

 

Winter, 1986: Centerfold comix shoot, "The Naughty Gourmet" with Sue Trayling. Every single one of those kitchen tools has been in use since. The breadbox has an Austrialian Communist Party sticker on it. That stove has seen some of the best cooking you can imagine.

The rest of the photo comic is here; it's wonderful.

 

 

 

The "Frances" Pictorial— this was the strange young woman who showed up at On Our Backs and demanded she be patted all over in talcum powder and photographed. She was very pretty, but months later she contacted that magazine and said she had decided to compete in straight beauty pageants and didn't want anyone to know she was gay. 

 

Spring, 1987:  Herotica comes out, my first book, and the first-ever anthology of women's contemporary erotic fiction. It went through three editions and a long series career with other editors, but this was the first cover, which I designed.

 

Summer, 1987: Honey Lee's most ambitious pictorial was her "Psychosexual Subway Map of Urban Lesbian Life." Gertrude Stein, our old bed, Madame Cleo in bondage, MUNI transfer slips.

This is the first of six pages; you can see the whole series here.

 

Fall, 1987: On Our Backs took HIV and AIDS seriously when it was a total joke in the rest of the women's press. They wouldn't allow it  to be mentioned. Honey Lee and I went downstairs in the garden to demonstrate what you could do to have fun with latex gloves and dental dams; it became the  "Let’s Go Safe Sex Shopping" pictorial.

More Safe Sex Shopping here.

 

Spring 1988: That's me in a jean jacket wearing one of my favorite buttons: "Stop Staring at My Tits." It was an illustration for a story called "Wild Side."

 

Summer 1988:  Cecilia Doughterty one of the avant-garde video scene's progenitors, made two of her videos with me, Grapefruit and Kathy.  I played "John Lennon" in Grapefruit. The erotic footage we shot in Kathy was later a major inspiration for the sex scene I wrote for Bound.

 

 

Our famous kitchen bathtub never looked sweeter. This is me and Honey, (smoking her Shermans, of course), shot by Mariette Pathy Allen.

 

Angry Women, 1991: Christian Mann, one of my erotic cinema gurus, and I, under the house, figuring it all out. 

January, 1989: Honey Lee had a business the likes of which I'd never seen before: "Erotic Portraiture." It wasn't "boudoir" photography, (I don't think that appellation had been invented yet). Honey's mission was whatever the subject's imagination desired— and the very few people who phoned her up for an appointment were one-of-a-kind. 

 

July, 1989: "When Girls Look at Boys." On Our Backs was the first to report on women's interest in gay porn. We created a scandal over having "real men" in our pages for the first time— they were such good sports! It would be another ten years before this notion of women's interest in gay hardcore hit the mainstream.

First page of the story is here.

 

September, 1989: Rachel Williams, one of the most charismatic leatherwomen who ever lived, on Bernal Hill.

 

January, 1990: "The Hunt," Starring Nina Hartley and Bobby Lilly.

This pictorial answered an argument that had been put to us by antiporn feminists since Day One of our publication. The Dworkinites declared early on that On Our Backs eroticized S/M, violence, phallicism, and penetration— which they conflated as one and the same.

Honey Lee said, "What if I do a pictorial for them that has absolutely none of those things, but is profoundly erotic?" Would they be able to enjoy it?

We shot all day in the garden with nothing but Nina, Bobby, fruit, and vegetables (not penetrated or phallic but sometimes eaten or licked). Above is one of the watermelon shots.

We never heard from our critics, one way or another. Our sincerity was quite amazing especially compared to their complete double-lives. As time went on, we found that our most severe critics were the ones who were privately obsessed with cock, S/M, bondage, etc.

Nevertheless, this was an original and amazing shoot.

(More Nina and Bobby here.)

 

March, 1990: "What to Expect," was my column to announce my pregnancy. I decided to make an all-American Apple Pie with a flag in the middle. We scrubbed that stove for hours in advance.

When I told my colleagues at our Xmas party I was expecting, one of my favorite contributors asked, "Did you inseminate, or did you party?" ;-)

 

June, 1990: It’s a Girl!

We shot Aretha's first photo, the baby announcement, above the tub in her car seat, balanced on a plywood tabletop.

When I got pregnant, it was 1989, and the only lesbians I knew who had children were older women who'd had their kids in long-ago marriages. I was a constant source of questionning, as if I had conceived by a miracle.

Of course, after 1990, the "gay-by boom" exploded, and this doesn't seem remotely shocking now. But at the time, I felt like I was the "Dr. Spock" of single-bi-lez-questionning-motherhood.

Isn't she beautiful? She was born that way...

 

Fall, 1990: Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World Comes Out, a collection of all the columns I wrote for On Our Backs. Aretha and I went on a book tour and she was such a big hit. I wish she could remember that infant adventure, because she got soooooo much love, from Dallas to Montreal, San Diego to Miami.

 

May, 1991: Close to Bessie Street was a dilapadated grand movie theater, called "The York,"on 24th Street, which had seen better days. Nan Kinney, Honey, and I went over early one morning while they were cleaning up and asked the dyke ticket-taker if we could shoot there... and if she'd like to play the "voyeur" for a story we were illustrating.

 

1990: Angela, our friend and one of Honey's most beautiful and enigmatic subjects. She was our Garbo.

 

 

The Smirnoff Billboard, 1983: This is the first photo Honey Lee ever took of me. Within a couple months, we moved in together on Bessie Street, a few blocks from this billboard.

 

Honey Lee Cottrell, on Bernal Hill, today. Photo by Caitlin Morgan.

 

Bessie Street, Night Sky

 

 

All photos by (c) Honey Lee Cottrell, unless otherwise credited.

 

 

Memories of Bob Guccione, Vanessa, and Me

My late and legendary "porn boss" is in the news today, as FBI details emerge about the life of Bob Guccione:

 "Before he rose to notoriety as the founder of Penthouse magazine, Guccione allegedly wrote letters soliciting customers to buy his dirty photos at the bargain rate of 10 photos for $2 under the pseudonym of "Robert Guccione..."

 The story is continued here at TPM, with great relish... about Bob's connections to the Mob, his exacting devotion to nude photography, and so forth!

It's interesting to learn personal history of my first mainstream publisher. I had only written for underground newspapers in the 70s and early 80s. Guccione was the first to send me a paycheck for my work.

I wrote the first feminist erotic film column (that's an understatment) at Penthouse Forum from '86-'89, when their magazine empire was flourishing. It was called "The Erotic Screen." Later I added a Q&A called "The X-Rated Advisor."

Many, many of the editors you know at every other NYC magazine office once worked for Guccione, at any of his many publications. "Omni," for example, was huge at the time I worked for Forum, and many sci-fi authors contributed erotic fiction to both sides. I remember first writing to Robert Silverberg back then, about some of his clever sexy short stories that I later published in Best American Erotica.

A couple insights: 

The classic photo layout for cheesecake that you see in every modern periodical, with a photo bleeding 2/3 on the left, a column of white, and then two photos, also full bleeds on the right, that's the "Penthouse Layout." —Lots of white space, very clean, little or no type, bleed the photos out on the edges. It influenced ALL the erotic and fashion mags, every men's magazine, even if they were showing off stereos or cars. it was different from Playboy's old layout, which had more traditional, Esquire-type design, the kind of thing you see on "Mad Men."

As for "organized crime" and its relationship to Guccione, that makes me laugh. Not because it isn't true, but because the entire magazine distribution business, like the record business, is all about trucking and "organized crime"— it's hardly limited to sexy periodicals. (What gets stocked and delivered, etc.)

I published a independent women's sex mag (On Our Backs) in the late 80s, and we had a hell of time breaking INTO this magazine distribution world, because it's so corrupt. The bigwigs don't give a hoot about your content as long as you pay them off.

The FBI, meanwhile, is perpetually annoyed with porn businessmen AND Teamsters beeause of the unreported income involved, (all those quarters in peepshow machines!) They use "sex crimes" as the excuse to investigate when they can.  The morality of everyone involved is irrelevant. Most of these guys who run the business are old-school male chauvinists who would never want their daughter to be involved in either trucking or porn. They kept telling us to be a "nice girls, go home." Lesbian-made sex zines? It blew their circuits.

Forum was a huge break for me at the time, to get the editing job at PH— it was the beginning of my career as a f/t writer. It also subsidized all my "free time" to edit On Our Backs. I had total creative freedom at Forum, which was amazing to look back at. I got expertly copyedited and that was that. Good times.

The only time I was "censored" was when the MacKinnon Dworkin laws passed into Canadian customs controls... which brought about  a whole list of things we couldn't "say" anymore at PH, such as "anal sex," any arguing between men and women (could be seen as "degrading to women"), and of course, even the silliest of S/M argot. You also had to make sure every character, even in fantasy, was at least a "junior" in college. Oh, those were the days! —EXTREMELY irritating.

Ultimately,the Canadian customs rules were only enforced against publications with a sexual stigma— the New York Times could print the word "bondage" all day if they wanted to.

The Customs laws took a far greater toll on small lesbian and gay presses than it did on Penthouse. I remember smuggling On Our Backs in the back of a car to Vancouver's "Little Sisters" queer bookshop.

Regarding my scrapbook photo above: This is one of the photos from Vanessa William's appearance in Penthouse, circa 1984. She had just won the Miss America contest, and a photographer from her past, who had done this very pretty little "girl-girl" shoot, sold his photos to PH, which in turn caused Miss America to take back their crown.

I was SO HAPPY that Vanessa triumphed and became massively famous, in spite of them. Anyway, i remember framing one of the best photos from this spread, where Vanessa is wearing a very "old gay" leather dildo harness, looking dead glamourous.

What's so funny is that on the opposite side of the thin magazine paper is ANOTHER centerfold, of then practically-unknown Traci Lords! It's a terrible pic of her. At the time, it annoyed me; I thought they included this boring white chick because they were so afraid to "merely" offer a black woman as a centerforld... what idiots. Later, this edition was pulled because it turned out Traci was underage.

Susie's Penthouse Column Story Continues HERE

 

To read the rest of Susie's history with Penthouse, check out: 

The Erotic Screen, Vol. 1: The Golden Hardcore and the Shimmering Dyke-Core 

 
Available at Amazon, B&N, & Smashwords. Here's the whole Table of Contents.

Interviews from the 1980s with legendary artists like Russ Meyer, John Leslie, Sharon Mitchell, Jeannie Pepper, Christopher Rage... and many more.

 

Firenze Heat, Pierre Bonnard, Hard Pear

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Jon Bailiff, Florence, August 2010

 

Porn Education Road Shows: Squaring Up the Racket

 At the height of the feminist sex wars, a lurid X-rated slide show toured college campuses, designed to alarm its audiences to the perils of pornography. 

It was a fever-inducer.

I responded with two show-and-tell's of my own: "How to Read a Dirty Movie," and "All-Girl Action: The History of Lesbian Eroticism in Hollywood." 

 The following essay is a review contrasting our two presentations; the so-called "sex positive" and the "anti-porn."

I never read a critique of either of our shows which was more than, "Oh my god, they're showing nekkid people doing it!"

This review, therefore, was fascinating for me and I've always been surprised more people haven't considered it.  Eithne Johnson's story is scholarly, published in a film geeks' journal. I'm glad to show it here, in digital form at last. I've included some of my own corrections and reactions in italics. 

"In April 1995, MIT graduate students organized a public panel discussion in reaction to a private strip show that had been sponsored by male students in a dormitory. Offended by the idea of this strip show, the graduate students ambitiously wanted their panel to address the issues that they felt it raised: "prostitution, stripping, and pornography." Following advice from friends, faculty, and on-line respondents, the panel organizers decided to provide a "balanced" panel by setting up "pro" and "con" sides. Thus, they imposed this binary opposition on the speakers who (warily) agreed to participate.

  

 

Porn Education Road-Shows, A Critique by Eithne Johnson

from Jump Cut, no. 41, May 1997

"Pro" panelists included Kim Airs, "sacred sex worker" and sex shop owner; Cynthia Chandler, a Harvard Law School student who was under consideration for Playboy's "Ivy League" issue; and me, a media studies instructor and researcher on women's porn. "Con" panelists included Northeastern University professor Jackson Katz, founder of the "anti-sexist" group "Real Men"; attorney Sally Hunt, who defends street prostitutes; and sociology professor Gail Dines, "renown lecturer on the pervasiveness of the media in our MTV culture" (program). For the organizers, this panel was a feminist political response to the pressing problem of sexism on campus, epitomized for them by the strip show.

For me, the panel was cause to reflect on the many porn-related panels that I have organized, participated in, and/or attended over several years. Given that I had once been a student activist, I could relate to the students' desire for an immediate and feminist-identified response. However, I was dismayed that the anti-pornography argument, to which they devoted the lion's share of the evening, had already shaped their understanding of feminist media criticism.[1]

Following on thirty years of women's activism, feminist media presentations, such as the anti-porn slide show, deserve more critical attention precisely as spectacles that use media for polemical education and advertising critique (most notably, Jean Kilbourne's influential "Killing Us Softly" series).

Since the early-to-mid eighties when X-rated movie screenings became the target of campus protests, a marginal space has emerged for feminist speakers who "educate" college audiences about the perils or pleasures of pornography, which may be defined so broadly as to include advertising and slasher films.[2]

As you probably know, these feminist educators typically use slide shows or video clips as their main attractions.

That these spectacles purport to instruct even as they promise to titillate and/or terrify their audiences suggests a strategy similar to the exhibition practices of "classical" exploitation roadshows.[3]

According to Eric Schaefer, because the "classical" exploitation film existed in a "space between" reputable cinema and disreputable (stag) films, producers were motivated to claim an educational value for their lurid pictures. Like the "classical" exploitation exhibitor, these feminist speakers offer hybrid pornographic/ educational roadshow attractions. As itinerant performers, they exploit the "space between" the official curriculum and extracurricular activities, which not so long ago could include porn movie screenings.

Here I will consider two prominent figures on the feminist roadshow circuit who exemplify the two types of spectacles — "anti-porn" and "pro-sex." Wheelock College professor Gail Dines is opposed vehemently not only to pornography but also to much of popular culture because both perpetuate "images of violence against women" (publicity). Writer/editor Susie Bright is a pro-sex feminist who encourages women to explore pornography for its range of sex fantasies and to contribute to the genre.

In this essay, I will look at the ways in which these pornographic-educational roadshows reconstruct pornography as a reading practice while also creating marginal venues for discussions of sexual agency and sexual abuse.

Two discursive tactics are deployed: 1) the anti-porn roadshow defines pornography as patriarchal propaganda for violence against women, illustrated by images from porn, advertising, and horror movies; 2) the pro-sex roadshow defines pornography as a genre in order to show its mutability as a cultural form and its accessibility to women as producers and consumers. Both moves reconstruct pornography through interpretive readings that depend on the appropriation of pre-existing images.

Formally, they recall the "compilation" type of the "classical" exploitation film. Thus, the anti-porn slide show compiles images that read pornography as the "objectification" of women: the educator (Dines) locates female victims upon whose symbolically posed bodies will be found traces of a now-absent male perpetrator.

The pro-sex video show compiles scenes that read pornography as the representational territory for sexual fantasies: the educator (Bright) celebrates pornographic scenes that exemplify female sexual agency and erotic pleasure.

It is important to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages imposed by using "pornographic" images as both the catalyst for and the organizing principle of feminist educational events.

What does it mean that these pornographic/ educational roadshows have appeared in reaction to popular entertainments (X-rated movies, strip shows) that promise pornographic spectacle? How do they teach women to read pornography and what are the implications of such education? To address these questions, I will show how pornographic/educational roadshows function as attractions.

 

BALLYHOO AND SELF-PROMOTION

 

Hoping to lure straight men for instant consciousness-raising, the MIT organizers promoted their panel to appeal to implied male consumers: "A Buyer's Guide to Prostitution, Stripping, and Pornography." On the promotional flyer, the catchphrases "LIVE GIRLS" and "Equality of the Sexes" appeared in light and dark print respectively, promising both pornographic entertainment and educational debate.

While exploiting pornography's generic imperative to reveal live flesh, the organizers sought to persuade attendees to take an "educated" position according to the "pro" and "con" factions seemingly represented by us, the panelists. This balancing act made the evening tense for us since we were precisely set up to become spectacular. For the audience, it delivered the ultimate battle between pornographic/ educational roadshows, pitting pro-sexers against anti-pornographers.

The audience did not know that the terms of the engagement had been rigged from the start, as I will explain. However, as such campus spectacles go, the unannounced strip act by "sacred sex worker" Kim Airs was probably the exception rather than the rule. This was clearly more LIVE GIRL than the organizers expected to see, even as they had unabashedly promoted the event with such ballyhoo.

Gail Dines and Susie Bright also negotiate the distinction between the "serious" educator and the entertaining LIVE GIRL according to their discursive tactics. Both cultivate visibility within the public sphere, are represented by agents, and have appeared on talk television.

For Professor Dines, the anti-porn discourse opens up a channel for official institutional support. For example, she was scheduled at Emerson College in April, 1995, under the auspices of the Dean of Students Office and the Committee for Awareness Programs at Emerson. "Seriously" entitled, "Sexy or Sexist? Violence Against Women in the Media," her presentation was accompanied by publicity from her agency calling it, "A Powerful Slide/Lecture Presentation by Gail Dines, Ph.D." Here, a photo of Dines, posed austerely in professional attire, appeared bottom-right, visually counterbalancing a sexy fashion photo upper-left.

Even as this semiotic display exploited the education/entertainment divide, Dines' credentials served to situate her roadshow as seriously instructional:

"Drawing upon research by sociologists, psychologists, feminists and media scholars, Dines will examine how these images affect the way we think about ourselves as males and females, as sexual beings and as potential victims and victimizers."

 

Suggestively linking sex and violence, this anti-porn discourse proposes to preempt any pleasure associated with explicit imagery by framing heterosexuality in terms of the "objectification" theory: female = object/ victim; male = subject/ victimizer. The disciplinary educator promises to reveal the latent meaning of pornographic imagery through the re-representation of the LIVE GIRL as victim.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Dines not only supported local protests against an adult video store in Boston (as did fellow panelist Jackson Katz), but she also brought Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon to testify for their controversial anti-porn ordinance before the Massachusetts legislature.

Because the anti-porn roadshow created a space for "serious" feminist educators, it has dominated the scene from the college campus to Capitol Hill. At the same time, it has engendered resistance to its polemical "objectification" thesis. Bright's pornographic-educational roadshow emerged out of the feminist pro-sex and anti-censorship movements, with which she identifies, given her history as sex toy specialist at Good Vibrations, a film reviewer for Penthouse Forum, and the founding editor of On Our Backs, which dared to play off the more "serious" feminist publication, off our backs.

Like other women porn producers, Bright seeks to subvert the prevailing anti-porn argument by countering it as an informed consumer/connoisseur. In this way, she implicitly claims to be subjectified, not objectified through pornography. Not only does Bright reject the distinction between "good" erotica and "bad" pornography supported by anti-porn feminists, but she incorporates the generic promise of the LIVE GIRL into her own performances and her promotional materials.

In 1987, Bright hit the college circuit, beginning with Cal Arts; she was also welcomed at gay/lesbian film festivals. Her first roadshow was titled "How to Read a Dirty Movie," featuring a video compilation. She followed with another video compilation roadshow, "All Girl Action, The History of Lesbian Eroticism in Hollywood."

Her roadshows tend to be supported by gay-lesbian-bisexual groups either on campuses or outside official institutions. In Austin in 1990, "How to Read a Dirty Movie" was part of the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, while "All Girl Action" was "sponsored by the Women's Media Project" (Maher).

At Williams College in 1995, Bright's "Sexual State of the Union Address" was sponsored by the Dively Committee, the BGLU, the Lecture Committee, and the Theatre Department. As a self-appointed, bisexual-lesbian spokeswoman for the LIVE GIRL, Bright occupies a more marginal position on the campus roadshow circuit than Dines, whose institutional affiliation secures her status as a legitimate educator.

As a "sexy" performer, Bright seeks to challenge the limits of women's respectable behavior in public; for Dines, institutional codes set limits on dress and behavior that can affect career opportunities.

 

SHOW-WOMANSHIP

 

A pornographic/educational roadshow succeeds as an attraction to the degree that the educator fulfills the ballyhoo's promise to deliver a spectacular performance. True to her "serious" publicity photo, Dines performs as a Marxist-feminist vanguardist. (This is interesting news to me, since I also think of myself as coming from Marxist and feminist foundations...  SB)

Dines' agency markets her roadshow as a humane mission; statistics on the incidence of rape, battery, and molestation of females (whether or not accurate) are meant to shock.

As an agit-prop performer intent on persuasion, Dines has sought to control the impact of her presentation before it even begins. On the eve of the MIT event, organizers admitted they had allotted Dines more time for her slide show than the entire "pro" side combined. The students justified the disparity by saying that Dines would not participate unless they gave her a minimum of 20 minutes, which was all she would agree to edit her 45 minute show down to. She has purportedly set rigid terms at other events as well.

According to Jim D'Entremont and Bob Chatelle of the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, they invited Dines to participate in a debate at Boston University regarding the anti-porn ordinance then supported by Dines, Dworkin, and MacKinnon. At the event, Dines refused to debate the other panelist and took questions only from students.

After taking up much more than her allotted time, Dines summarily left the panel, followed by a group of supporters. (D'Entremont and Chatelle suspect that the audience was stacked with several of Dines' students from nearby Wheelock College.)

The other panelist, a woman with much experience defending civil liberties and supporting women's shelters, had little time to present her argument against the anti-porn ordinance, much less to contend with an audience that was greatly disturbed by Dines' rhetoric.

The rabble-rousing anti-porn performance appears to demonstrate the triumph of the disciplinary educator over pornography's perversity. Emotionally moved audiences obviously find something gratifying in this victory in rhetoric. By refusing to debate, democratic dialogue is suppressed in favor of moral indignation.

Whereas Dines issues radical-critical theory warnings about popular culture's seductiveness, Bright revels in seduction's consumerist pleasures. In performance mode as "Susie Sexpert," Bright wants to be the "bad" girl to the "good" women of anti-porn feminism. Like porn stars-turned-performance artists, Bright uses her body to deconstruct the theater of pornography, its sexual stylings and fantasy constructions.[4]

Her sartorial choices as Susie Sexpert signify her cultivation of perversity: she embodies a connoisseur of pornography, the pleasure-seeking, sexually subjectified consumer which anti-porn feminism has traditionally denied to women and ceded to men.

Unlike Dines, who has an appointment at an academic institution which gives her economic security, Bright has a much less secure occupation as "freelance writer, editor, and lecturer."[5]

Dines' roadshow may be motivated by Marxist feminist politics, but she does not have to tour for a living. Bright has financial reasons to stay on the lecture circuit as well as on book tours (sometimes simultaneously). Indeed, Cleis Press (one of my first publishers- SB) markets Bright as a pop culture commodity/ connoisseur: "America's favorite X-rated intellectual" (publicity).

Since Bright has to consider the possibility of future gigs, she probably has to give a "good" performance" to be invited back. Criteria for judging her performances would emphasize their entertainment value and inclusiveness of sexual identities; of course, official discourses can also deploy these very criteria to withhold legitimacy to her lectures. Few academic programs would actually hire her as a self-styled "X-rated intellectual," (I actually haven't found that to be true, particularly in private universities- SB) but she has taught the occasional class, including a course, "The Politics of Sexual Representation," at UC Santa Cruz (her alma mater).

In contrast, Dines' academic credentials authorize her performances as an educator, seemingly removed from the realm of commodities. As a professor, her words have weight; however, if her presentation were subject to peer review, it might have attracted a lot more critical attention from media scholars by now.

THE "SQUARE UP" OR HOW TO ATTRACT AUDIENCES BY ALARMING THEM

As Eric Schaefer explains in his dissertation, the "classical" exploitation film typically began with a "square up": "a prefatory statement about the social or moral ill the film was attempting to combat". Purporting to provide a somber educational perspective, the "square up" served as a moralistic pretense for showing the lurid spectacle which the film promised its audience.

Schaefer points out that roadshow advertising ("exploitation" as it was then called) played up such pictures' edifying and titillating aspects. For films dealing with sexual matters, audiences were even segregated by gender, an exhibition strategy that could be seen to support a conservative take on sexual relations (even if it was only meant to safeguard the box office). Pornographic/ educational media presentations also use the "square up" tactic, especially those that promote an anti-porn argument.

Indeed, anti-porn presentations perpetuate an inherently conservative, segregationist model of gender relations by setting up a female victim against a male victimizer. Because this strategy is used by porn opponents on the far right and the radical left, it deserves further scrutiny. In asking people to identify with the quintessential victim — the young girl — such educational presentations talk down to their audiences in order to scare them into the correct reading.[6]

Before discussing the "square up" for Dines' presentation, it is worth comparing two videos that promote anti-porn positions: Sut Jhally's DREAMWORLDS (1990) and Focus on the Family's LEARN TO DISCERN (1992).

Offering a radical critique of gender on MTV, DREAMWORLDS opens as follows: "Warning: This video contains scenes of graphic sexual violence which may disturb some viewers."

Then the title appears followed by the subtitle, "Desire/Sex/Power in Rock Video." While the warning sets up the expectation for exposure to "graphic sexual violence," without explaining what constitutes such, the subtitle then suggests erotic excitement.[7]

Since both violence and erotica can be emotionally unsettling, the warning primes audiences to become disturbed. The opening sequence explains that MTV was designed to target teens, but the accompanying visual imagery (taken from a music video) implies that the real target is young girls, echoing the anti-porn argument's claim that the true victim of a pornographic culture is the female child.

From a critical Christian perspective, LEARN TO DISCERN opens with a similar warning directed toward parents presumably ignorant of how popular culture puts their children "at risk," especially the innocent girl.

Not surprisingly, heavy metal iconography figures prominently in both DREAMWORLDS (as sexist imagery) and LEARN TO DISCERN (as satanist imagery). Though from opposite ends of the political spectrum with regard to gender relations and capitalism, both videos incorporate the feminist anti-porn strategy of linking "pornographic" images (from porn, MTV, advertising, and slasher films) with violence against women. Seeking to impose fear, DREAMWORLDS exploits the theme music from HALLOWEEN; LEARN TO DISCERN is shot with a studio audience, so reaction shots of disturbed faces bolster the educator's lecture.

This "horror show" approach has proven very effective attracting and provoking audiences, from students to senators.[8]

As an exhibition practice, the "square up" helps position the educator as expert (on media, on female victimization), and therefore most competent to read popular imagery. To prepare people to see Gail Dines' presentation at Emerson College, the Director of Student Activities issued the following memo:

"Please be advised that the slide presentation will contain adult content and that children under 18 are discouraged from attending."

(What better way to prime an audience of college students than to warn them of "adult content?") Attached to the memo, Dines' publicity flyer provided a provocative warning that was posted all over campus:

"On a daily basis we are bombarded with media images that suggest sexual harassment is flirting, battery is foreplay, and rape is hot sex. Using examples from advertisements, films, magazines, MTV, and 'slasher' movies, Gail Dines shows how images of violence against women are so commonplace that we, as a society, are becoming desensitized to them."

 

Dines' "square up" sets up an expectation to be "desensitized," presumably by viewing an atrocity exhibit of "violence against women." While Dines repudiates these images as dangerous to women, her slide show exhibition compels her to inflict those same images on her largely female audiences.

Given that Hitchcock's notorious quote — 'Torture the women! The trouble today is we don't torture the women enough" — appears at the top of her publicity flyer, she seems to have learned something important from this Hollywood showman. Hitchcock, DePalma, slasher films, and made-for-TV movies have exploited audience sympathy for female characters-as-victims.

Similarly, Dines wants to generate and exploit such sympathy in order to win adherents to anti-porn feminism. Even as the anti-porn educator urges women to become "image-literate" (so they are aware of this "violence"), anti-porn discourse preempts individual women's competency to read popular imagery by presenting only one correct, disciplined reading. If any woman finds the imagery erotic, then she is left to conclude that such pleasures must be guilty.

(At this point, you might like to know that Dines shifted emphasis since her antiporn roadshow days. She is now the central American figure fighting "sex traffiking", and her politics on prostitution reflect the same views she portrayed in her antiporn work. - SB)

Because Susie Bright seeks to challenge anti-porn discourse, she uses the "square up" tactic in seeming parody. Her first roadshow, titled "How to Read a Dirty Movie," echoes the anti-porn educator's assumption that audiences need to be taught a proper way to read porn. Thus, Bright's "square up" beckons an audience already sensitized to anti-porn discourse. As Bright explained to reviewer Kathleen Maher,

"It's very much like an erotic literacy tour...A lot of it is about gender and then I talk about what people mean when they talk about violence in pornography" (21).

Like Dines, Bright claims the educated reader's position, but from personal experience rather than formal education. To counter the anti-porn presumption that (good feminist) women are porn-illiterates, pro-sex discourse issues from a s/expert — a feminist whose consumer/producer experience with the genre qualifies her to explain it. For her sexpertise, Bright draws on her impressive background as reviewer, performer, and consultant for sexually explicit films.

Whereas Dines' "square up" warns audiences about harmful violent images, Bright subverts the tactic by warning audiences of the dangers of a feminist discourse that fails to acknowledge women's pleasures in and production of sexually explicit imagery.

In fact, Bright wants to champion porn — especially its non-normative "girl-girl" convention — and selected film imagery as sites in which lesbians could locate and read female sexual desire in a society that has refused direct representation of lesbian sexuality.

With "All Girl Action, The History of Lesbian Eroticism in Hollywood," Bright promises to reveal the pleasures of "deviant" readings.[9] 

(I was, as you might be guessing, influenced by John Berger's "Ways of Seeing," and Vito Russo's "The Celluloid Closet" - SB)

Unlike Dines' show, which attempts to close down alternative readings, Bright's show opens up space for multiple readings and interpretive competencies. Moreover, she does not talk down to her audiences nor ask them to assume a universalized position of the innocent young girl.

 

THE MEDIUM IS THE DISMEMBERMENT

According to Dines' publicity,

"By carefully analyzing and dissecting the images, Dines helps to promote image literacy by making the viewers aware of the ways in which the media manipulates and seduces it audience."

How she uses her chosen medium — the slide show — is key to this method of "dissection" analysis. Indeed, the anti-porn slide show formally constructs the objectifying dismemberment which it claims pornography does: it gives a serial display of anonymous female body parts cut out of any meaningful context. In an essay written in 1981, Paula Webster describes a feminist anti-porn slide show that included:

"About 30 images of predominantly heterosexual couples engaged in intercourse...There were shots of individual women, bound and gagged, pictures of female dominatrixes, assorted album covers, posters, clothing advertisements, as well as a handful of very jarring images of self-mutilation and the now-infamous Hustler photos of women arranged as food on a platter or put through a meat grinder." (48)

 

That description from 1981 could easily apply to Dines' current slide show.[10]

This strategy of reconstructing pornography as images without specific histories suggests that porn is a static cultural form. To support the objectification theory of violent imagery and its detrimental effects on women, anti-porn feminists have to mount evidence that popular culture is dangerous and even resistant to change. Indeed, Dines exhorted the MIT audience to "stop analyzing" pornography and start building an "old-fashioned organization" to fight it.

Following Dines' presentation, MIT professor Henry Jenkins noted a contradiction: she criticized "textual analysis" yet used it to read meaning from the slides. Dines said her method of textual analysis — in contrast to what she identified as polysemic postmodern approaches — was accurate for understanding "overall context" as well as how texts are constructed. Dines warned,

"Ultimately there's nothing you can play with to get this woman out of this position [referring to an explicit slide image]."

 

In a literal sense, she is absolutely right: no matter how one "plays with" an image, one is powerless to alter the context through which the image was produced. But this point only makes sense if one accepts her disprovable assumption about production context — that the woman was forced (more so than any other laborer) into a pose she did not consent to perform.

The only "proof' usually offered in support of this assumption is Linda Marchiano's poignant testimony from her autobiography, Ordeal, in which she reveals that, as "Linda Lovelace," she was beaten and manipulated by her former husband/manager. By invoking Marchiano' s painful past as a porn celebrity (DEEP THROAT), Dines and others insinuate that her experience represents that of women in porn and sex work.

Much less can be said of actresses in slasher films and models who pose for advertisements, which regularly focus on specific body parts (eyes, hands, legs, etc.). Because they "objectify" by showing female body parts, Dines reconstructs slasher and ad images as "pornographic." She concludes such images symbolically dismember the female body. These images are then considered a warning to women that their actual bodies may be treated as objects by men, who implicitly read the media as patriarchal propaganda in support of their objectification of women.

In 1981, Paula Webster noted this flaw in the anti-porn logic:

"The most important misunderstanding was that a mere representation was spoken of as a reality — as an actual event recorded by some Candid Camera" (48).

 

In Dines' anti-porn roadshow, still images seemingly give documentary evidence of male violence against women. Women in the audience are asked to imagine being in the position of the women displayed, reading images as a record of spontaneous domination instead of staged performances. The anti-porn slide show works — inasmuch as one believes in it — precisely because it performs the symbolic dismembering of female bodies.

This dismembering is produced specifically through reconstructing pornography as a serial display of static slide images (using gory, glossy body-part imagery). The serially projected images function much like the editing in PSYCHO's shower scene — accumulated shock cuts convey the impression that a stabbing might have occurred.[11]

As this serial slide display reconstructs "pornography," the educator's narrative supplies interpretive competence-horror and outrage are the appropriate reactions for reading pornography. This propaganda's sheer disciplinary force makes it unlikely that audience members will risk appearing incompetent in order to point out the obvious: the pornography reconstructed by the educator exists only through this interpretive approach.

 

DO-IT-YOURSELF PORN

 

Bright has popularized pro-sex roadshows which reconstruct pornography as a "do-it-yourself' project: anyone can become a porn connoisseur.

Subverting the anti-pornographer's insistence on a monolithic reading, Bright's Sexpert reconstructs pornography through videotaped compilations. Although these tapes might seem to indicate only her own preferences, as a lesbian-identified bisexual Bright also understands how lesbians may collectively interpret a variety of images as scenes of sapphic desire. (This labeling terminology seems quaint to me now. I don't care what anyone calls themselves... "show me the business" is more my attitude - SB)

For her video compilations, Bright not only picks "girl-girl" porn scenes but also selects from films that have erotic significance for lesbians — QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933) and MOROCCO (1930) for drag performances, and girl-centered movies, such as MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM (1958) and THE CHILDREN'S HOUR (1962). She shows how home-video allows anyone who can afford two VCRs to construct her own pornographic movies.

Indeed, "All Girl Action" builds on separate scenes' homoerotic charge by sequencing them to prolong the viewing experience, intensifying the charge since such scenes are otherwise defused within heterosexual narratives.[12]

According to Bright, "All Girl Action" represents "sort of a triumphal tour." Audiences respond with pleasure to shared lesbian-bisexual readings.

Bright argues that people have learned more about sex from porn than other sources, and that lesbians in particular have learned about sex with women from pornographic conventions. According to Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, the mass marketplace is "impersonal," "democratic," and "nonjudgmental":

"As a setting for learning about sex, the marketplace offers some clear advantages over friends, medical experts, or even more liberated manuals."

As porn film production shifted to video in the early 80s, it became more readily available, especially to women, in many video stores instead of remaining marginalized and stigmatized in adults-only enterprises. Nevertheless, porn's status as marginally legal affects what the market can offer. From Bright's perspective, the problem is summarized in a video guide for Good Vibrations (the sex specialty store designed for women):

"There are millions of sex films available to erotically minded video viewers. Most of them are guided by formulas imposed by nothing less than censorship, legal restrictions, limited budgets, and a very narrow view of the intended market for explicit sexual cinema."

 

Since formulas are influenced by market pressure and innovation, Bright advocates that women not only become better consumers but also producers of porn. She has been especially involved in making porn from a "clit' s point of view" (Herotica).

From 1984-1991 at On Our Backs, she was the "Toys for Us" columnist, in which she championed all kinds of sex products and activities, such as dildoes and penetration, which at the time challenged the prevailing lesbian-identified conception of female sexuality. Incorporating her essays from that magazine, Bright has written four books.

Since the late eighties, she has edited the Herotica  and Best American Erotica collections. These and her own books have been issued by alternative feminist publishers, including Cleis Press (gay-oriented) and Down There Press (sex-oriented), as well as by a mass-market publisher, Simon and Schuster. But Bright's enthusiasm for "pornotopia" underplays established porn video companies' and distributors' enormous resistance to change; their audience is internally identified as "raincoaters" (a derogatory male-identified term that they have embraced to flout porn opponents).

 

THE THRILL-SEEKERS

 

Building to a rhetorical climax, Dines invokes porn's presumed violence by asking women in the audience if they'd planned to grow up to become "masturbation stimulators" for men (the evil raincoaters). Because competency to read pornographic imagery as violently objectifying is linked to the anti-porn educator's expert reconstruction, she establishes a context for her slide show structurally hostile to alternative readings.

Having enticed audiences by warning about the dire effects of desensitization to media imagery, the anti-porn roadshow must satisfy the expectation to be resensitized, shocked and horrified. To borrow from Linda Williams, the anti-porn roadshow must deliver as a "body genre." Fear is the predictable reaction as rhetoric and context invite audiences to "mimic" the appropriate response to sadomasochistic narratives of (female) victimization. Insidiously, Dines invites women to imagine themselves as unwitting victims for men's sexual fantasies.

As feminist propaganda, the anti-porn roadshow specifically hails women as "potential victims," objects for both symbolic and literal rape (Dines' publicity).

Beginning with the rhetorical "square up," the anti-porn educator's impulse to locate female victims can be so powerful that women present at the roadshow may confess to experiencing victimization.

At the MIT event, panelist Cindy Chandler offered her own testimony of sexual abuse, following Dines' sarcastic attacks aimed at Chandler's desire to appear in Playboy. Under such pressure, Chandler inadvertently supported Dines' assumption — that sex workers are always-already victims of abuse — in order to (re)claim her own authority to speak for her ability to distinguish between coerced and chosen sex acts.[13]

By reconstructing pornography as violence against women, the anti-porn slide show appropriates the "sadomasochistic" scenario of the "teen horror film," in which sexually active females are punished by marauding males (Williams). Thus, Dines hopes that both virtuous women and masturbatory males will be scared away from porn.

While Dines sacrifices female sexual agency to the anti-porn cause, Bright explicitly addresses and encourages it. Promising "dirty" movies and "all girl action," Bright's roadshow audiences expect entertaining, diverse, and novel spectacles which women may find exciting. Her videotape compilations include many sex acts, including female ejaculation through masturbation.

If Dines' audiences leave terrified, Bright hopes her audiences come and come again. (Actually, I was hoping they'd think and think again. Maybe it's the same thing. Also laugh a bit. - SB)

Her enthusiasm stems from interrelated motives: 1) a porn producer's (self-serving) purpose to encourage women to buy porn; and 2) a feminist's consciousness-raising effort to empower women as sexual agents. Bright seeks to relieve viewers' boredom with, or resistance to, porn formulas by emphasizing the hot moments, as if the "on time!" temporality of seduction could be endlessly sustained (Linda Williams).

Bright wants to leave her audiences begging for more. Through reconstructing pornography by appropriating a variety of images, from Hollywood to "how-to" productions, Bright encourages the viewer to develop her own sexpertise, which may multiply her potential pleasures as a sexual subject. Moreover, she suggests that women use porn as men are presumed to use it — for masturbation. Thus, Bright's "user-friendly" conception of pornography suggests that the "pornotopia" has arrived, thanks to home video.

 

THE (IM)MORAL OF THE STORY

 

Although the MIT students' believed their ballyhoo would appeal to the campus majority (heterosexual males), the panel attracted a diverse audience-students and humanities faculty, a gay student/sex worker, and community "free speech" activists.

Given the way the pornographic/ educational roadshow exploits the "space between" the academy's objective to teach and pornography's promise to titillate, it is not surprising that the event would attract people who already feel marginalized on campus, regardless of the fact that some disagree bitterly over the meaning of pornography. On one level, the event failed the organizers' intended mission — to educate and punish (straight) men, especially the ones who had sponsored the strip show.

The anti-porn presentations failed to attack directly the (always absent) male conspirators who presumably produce the images of violence against women. In a moralistic move, the anti-porn educators saw women as incompetent to read porn unless seduced into a masculinized reading position.[14]

On another level, the event did provide an enemy since feminist anger was displaced onto the women speakers — and their presumed allies in pornography, prostitution, and stripping — who refused to see porn strictly as the "theory" of violence against women.

Having had my allegiance to feminism thrown into question by Dines, I was further dismayed to see several young women surround her during the reception. Nevertheless, I had to admit that as an undergraduate I, too, once found that argument passionately convincing. Where there was no space on campus (outside women's studies courses) for specifically feminist discussions of either sex or sexual violence, feminists have created one by protesting pornographic movies, in retrospect an easy target for public disapproval.

Having displaced porn movies as sexist entertainment, the anti-pornographic/ educational roadshow provides a feminist space where women can become allies (regardless of their differences), where victims of abusive men can be hailed as "survivors," where consciousness raising can extend to men who support the cause. Drawing on the techniques of the horror/slasher genre, the anti-porn roadshow urges every woman to take a lesson from the Final Girl, who is fierce and chaste.[15]

As a result, in its eagerness to stigmatize explicit entertainments, the anti-porn roadshow fails to address sexual pleasure and its diverse expressions. While deemed appropriate, erotica can never be shown because distinguishing between objectionable porn and acceptable erotica would not only collapse the binary opposition that sustains the anti-porn atrocity exhibit, but also subvert the educator's claim to superior knowledge.

While the anti-porn educator exploits pornography's popularity (without admitting that the slide show itself may titillate), the pro-sex educator seeks to address the genre's appeal. Much as X-rated movie screenings may have signified liberation from adult supervision, pornographic-educational roadshows (regardless of orientation) may attract students precisely because students are intrigued by the prospect of exposure to topics previously forbidden to them by adults or banned from the campus by administrators.

While promising a pornographic spectacle, feminist roadshows offer informal sex education for college students who face concerns specific to their sexual identities and practices. Obviously, the moral implications of the anti-porn and pro-sex roadshows differ markedly. The former frames heterosexuality as a violent experience leading to female victimization/objectification; the latter frames sexuality as simply a matter of personal agency. In either case, this form of sex education remains an extracurricular affair since sexual knowledges accrue informally on campuses.

Some might argue that both porn and sex education should remain outside the college curriculum since organized efforts to educate about sexuality may suppress diversity and threaten to reinstate the academy's parietal role. According to Andrew Ross,

"The call to 'educate' desire... is one which comes instinctively to intellectuals, all too willing to propose or act out their reformist zeal on behalf of others."

Certainly, the anti-porn roadshow offers a good example of this problematic urge to "educate" desire by imposing one politically correct, gender-identified reading. Anti-porn discourse perpetuates porn's status as low culture and considers its consumers uneducable. But if pornography is understood as a product for masturbatory male consumers ("raincoaters"), then both porn and its pleasurable use are ceded to men.

Zealous educators need to reconsider what Ross identifies as porn's basic appeal:

"Pornography's popularity lies in its refusal to be educated."

Taking the contrary attitude expected of it across the education/ spectacle divide, pornography is discursively linked to education as its quintessential juvenile delinquent. As Jennifer Wicke puts it,

"Pornography peeps out from its brown paper wrappers and asks how a culture reproduces itself, in and through the images and texts it disseminates, in a paideia at large."

By engaging with porn, pro-sex activists and academics confront the bad boy/LIVE GIRL pair that underpins the premise that porn refuses to be educated. To accept this premise is to deny women's efforts to blur the boundaries between the education/spectacle divide precisely to interrogate pornography and to produce generic innovations that engage both sexual desires and sexual knowledges.[16]

It is time for a theory of sexual subjectification to counter the theory of objectification (Birken). It is time to recognize women's stake in sex education and sexy entertainment. As a self-identified consumer/producer of porn and sex education, Bright offers an example of what Ross calls the politics of the "liberatory imagination."

If it is possible that such a politics can "set the agenda for a radical democracy beyond liberal pragmatism," then feminist educators should continue to seek alliances with both pro-sexers and health care activists. In Alice Echols words, we may

 

"reclaim the radical feminist vision that joined sexual liberation with women's liberation."

By liberating feminism from its association with the anti-porn discourse, we can make a difference in students' lives precisely by acknowledging the ways in which popular culture invites them to be (hetero)sexual subjects.

After the MIT panel, several people, especially self-identified queers and lesbians, expressed appreciation that the event included my presentation on porn by and for women. Little did they know that it took much persuasion to be included precisely because the organizers wanted to ignore women's engagement with porn in their zeal to prove it only appeals to misogynists. Inevitably, this attitude perpetuates a climate of shameful secrecy that suppresses the diversity of women's sexualities.

NOTES

1. During lengthy discussions with these science students in advance of the panel, I tried to explain the range of methods/approaches that are typically used to analyze media and to convince them that the image-based anti-porn slide show was not at all typical in the field.

2. Further research needs to be done to write a history of campus activism against pornography in relation to the popularization of the anti-porn position. From the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, both sexually explicit and explicitly X-rated movies were shown periodically on some college campuses, including the University of New Mexico (where I was an undergraduate) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where recent organizers had no sense of this local history).

Such movies were scheduled for a number of reasons, such as to indicate students' sexual liberation as legal adults and to promote fraternal bonding, but they probably best served to increase revenues for campus theaters. With the feminist anti-pornography movement in the 80s, student groups effectively stopped screenings of DEBBIE DOES DALLAS (UNM) and DEEP THROAT and HIGH SCHOOL MEMORIES (MIT, as reported by McCain).

3. See Schaefer's dissertation, "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959.

4. Bright has appeared in many sexually explicit poses for photographs: balancing over a horse to expose her naked ass or dressed as a dominatrix for On Our Backs; (No, that wasn't me, that was the legendary Cynthia Slater! - SB)  with a "Macho Slut" button pinned near her cleavage for Outweek; wrapped in a black leather sheath (latex, actually - SB) for her book Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World.

In addition, she has been in a porn movie, BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR, THE SEQUEL (Mitchell Brothers, 1986); she appeared as Susie Sexpert in Monika Treut's first feature, THE VIRGIN MACHINE (1989); and she makes a cameo appearance in the women's bar scene in BOUND (Wachowski Brothers, 1996), a caper film revolving around lesbian lovers, for which Bright also served as a writer-consultant. (I was a non-sex extra in two Mitchell Bros films, with all my clothes on. Sorry! - SB)

5. Henry Jenkins noted that publishers are likely to pay Bright much more as a popular writer than they are likely to pay scholarly authors, such as Dines. While this is true, it should also be noted that Bright's visibility is contingent on the currently favorable attitude toward lesbianism in some aspects of the marketplace.  (I could write a lot more about this note! - SB... basically, the antiporn activists of yesterday are financially supported by the Federal Government and church partnerships that have developed around grant-giving to fight porn, sex workers, etc. This has proven to be more financially fruitful than the average college professor position.)

6. In her essay, "Live Sex Acts," Lauren Berlant explores the problems and limits to arguments that hold up a universalized young girl as the ultimate victim. Draft, April 14, 1994, distributed through the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, Harvard University.

7. According to Chuck Kleinhans, DREAMWORLD's warning is meant to prepare viewers for dramatized rape scenes from THE ACCUSED (1988, d. J. Kaplan), which are appropriated to support Jhally's critique of MTV. But Jhally' s advance warning does not specify the source of upcoming "graphic sexual violence," leaving viewers on alert throughout the video presentation.

8. In Girls Lean Back Everywhere, Edward de Grazia describes many occasions in which Senators and Congressmen screened hardcore movies at the insistence of conservatives, especially the National Organization of Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), who sought to vilify liberal justices and politicians.

De Grazia notes that in the late 60s conservative senators and the CDL sought to link explicit materials to abuses of actual women by recounting specific cases in which the male perpetrator was allegedly motivated by exposure to such materials. "Horror stories" of this kind would in the late seventies be staple testimony before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (Meese Commission)". That the feminist anti-porn slide show was preceded by propaganda created by anti-porn conservatives speaks to the relative friendliness of conservative politicians to radical feminists on this particular issue.

9. For more on lesbian readings, see Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), reviewed in this issue of Jump Cut by Jane Gaines. (Anything by Chris Staayer is awesome -SB)

 10. That "meat grinder" image has logged a lot of miles on the anti-porn roadshow circuit. In a "Script" (circa 1983) produced for a slide show by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), the narrative to accompany the Hustler image reads, "This 1978 cover of Hustler implies that women are meat to be ground."

Dines not only continues to use this dated image, but also regularly features the poster for SNUFF, which she erroneously claims shows a real murder. As Eric Schaefer and I have argued, the release of SNUFF in 1976 prompted a discursive shift in which porn was taken, especially by feminists, as evidence of sexual violence against women rather than as a progressive expression of sexual liberation.  (Johnson and Schaefer are the people who exposed the SNUFF film hoax, step by step. A brilliant study in exploitation roadshows - SB)

Following on this shift, the Hustler cover should be understood historically as a hyberbolic response to the feminist anti-pornography movement (Kipnis). Flynt's "meat grinder" shot sardonically followed the specious anti-porn argument — porn kills women — to its extreme end. According to Laura Kipnis, "This cover was instrumental in the founding, the following year, of Women Against Pornography."

 

11. The reference to PSYCHO is not coincidental. As illustrated by Dines' own publicity, anti-porn feminists and some feminist film scholars have singled out Hitchcock's films for evidence of violence against women.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, I took a popular culture class with a professor who argued that the shower scene not only offered sexual violence as content but also was a formal demonstration of sexual violence by the director against the implicitly feminized film body. This argument points to the limits of a theory that presumes the following: 1) that the film body is gendered female; and/or 2) that the ideal film is a holistic body (rather than the sum of its component shots). Not surprisingly, this professor promoted the anti-porn argument and frequently used the slide show for this form of cultural critique. Although I pursued different approaches, I am indebted to this professor for encouraging me to study popular culture.

12. THE MEETING OF TWO QUEENS (1991, C. Barriga) offers a similar reconstruction — a meta-narrative of lesbian desire — by editing shots from Dietrich and Garbo movies so that the women appear to fall in love with each other.

13. Unfortunately, Chandler thereby undermined the intent of her own presentation, "How to Empower Women and Represent Women in the Sex Industry."

14. Given their emergence in the seventies, it is not surprising that the feminist anti-pornography assumption about gendered competency echoes the theory of the male gaze and the transvestite-female spectator popularized in feminist film studies through Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."

15 The term, "Final Girl," is taken from Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992). (This is a must-read book- SB)

16. This argument is elaborated in my dissertation, "Desiring Ourselves: Sexology, Pornography, and Feminist Ars Erotica."

WORKS CITED

Birken, Lawrence. Consuming Desire. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1988.

De Grazia, Edward. Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. New York: Random House, 1992.

Echols, Alice. "The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968-83." In Carole S. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 5072.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs. Re-Making Love, The Feminization of Sex. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1986.

Good Vibrations. "Videos." (Brochure). nd., n.p.

Johnson, Eithne and Eric Schaefer. "Soft Core/Hard Gore: Snuff as a Crisis in Meaning" Journal of Film and Video 45 Numbers 2/3 (Summer-Fall 1993): 40-59.

Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove, 1996.

Maher, Kathleen. "Susie Sexpert Explains It All to You." The Austin Chronicle 9 Nov. 1990: 1.

McCain, Nina. "Adult' Film Canceled at MIT after Protest." Boston Globe   

  

No Respect, Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York & London: Routledge, 1989. 171-208.

Schaefer, Eric. "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1994.

WAVPM. "Script-Abusive Images of Women in Mass Media and Pornography." nd (circa 1983), np.

Webster, Paula. "Pornography and Pleasure." Heresies 3.4 ("Sex Issue," 1981): 48-51.

Wicke, Jennifer. "Through a Gaze Darkly: Pornography's Academic Market." In Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (Eds.), Dirty Looks. London: British Film Institute, 1993. 62-80.

Williams, Linda. "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess." Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2-13.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Henry Jenkins, Chuck Kleinhans, Julia Lesage, and Eric Schaefer for their comments. I would also like to thank the following folks: Susie Bright; Jeanne Maguire at Emerson College; Bob Chatelle and Jim D'Entremont of the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression; and Eric Schaefer, for finding an article on MIT's X-rated movie history. Since Eric and I went to Susie Bright's "How to Read a Dirty Movie" together, we simultaneously came to the conclusion that the education/ spectacle format was similar to the style and exhibition practices that Eric had observed of the "classical" exploitation film. In this essay, I hope that I have convincingly extended his analysis to these contemporary presentations.

 © Eithne Johnson

 

 

To read the rest of Susie's history with her old-school porn road shows, check out: 

The Erotic Screen, Vol. 1: The Golden Hardcore and the Shimmering Dyke-Core 

 
Available at Amazon, B&N, & Smashwords. Here's the whole Table of Contents.

Interviews from the 1980s with legendary artists like Russ Meyer, John Leslie, Sharon Mitchell, Jeannie Pepper, Christopher Rage... and many more.

Notes on Cunt

One of the biggest sex stories of the year— which many decried as the most repulsive— was child-star-turned-dissolute-divorceé Britney Spears, who flashed her waxed vulva for all the world to see.

The world however, hasn't been able to pry their hands from their face. The peek-a-boo set is, for once, too scared to look.

My photograph on the left is not Ms. Spears— it's a friend of mine. I wish Britney could have been as unapologetic. I wish her audience could have been cunt-positive. Neither is remotely the case. But let's unveil this one slowly.

In Bed with Susie Bright 276: The Year's Top Sex Story

Listen to excerpt.

The phenomenon of celebutard coozie flashings was remarkable, but the depth of analysis was sophomoric. Why?

Was the fury on account of Britney torpedoing her "I'm a Republican Goody-Two-Shoes" career? Nope, she can get in the back of a very long line on that ticket. Was it Hollywood, the star-making suicide machine? Alas, the spectacle of child exploitation in show business until they disintegrate into narcissistic toy-adults is all too common.

The real shock, the bit no one mentions, is that even though everyone is informed, through reading, about Britney's crotch shot, relatively few people have looked at the evidence. The majority haven't seen, or want to see, what all the fuss is about.

Go look. Remember to remove all the whore/madonna crap out of your mind, and tell me what you think about it.

Without the slightest feminist or artistic design, Spears has changed the public perception of what a mother-of-two's sexuality might be all about. Here she is, showing you her bare cunt, and a vulnerable cesarean scar that couldn't be obscured by  otherwise careful makeup.

The picture has an impact, regardless of her delusions.

"But why should I peer at such a thing?" you might protest. "It's vulgar! It's sad! I'm above all that!"

Oh, bullshit. Have you ever looked at titty pictures for the hell of it? And speaking of vulgarity, who flocked to Saddam's hanging video, or clicked on Abu Ghraib's tortures? That was far, far more popular than Brit's twat.

There's no need to list extremes. What about reality TV— squirming is a national pastime!  And who wouldn't pass up a picture of Justin Timberlake's hard cock if it happened to be captured from the Mickey Mouse Club bathroom? Many of us will voyeurize everything, and still hesitate when it comes to a photograph of a woman's genitals. 

There is something about the sexual and creative center of a woman's anatomy that is beyond the PALE of our comprehension. We just can't hack it!

Sure, Britney's hoo-hoo has gotten plenty of internet clicks, but not NEARLY as much traffic as any of the incidents I listed above.

If you do go to the forums where people are looking and commenting on BS's photos, they are all men. Each one of them debates how disgusting her vagina is, and just how desperate you'd have to be to fuck her. The disdain and condemnation for her behavior is beyond anything I have ever seen on any subject. Bush never got it this bad, nor Clinton, for that matter.

In the printed news about Britney, we hear of her "inappropriate behavior" as a euphemism, while the actual deed is obscured. She is said to drink, pop pills, snort powders, pass out in public, commit sartorial murder, lather in promiscuity, be the worst mom ever.

But GOD FORBID you should mention she has a cunt, and that she showed it without any foreplay, tease, or a million-dollar payout. Playboy centerfolds are fainting from the disgrace of it all. Ms. Spears simply opened the door of her limo, then did the same with her legs, and let the cameras go nuts.

Why is THIS act the last straw? A shot of a man's penis, flaccid or erect, never destroyed him. People might think it's funny, interesting, sexy, or bizarre, but not a condemnation to hell. You can see Daniel Craig's cock in his popular movies, and he's  been elevated to Bond.

Britney Spears, or any female public figure, cannot reveal her uncovered mons without a wholescale public attack. It wouldn't matter if she was a brilliant actress or avant-garde philosopher. When it comes to this anatomy, where the pleasure comes in— and the babies come out— our culture is in cardiac arrest. The fear and loathing crush any reality check.

"What about hardcore?" you may ask. Yes, porn is the exception, but even there, we see a transformation. Beaver shots are not "in" anymore, as they were for one brief moment in the 70s. Aroused cunts are not the focus— it's tits, bouncy butts and shaved anuses, gigantic cocks, denuded holes, and fantastic open mouths. When was the last time you saw an X-rated picture promoted based on cunnilingus or any kind of cunny-worship?

Furthermore, the hair issue has been turned upside down. It used to be that pubic hair denoted modesty and mystery, the allure of the enchanted forest.

Now, a single hair is thought of as unclean. By waxing everything off (which shaving alone cannot accomplish)— and following up with bronze makeup from waist to knees— you achieve a Barbie Thing. It's a a desexualized "clean" look, as Britney's stylists put it. If it wasn't for Spears' birthing scar, and the curve of her thighs, you might miss her element altogether!

I have nothing against shaving or waxing per se— it's all quite fun until the hair grows back in! I appreciate seeing the "sculpture" of a woman's cunt, and how it's mature, not like a young woman's. Most people don't even know that— that your coozie grows up. I once published one of Tee Corinne's self-portraits of her shaved vulva in On Our Backs, and the magazine was banned all over the country for being "child porn." The censors don't even know what a 35-year-old woman's genitals look like, and how different it is from a baby's. The ignorance is stupendous.

I'm not trying to be obvious. I'm exhausted with the usual rhetoric. It's not that anyone should shave, or not shave— pose "commando," or wear long-johns. Yes, Britney is a mental health train-wreck, and yes, there are far more important things that should be on the front page of the newspaper. All of those things are easy to say.

My beef is this: the toxic taboo around women's cunts, clits, and the whole furry circle is so over-the-top that it goes beyond celebrity scandal or pleas for modesty. Our conservative culture has made a fetish of women's sex as "dirty" beyond compare; a sin and a revulsion above all else. Of course I could write a book about this, and many others have. Like Inga. Or Laura. Or Betty, Tee, or Joani. Somebody please send Brit copies.

The ultimate disfavor of the anti-cunt clamor is that women get the impression that there is something terribly wrong down there. So wrong it can't be spoken plainly, let alone looked at.

The club-girl commandos like Paris, Lindsay, Tara, and Britney have done us all a very weird favor. They have degraded feminine "virtue"— thank goodness. By making a cunty spectacle of themselves, they have inadvertently triggered consciousness that, in a subversive context, taps the right note. They might not understand a pussy-pride backlash— they may deny, regret, and wring their hands— but the clit-fix is in. I'll look forward to a sober, in-your-face replay.

In my mailbag, I follow all this up by offering some timely advice to a woman who worries her boyfriend will be grossed out when he goes down on her. See what I mean?

Top photo by Honey Lee Cottrell, and middle photo from Tee Corinne, both published with many awesome others in Nothing But the Girl. A wonderful fan sent me the CuntFire Girls logo, but I have no idea who created it! Please tell me if you know!

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Thank you so much... Susie