Essays on Lust, Aggression, Porn, & The Female Gaze
That I Might Not Have Written If Not for Her
Table of Contents:
The Baffling Case of Andrea Dworkin
Spankful
Story of O Birthday Party
Are Women Making Porn Movies?
As Porn As We Wanna Be
Lesbian Lowdown
The Prime of Miss Kitty MacKinnon
The Blatant Lesbian Image
Dyke
Cunt
Soaking Feminism
Vargas Girls: Susie’s Vargas in Drag, & Andrea’s Blonde Sambos
Andrea Dworkin Has Died
These are essays and stories I've written from the mid-80s to today. Some are scholarly; others were written as consumer advice; some were
popular features in counterculture and mainstream media.
I think you will find it to be everything you ever wanted to know on the topic from the sex-positive-feminist-pornographer side of the tracks, and a very good introduction to the "other side" as well.
After you've read it, I would welcome your thoughtful feedback. Thank you so much for all your interest... I've been very moved to re-read these stories and think about all that has happened in the past thirty years since this conversation began.
Thanks to all 11,000 of you-- yes!-- who weighed in on the cover contest. It was a 50/50 split vote, the red domme vs. the mantis. I decided to use both! They were each designed by the amazing Stewart A. Williams.
The book is a "live" history of erotic cinema before the Internet— from the Golden Age of lavish 35mm hardcore, to the video-inspired “Porno Spring,” initiated by none other than punk, feminist, and lesbian video-makers.
Fascinated with the overlap of Hollywood, Indies, and Blue Cinema;
An afficionado of porn director and porn star history; or,
Seriously into the nature of sex work on film;
—You'll go cuckoo for the whole thing.
This first volume includes all my stories on blue movies and the porn biz, covering 1967-1989.
There's my original “X-Rated Advisor” columns from Penthouse Forum, my killed story about the history of Jim Crow in the Adult Industry, plus uncommonly candid interviews from the 1980s with legendary artists like Russ Meyer, John Leslie, Sharon Mitchell, Jeannie Pepper, Christopher Rage... and many more.
Chapters include:
The bizarre beginnings of How-To Sex Videos,
the unexpected taboos of erotic foreign cinema,
the punk nationalist "Tampon Tango!" from Japan,
The Last of Traci Lords,
The Eve of John Holmes’ Departure,
the last word on “What Women Want,"
my blue-movie favorites, (both X and R-rated),
the never-spoken realities behind a porn shoot, the invention of the “Blatant Lesbian Image”
— plus dozens of fan questions answered with panache and detail!
Finally, you might like to watch this video of me recounting the improbable story how I ended up with a notebook in my hand at the Pussycat Theater... This was the inspiration for the whole saga.
When you finish reading The Erotic Screen, I'd love to hear your review— on your blog, on Amazon, Good-Reads, wherever you write your opinions. Please do send me the link so I can write you back. And you can always email me any feedback you may have...
All my best, and Clits Up!
Susie
P.S. There is no paperback. The advantage of the e-book is that the chapters are linked to videos, illustrations, and bio material that are ideal for reading on your computer or your e-book reader, iPad, etc. Enjoy!
You don't need a special device to read a Kindle book; they look great on any normal computer or tablet, ipod, iphons, or cell-phone.... Here's all you need.
As you know, I am a diehard fan of the rigorous movie quizzes devised by Dennis Cozzalio at his swoon-worthy filmblog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.
I am posting my answers on his blog, along with everyone else who's playing... but here's an extended version, with film clips and photos. Come over and post your answers, it's sooooo fun; more like an interview than an exam.
Let me stretch my cold blue hands from their keyboard coffin and begin:
1) Favorite Vincent Price/American International Pictures release.
My earnest favorite is the “The House of Usher.” I like to think Price truly drank the Poe Kool-Aid and gave himself to that role.
I also gasp at “Raven” for the debut of that handsome, full-head-of-hair jackanape, Jack Nicholson.
2) What horror classic (or non-classic) that has not yet been remade would you like to see upgraded for modern audiences?
I have a longtime answer to this question.
I edited a lesbian magazine in the 1980s called On Our Backs. I discovered an erotic short story in our slush pile that was terrific, a sci-fi suspense-thriller featuring two amazing lovers/adversaries: Ripley and Vasquez.
I called the author on the phone, exclaiming over her inspiring characters. Wow, what originals! She was quiet on the other end of the line.
That’s how I came to rent the whole series. Nevertheless, I wrote back to my author, “I still wish your story was the movie; I love it the best.”
That was my introduction to slash fiction— I’ve read a lot of it now, much of it script-worthy!
3) Jonathan Frid or Thayer David?
Barney Barney Barney! I wasn't supposed to watch “Dark Shadows,” and it was the only soap I was interested in as a child. Frid's character and those pretty ladies’ décolletage are what stayed with me.
4) Name the one horror movie you need to see that has so far eluded you.
My glaring omission isThe Exorcist. I read the book in broad daylight at fourteen and scared myself so badly I couldn’t sleep. I remember seeing the lines of people waiting for its debut at the movie theater in Westwood, and I thought, “No, I can’t take it, I can’t.”
5) Favorite film director most closely associated with the horror genre.
David Cronenberg.
But my favorite "horror" director not especially connected with horror is Roman Polanski.
6) Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele?
Barbara’s face is so memorable, that British porcelain in Italian camp. She worked with Fellini, right? You have to love a Felliniesque horror vamp.
I lean toward attractive monsters, sexy monsters, French monsters.
The one who touches my heart the most is the Beast in Cocteau’s La Belle et le Bête. I would never leave him!
However, in the course of preparing my answer to this question, I stumbled upon something I simply MUST watch tonight: Nazi zombies, in Dead Snow. Norwegian!
13) Favorite Mario Bava movie.
Need you ask? Diabolik! He robs from the rich to give to the girls. No horror, just pure pre-Bond awesomeness.
14) Favorite horror actor and actress.
My boyfriend right now is "Eric" in True Blood, played by Alexander Skarsgard. He and the Nazi Zombies can HAVE me.
Boris Karloff is my classic favorite, and my mother’s as well.
Their Dark Shadows moments were just one little twinkle on great careers from start to finish.
17) When did you realize that you were a fan of the horror genre? And if you’re not, when did you realize you weren’t?
I was raised quite obediently as girly-girl— I thought horror was for boys, along with mathematics and sports. I said horror movies were dumb— or frightful— and as I was “protected” from them as a child, I had no idea what I was missing. Occasionally I’d hear some chick screaming from a monster-rape reel, and I’d grimace. Stupid, stupid victim.
In the 80s, around the time I got the Ripley/Vasquez manuscript, I confided my horror-contempt to one of my colleagues, book critic Laura Miller.
She surprised me; she told me I was a fool to be missing out on some truly great movies. Laura seemed to know what would turn the key for me… and suggested an early Cronenberg: Brood. It’s psychiatric! It’s sexual! It’s Canadian! I was enraptured.
I always liked fantasy and fairy tales for their romance and cruelty, I just hadn’t figured out where to find those themes in horror. I also hadn’t yet discovered my horror heroines, women who make things happen.
I suppose it's old hat now, but Clover’s writing about "The Final Girl" gave me a way into horror, to see beyond the shrieking raped-wretch. Women get to “do more stuff” in horror than just about any genre. In horror, once you start listening between the lines, gender is a tossed salad.
18) Favorite Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) movie.
I fail once again. I guess I know what I'm doing this Halloween.
19) Name an obscure horror favorite that you wish more people knew about.
The People Under The Stairs… it’s so bad it’s delicious.
Rabid… oh, Marilyn.
20) The Human Centipede-- yes or no?
Oh yes! YES! YES! This is exactly where the toilet flukeworm in X-Files was heading.
21) And while we’re in the neighborhood, is there a horror film you can think of that you felt “went too far”?
“Going too far,” for me, is a desired mental destination. If something affects me, it’s done its magic, and my reaction says more about “me” than it does about the supposed line it crossed.
A favorite movie that pushed my buttons this way was I Spit on Your Grave.The ultimate in Old Testament Medieval Revenge. Camille Keaton is beyond The Final Girl— she is: The Rapture.
The first half of the film, her character is humiliated, raped, broken— left for dead. I could barely sit through it. No wonder this film was targeted by feminist picket lines and boycotts.
But had any of the protestors watched the SECOND half? What Keaton does to her rapists is TWICE as sick— and cold as ice. All one can do is applaud. Or laugh, evilly.
22) Name a film that is technically outside the horror genre that you might still feel comfortable describing as a horror film.
Recently, The Debt. Anything on a gynecologist’s table with a Nazi: Horror movie.
23) Lara Parker or Kathryn Leigh Scott?
Lara Parker, by a hair— but I'm not really into either of these girls.
24) If you’re a horror fan, at some point in your past your dad, grandmother, teacher or some other disgusted figure of authority probably wagged their finger at you and said, “Why do you insist on watching all this morbid horror junk?” How did you reply?
“Can I watch just two more minutes?”
And if that reply fell short somehow, how would you have liked to have replied?
“When I grow up, I’m going to do whatever I want and you won’t be able to stop me.” —
That’s what I was thinking all the time.
But I never would have said that, because the “violence” that would have ensued would make any horror movie look like a walk in the park!
25) Name the critic or Web site you most enjoy reading on the subject of the horror genre.
I'm a neophyte. Tell me and I'll follow.
26) Most frightening image you’ve ever taken away from a horror movie.
How about the most frightening image I DIDN’T take away? There’s nothing like anticipating a shock, which you’ve been told your whole life is “beyond the pale”... only to find out it’s a con.
Snuff fooled so many people. What an advertising campaign! What a rout! It managed to get banned in several cities, become a centerpiece of feminist outrage for a good decade… and it was all a big NOTHING.
The movie’s tag line was, “Made in South America, Where Life is Cheap!”
In fact, the “snuff” ending was shot in Hell’s Kitchen, where the film distributor was so cheap that he heated up a little Chef-Boy-R-Dee for the FX shot of the "victim’s" intestines. The dead actress couldn’t lay still.
The things they got away with, before the Internet...
But to answer your original question, the image that's never left me more haunted is Catherine Deneuve going nuts in Repulsion, which critic Kim Morgan outlines beautifully here:
27) Your favorite memory associated with watching a horror movie.
Staying up by myself, watching vampire movies after mom went to bed.
28) What would you say is the most important/significant horror movie of the past twenty years (1992-2012)? Why?
30) You are programming an all-night Halloween horror-thon for your favorite old movie palace. What five movies make up your schedule?
Just for a kick, how about a horror fest based on The Bechdel Test?
The Bechdel Test requires a movie to pass three questions: 1) It has to have at least two women in it, 2) Who talk to each other, 3) About something besides a man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The last three minutes of Part 11 show the dozens of photographer names and TV station feeds that are part of the multi-screen collage.
I noted that this project does not have a byline. It's obviously someone who's an activist in investigating various cover-ups in the 9/11 investigation (see the PSA for RememberBuilding7 at end of the tape).
I don't have any conclusions about 9/11's origins other than: "Nothing would surprise me." Regardless, this synched documentation is a prodigious video capsule of events.
It's also sad, and poignant, and makes me think of all my friends in New York, both here and passed away. *Love you.*
Watch it now, before someone says it's "offensive" and YT takes it down.
The first person in my mother's family who came to California was my great-aunt Tess O’Halloran, who went to make her living as a governess in a Hollywood home.
She came home to Minnesota one Christmas, a Success, loaded down with navel oranges and wearing a two piece suit the color of a peach. No one in my family had ever worn any other color than blue or black or brown. The children didn't know that a peach-colored fabric existed, and when they touched Tess’s outfit, they worried that it would melt away like ice cream.
In St. Paul at the time, there were signs on respectable establishments that said, “No Dogs, No Indians, No Irish.” There was no work in the ghetto, and Tess’s good fortune out West was intoxicating. Soon one Halloran after another was either joining the service or moving out to San Francisco to work in the Hunter’s Point shipyards...
I've finished my memoir after three years— Big Sex Little Death — and I'm ready to come out of my bat-cave.
WHAT'S IT ABOUT?
"Guns, drugs, threesomes, socialist factionalism, a stabbing... all before she got her G.E.D.? —I have a very scary feeling Susie Bright is not making any of this up."
7:00 p.m. (Doors open at 6:30 p.m.) FREE ADMISSION Seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basis / No advance tickets
"Susie is a one-woman counterculture...
She recounts a life full of political and erotic adventures and betrayals, a life at once deeply subversive and totally American, defined by the idea that people should be free to express and pursue their own visions of happiness, no matter how uncomfortable it makes the prigs and scolds among us."
Photo: Jill Posener, at the beautiful Albany Landfill
Details on How To Purchase Books:
Every independent bookstore you see linked on this page sells my hardback, and many of them do ebooks, too. Amazon has the Kindle version, the hardback, and exclusive audiobook. B&N has a "Nook" version as well as the hardback. In other words, you can find it everywhere, and be able to support the retailers you like.
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.
My book partner Jill Posener once made a presentation on lesbian photography to
an art history class.One of the
young men students had a demanding question for her. "How is it,"
he said, "that you can say 'cunt'-- every time you refer to women's
genitals? If I said 'cunt', to my girlfriend or anyone else, I'd get the back
of her hand!"
Lesbians
have actually made the world a safe place to say cunt...if you respect the proper
historical antecedents.'Cunt', of
course, is a woman's vagina and vulva, her pussy, her private parts, her sexual
pleasure. It's also been used as a pejorative since the early 20th century.My father Bill Bright, who was a linguist
(and curious to boot),investigated
the word for me:
"There
are related words in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages," he said,
"So it has probably been in English as long as the language has existed. The oldest printed
occurrence is from 1230, when a list of streets in London included 'Gropecunt
Lane'. That suggests that the word was not especially taboo at that time.
"In
1400 a medical textbook says: "In wymmen the necke of the bladdre is
schort, and is maad fast to the cunte" - so apparently it was respectable
terminology then.
"But
in 1622 I found a source which jokingly spells it as "sunt", suggesting that there was some taboo associated
with it at that time.
"It's
interesting that use of the word as an insulting term not for the body part, but for a human being, is quite
recent.The oldest printed record is only from 1929: "What's the cunt
want to come down 'ere buggering us about for ...?" I can't tell
whether the reference is to a man or a woman. But in 1932, George Orwell used it
in referring to a man: 'Tell him he's a cunt from me.' "
While
the women's clitoris is the properpleasure analogy to the male penis, in terms of Western art, women's
sexuality has traditionally not focused on their genitalia. Feminine sexuality
is typically shown by her curves, her breasts, her hips-- or even, in the most
risqué fashion, her bush.
What
lies beneath her bush has only been detailed by two groups : hard-core
pornographersand
lesbian/feministartists.
Male-oriented Hustler magazine and the lesbian underground
press have been the two places you could count on seeing woman's cuntdisplayed for arousal. The difference
between the two (besides the audience) isthat, in lesbian work, the cuntcomes in every authentic style, and her presentation isnarcissistic, impudent, even grand.
There
is no great secret to the meaning of genital portraits-- they are as unique as
faces, and they carry all the meanings we associate with women's orgasm,
menstruation, childbirth. They are a symbol of life and joy;and in the same way that the phallus is
often celebrated, cunt pictures are undeniably a signature for power.A strong woman, in this
understanding,is not afraid her cunt,
either of looking at it or of naming it.She can appreciate other women's cuntsfor their beauty and their audacity to be displayed, as well
as their signal to arouse.
Although
there have been a million conflicts in feminist politics over eroticism and
sexuality, there has always been a unified camp regarding the need for women
tolove their genitals.Enjoying masturbation is practically
considered an accomplishment among feminists-- rather than something one would
take for granted, as most men do.
There
is a special feminist homage to be made in any discussion of cunt portraiture, to Betty Dodson, the enormously talented
writer and painterwho literally
changed the female world when she self-published Liberating Masturbation in 1974.Her descriptions of solo sex were accompanied by her
exquisite illustrations of many different women's pussies.
A
woman was lucky if she saw Dodson's illustrations as an introduction to female
sex. Commercial porn is often the first opportunity a woman gets to see
whatother women's vulvas look
like,which can be both thrilling and misleading.
Hairlessness, which can
beevocative and beautiful for the
camera, is nevertheless bewildering when it is shown as the norm for adult
females. Lesbian cunt portraits are sometimes shaved, but more often hairy,
sometimesshown off the way a man
might display his hairy chest. Inone of Tee Corinne's cunt portrait, from her "Isis" series,
thepubic hair is silver white
with age (and presumably with commensurate pussy wisdom).
The
first lesbian criticism of cunt pictures came only in the 1980s, not because of
any puritanical distaste, but because many lesbians felt that the image had
become the only picture that was acceptable to the community. that daring to
show women's faces and fantasies was the territory that was ignored in the
cunt-positive presentation of women's sexuality.Some women felt like the association between cunt and nature
was condescending and old-fashioned.
The
best cunt photographs show more than justbeautiful composition. Cunt imagery is not necessarily
"ovular''.It can be very
aggressive, e.g.,when a cunt
adopts a cock-like attitude, as seen in photographs by Phyllis Christopher
and Jamie Griffiths. Lesbian cock-consciousness is just the latest twist on
cunt: proclaiming big clits, the dildo as genital signifier or gender distorter--
a symbol of lesbian braggadocio and desire.
Morgan
Gwenwald's "Incorrect View of the Beloved" is one of my favorite cunt
shots.She focused straight up
from the floor into a headless woman's pussy, showing an angular figure with
her hands on her hips and her cunt in your face. Gwenwald's tongue-in-cheek
title says it all-- satirizing the claim thatwomen areobjectified when their genitals are exposed so blatantly, when
theirfacelessness is judged as
anonymity.I may not know this
Beloved's name, but she is anything but a blank sheet of paper. Her cunt is not
so much being peered at, as it is advancing upon us.
Women's
genital portraiture would simply not be controversial if there was not such a
strong taboo against nudity and female self-knowledge. Because a women's vulva
and clitoris are not as apparent to her as a man's, she is not guaranteed their
visibility unless she parts her lips, holds up amirror, and looks. A man simply gazes south and there it is.
Girls are brought up to protect their virtue, in part, by preventing them from
exploring their genitalia.Fortunately, those preventive measureshave failed over and over again.
From Nothing But The Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image- A Portfolio of Lesbian Erotica Photography, by Susie Bright and Jill Posener. All the photos described here, you can see in the book.
