Macho Sluts (6 page)

In other stories, complexities of identity and desire are experienced less as a threat and more as an enhancement. In “The Surprise Party,” for example, gay and lesbian identity does not preclude a hot encounter with the “opposite sex.” Here a dyke gets picked up by three gay cops and silently admits to herself that this is what she wants: “He put his hand on his crotch, fondled it and squeezed it. ‘You don't like this, either, do you?' he demanded. ‘No!' Liar, her sex conscience jeered. You love getting fucked. You fantasize about cock and talk dirty about it all the time. But I'm a lesbian, her public-persona objected. This doesn't have anything to do with that, the wiser voice replied.”

Identities and roles are further complicated in the story “The Vampire,” in which the two main characters are described against type: Kerry, the vampire, is an olive-skinned dyke with a crew-cut in full leathers. Iduna, ostensibly the “prey,” is an alabaster-pale femme in a red-lined cape. Iduna is a vampire chaser, eager to offer herself up. The vampire has to be seduced into taking her and it is the “victim's” desire that drives the scene. The roles of hunter and prey are effectively reversed; it is Iduna who muses “after the long hunt, the desperate search … finally, my treasure, my pet, my lord, I will make you my beloved …” Iduna is far from a passive recipient of the attentions of a top; indeed she has been “well schooled” in how to make herself “interesting to take.”

Even the concluding story in the collection, ostensibly “a dash of vanilla,” challenges neat distinctions between S/M and “normal” lesbian sex as well as between tops and bottoms. In this story, cunnilingus is revealed to be no less challenging or physically demanding than many other scenes depicted in the book. Nor is it free of power exchange: the narrator who performs cunnilingus on her girlfriend for hours on end might be seen as a classic bottom selflessly servicing her top. Yet at the end of the story, the roles flip as the narrator describes her own pleasure in overcoming her lover's reluctance to be fucked: “I fuck you yet again, and this time you really protest. It's too much, you're too tired, you're sore. But I'm adamant. I've worked so hard to get you to this place, thrown open to me … It's almost like a feeding frenzy, this letch to fuck you again and again while pleasure has made you helpless.”

Nowhere in this collection does anyone sacrifice their own pleasure for another. Tops take what they want, bottoms get what they deserve, in all the best ways. While not every scene is as involved as Roxanne's in “The Calyx of Isis”—in which she is the willing recipient of the attentions of no less than seven tops who guide her through “a high colonic, being fisted, pissed on, tied hand and foot, turned into a pin cushion, whipped ragged, fucked some more, called a whole lot of bad names, and pierced repeatedly …”—the sex is unquestionably intense.

So consider yourself forewarned: Califia demands a great deal of his readers; there is no attempt here to present a kinder and gentler S/M. Of course, no one is obliged to continue turning the pages. As Califia offered his readers in a 1984 essay, “Those of you who aren't ready for this have my permission to leave the room. But don't slam the door on your way out.”
⁹
On the other hand, you may just miss encountering yourself in new ways if you leave this room too precipitously.

ENDNOTES

1.
Pat Califia,
Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex
(San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1994), 158.

2.
Carol Queen, “What Do Women Want?” in
The Burning Pen
, ed. M. Christian (Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2001), 49.

3.
Pat Califia,
Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality
(Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1980), 107.

4.
———, “An Insistent and Indelicate Muse” in
The Burning Pen,
147.

5.
Cindy Patton, “Why I Write Porno,”
Bad Attitude
1 no. 2 (1984), 3.

6.
Pat Califia, “Non-monogamy,”
On Our Backs
(summer 1987), 24.

7.
———, “The Limits of the S/M Relationship,”
Out/Look
151 (1992), 19–20.

8.
Ibid., 21.

9.
———, “Gay Men, Lesbians and Sex,” in
Public Sex
, 183.

Macho Sluts

Introduction to the original edition

Liberty is the right not to lie.
—Albert Camus

The things that seem beautiful, inspiring, and life-affirming to me seem ugly, hateful, and ludicrous to most other people. This may be the most painful part of being a sadomasochist: this experience of radical difference, separation at the root of perception. Our culture insists on sexual uniformity and does not acknowledge any neutral differences—only crimes, sins, diseases, and mistakes. This smug erotic totalitarianism does hidden violence to dissidents and perverts. It distorts our self-images, ambitions, and dreams. We think we are alone, or crazy, or ridiculous. Our desire learns to curb itself, and we come to depend on the strength of self-repression for our safety. We live in fear of being known, and such fear stifles the nascent erotic wish before the image of what is wished for can be fully formed. We know we are ugly before we have even seen ourselves, and the injustice of this, the falsehood, chokes me.

What then, are my choices, as a writer and a sadomasochist? I could keep my sexuality private, write about other issues, other sorts of people, and tell myself that these are more important themes, more universal characters, more valid as literature. That involves telling a lie of omission—becoming invisible as a pervert, assuming an undeserved mantle of normalcy and legitimacy. Or I could become an apologist and seek to persuade the tyrannical majority that sadomasochism is not violent or self-destructive. But that would require telling many little, white lies—watering down the descriptions of frightening acts, softening the dialogue, emphasizing what S/M has in common with vanilla rather than where they part company, and appending endless, didactic justifications. This kind of fiction makes the non-S/M reader feel condescended to and lied to; it bores the well-disciplined reader and confirms a suspicion that our lives and visions are too trivial and base for explication.

It doesn't feel as if I really have a choice. Writing is hard work. It is boring and lonely. And there are too many long stretches of panic and self-hatred between the moments of inspiration. I have never been able to endure this drudgery and finish a piece that I did not care about passionately. If there isn't enough lustful electricity in the work to keep my batteries charged during the false starts, tedious revisions, and backtracking away from dead ends to come up with a proper finish, I run down like a neglected wind-up toy. These short stories are attempts to tell the truth about my own desire, and they are written for people who understand what I need and value what I see. I would rather be a tribal storyteller than a self-conscious member of the literati or a leather missionary churning out tracts for a bunch of people who will never think of themselves as heathens.

This book will be accused of being pornographic and thus misogynistic, a piece of hate literature. So let me say explicitly, at the risk of sounding foolish, that this is a valentine in its original form, a cunt held open by a woman's trusting fingers. It is a visible act of love, written for any reader who is not a traitor to her own cunt. (It has something to do with hatred, too, but not what you assume.) It was meant to generate some of the hope that leather dykes need as much as they need raw courage to survive in a hostile world. I want more of us to make it to adulthood without being driven mad or driven normal or driving off a cliff. And I want more of us, period. So this book is also a recruitment poster, as flashy and fast and seductively intimidating as I could make it.

You might not like the women in my stories, but all of them—tops and bottoms—are strong women. They are not completely autonomous human beings (even I can't suspend disbelief to that extent), but they chafe under any restrictions. You won't get any charity fucks out of them because they don't feel sorry for you. Nor will they say something that will make you feel bad about yourself under the guise of upgrading your id and your politics. They are selfish bitches, but they know how to have a good time, and if you amuse them, they could show you a good time as well. They don't want to save the whole world, but they know it's essential to be able to save your own ass. These are women who get to be heroes, have adventures, kick up their heels and kick butt.

Under the guise of keeping you entertained, Reader Mine, I wanted to get some social criticism flowing as well as some j/o grease. Why exactly is it that pornography (especially pornography about sexual minorities) is assumed to be either worthless trash or toxic waste? Why has it taken so long for any sex books (whether their jackets are leather or flannel) by and for lesbians to be written? How does this new genre of porn function?

Most people (even the nicest sort of liberal who opposes censorship) assume that porn isn't worth defending because it's thrown-together, hurriedly produced garbage intended to make a quick buck. And people do spend a lot of money on mass-market pornography, despite the fact that most of it is flat and stale. The average porn novel is typed, not written. You have to work at breakneck speed to make a living when you get paid maybe $200 a book. It's no wonder that the work attracts hacks. Even the porn writers who aren't hacks feel contempt for their audience as well as themselves, and it permeates their material. Illegal businesses are even more tightly controlled than “legitimate” enterprises, and this overpriced, offensive swill is the only graphic sex that's readily available. This won't change unless obscenity is decriminalized, and competition makes it necessary for porn producers to cut into their profits with a little quality control. (In other words, don't hold your breath.) The sad fact that the porn industry makes an obscene profit with its degraded product is just an index of how badly people want to learn about sex and get turned on. It doesn't tell you anything about what people would like to buy if there was really any choice.

But these marketplace conditions do not apply to by-and-for-lesbians porn. Because lesbians hardly constitute a mass market on the scale the Mafia (or the vice squad) is accustomed to, the term “lesbian pornography” used to refer to material that didn't feature lesbians and wasn't intended for a lesbian audience. Now, a few entrepreneurs, artists, filmmakers, writers, and poets are pouring their creative energy into making homegrown lesbian porn. These businesses are under-capitalized and labor-intensive. Most of them don't show a profit. Their product is a welcome relief from the straight-produced stuff which usually misses the point entirely. It is immensely popular among lesbians.

This new kind of pornography has been confiscated by agents of the state (especially in Canada) and banned from significant numbers of feminist bookstores. Many women's publications routinely give sexually explicit work—even non-fiction lesbian sex manuals—savage reviews. Is the crime of obscenity synonymous with bad writing? Or with being a man out to make a quick buck? Apparently not.

As the judge who banned
Coming to Power
in New Zealand said, “Some of the stories are well written but … The book is in the finding of the Tribunal clearly indecent.” The same tribunal had classified
The Joy of Lesbian Sex
to be “indecent in the hands of persons under the age of eighteen” despite the fact that “the book is well written, informative, and well presented. The subject is sensitively handled … and by comparison with other manuals on lesbianism is of a superior standard.” And despite the fact that “lesbianism is not outside the law” in New Zealand!

Well-written, sexually explicit material is sometimes even more threatening to the status quo than pulp. In
The End of Obscenity
(Simon and Schuster, 1968, page 435), Charles Rembar, the attorney who successfully defended
Lady Chatterley's Lover
,
The Tropic of Cancer
, and
Fanny Hill
against obscenity charges, comments on problems he faced writing legal briefs that argued that these works should not be banned:

One was “well-written obscenity.” The cry had plagued us all through these cases. Good writing, every one of my opponents had declared, is no excuse. If not all of them said—as many of them did—the better the writing the more dangerous the book, they all agreed that literary quality could not make an obscene book non-obscene.

People who wring their hands because obscenity laws have been used to hassle the publishers of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce are correct to bemoan the chilling effect this has had on including sexuality in “serious” (i.e., non-pornographic) fiction. But they miss another crucial point. Because the censors are even more afraid of well-written porn than they are of expletive-ridden drivel, publishers shy away from pornographic manuscripts that are too literary because in the past, this has incurred the wrath of the authorities. The dearth of good writing in porn is at least as tragic as the dearth of sex in literature. It persists despite the fact that literary quality is now considered to be one sort of social value that may rescue a work from being declared obscene and vulnerable to being confiscated and destroyed, at least in this country.

The task of creating high-quality pornography is a challenge worthy of any talented writer. It just isn't that easy to get a reader hopelessly and unforgettably aroused. I am not talking about the auto-erotic Pavlovian response that some of us have developed to the repetition of certain key words. I am talking about phrases that stay with the reader, images that come back in the middle of a work day and make her blush, a book that she will want to read again and won't loan to her friends because she knows she'll never get it back—not a disposable paperback she can toss into the garbage without remembering if she ever read it or not.