Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (49 page)

It seems that to this point, female upbringing, which inculcates in most women a certain passivity and reticence, has made it difficult for many lesbians to admit or encourage within themselves an unalloyed aggressive interest in sex outside of love and commitment. It is not surprising that as women they have problems even admitting such interests. Kinsey reported that 77 percent of the males he interviewed acknowledged being aroused by depictions of explicit sex, but only 22 percent of the females admitted to such arousal. A more recent study gives a possible insight into this discrepancy between male and female response to pornography. Both men and women were exposed to explicitly erotic audiotapes while they were connected to instruments that measured their physical arousal. The instruments actually recorded no difference in arousal rate between men and women, but while all the male subjects who were aroused admitted arousal, only half the aroused female subjects admitted arousal.
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Of course it is much more difficult for a man to deny the physical, very visual evidence of his arousal than it is for a woman, who has only to turn a mental page in her mind and say—and perhaps even believe—the arousal never happened. Females have been socially encouraged in such internal and external denial.

Even some of those who prided themselves on aspects of their sexual liberation in the 1980s still had to admit to their difficulty in overcoming their well-inculcated sexual timidity. One woman who made a living manufacturing sex items and spoke unabashedly of having attended sex orgies nevertheless admitted:

It’s still not easy to pick someone up at a bar. What do you do and say? With gay men, they have it down pat. They don’t worry if the other man’s lover is there. With women you worry, and you feel guilty. And you always have this frantic look about you. Everyone I’ve spoken to says it takes ages and ages before you do such things with ease. Maybe never.
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The lesbian sexual radicals thus found that their struggle to encourage a more adventurous sexuality among lesbians was not easily won. While some few lesbians were successful in constructing a new sexuality for themselves, changing old attitudes among lesbians on a large scale proved to be virtually impossible in the course of one decade.

The Attraction of “Opposites”

Another way the sexual radicals hoped to enliven sexuality (even for those engaged in long-term lesbian relationships) was in attempting to avoid lesbian merging by encouraging polarities such as “top” and “bottom” or butch and femme. While some lesbians who engaged in sexual polarities felt that those roles were
natural
to them and had no superimposed meaning, others in the 1980s deliberately experimented in the hope that games of opposites would help them escape from the tedium of egalitarian vanilla sex. They also believed that the boldness of the roles made a blatant statement of their desire to overturn those conventional female sexual attitudes that lesbians shared with heterosexual women.

The group that worked the hardest to break down conventional female sexual attitudes was those lesbians who rallied around the label of sadomasochists, not merely as an expression of private sexual taste but as a public stance. Their purpose, in addition to enjoying their own sexual preferences, was consciousness-raising: it was their goal to get women to understand that they have a right to their sexual desires, no matter how unconventional or “perverted.” In fact, they referred to themselves as “perverts,” both to parody public conceptions of them and to insist that it is all right, even admirable and beneficial, to be what society has dubbed “perverted.”

Perhaps because they had to battle so much with the cultural feminists, lesbians who were involved in s/m and other radical forms of sexual expression often made pleasure seem like medical prescription. The clubs devoted to lesbian s/m during the 1980s such as Samois and the Outcasts in San Francisco, Leather and Lace in Los Angeles, the Lesbian Sex Mafia in New York, and SHELIX in Northampton, Massachusetts, were careful to explain that s/m sex has nothing to do with real-life violence or oppression of women. Instead, it is a cathartic sexual game based on fantasy, an important kind of sexual psychodrama in which the partners agree upon the limits, establish “safe words” that permit the bottom to stop the action whenever she wishes, and help each other return to everyday consciousness when the scene is concluded. They argued that it gave healthy release both to the top, who could deal in a controlled setting with her human perplexities about power and aggression, and to the bottom, who could surrender to her sexual pleasures and lose control safely. They insisted that it in no way affected a woman’s real-life personage, as a lesbian limerick about s/m bondage from a bottom’s perspective suggested:

Jane rode around on a Harley-bike.

To strangers she looked just like a bull dyke.

But at home in bed,

To her lover she pled:

“Get the ribbons. You know what I like.”
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Many of them saw s/m not simply as a bold sexual adventure, but also as a solution to “lesbian bed death” within long-term lesbian relationships. It was a way of creating a “barrier” that is necessary for continued sexual interest by constructing sexual polarities in bed such as mistress and slave, dominant and submissive, top and bottom. It could be a useful aid to monogamy if a couple wished to utilize it that way.

Women who were involved in lesbian s/m in the ’80s also generally maintained that there is nothing about s/m that is inconsistent with the principles of feminism, since it is opposed to all hierarchies based on gender. The early founders of Samois, in fact, had their roots in the feminist movement and were among the first to insist that women must claim their sexual birthright, which was no different from that of men and only appeared different because society’s emphasis on exclusive gender identity suppressed natural similarities. Women who joined such organizations were usually s/m enthusiasts, but many felt they had joined not so much for s/m itself as for their perception that those groups presented the ultimate in female sexual liberation. The meetings were erotically affirming, conveying the idea that “sex is o.k. It’s o.k. to be sexual, to feel sexual, to act sexual.”
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Members believed that they were modeling an important concept of sexual freedom for all women, since women could not be free unless they owned their own bodies and had unrestricted right to pursue their erotic pleasures.

S/m leaders specifically articulated connections between unfettered sexuality and the success of feminism. They claimed that examination of their s/m interests was a “feminist inquiry.” Corona, a professional s/m dominatrix, who did counseling for s/m lesbians and staged “Erotic Power Play” workshops as well as s/m orgies, asserted that feminists must not be afraid of power nor of looking at themselves to understand how their psyches operate and s/m helps them achieve such fearlessness. Other s/m activists emphasized that feminism that runs from sexual exploration is “femininism”; it is restrictive and contributes to women’s difficulty in breaking out of their hindering socialization as “good girls.” Feminists had much to learn from sexual outlaws, they said.
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Several lesbian psychologists of the 1980s helped to promote s/m by agreeing that it could be a healthy working out of traumas rather than a giving in to them and that as an exploration of sexual variety it could add richness to lesbian sexual lives. They pointed out that dominance and submission, as well as pleasure and pain, are deep and troubling issues in society and in the individual psyche and that there is real value in exploring and experimenting with feelings about them. The realms of sexual fantasy and erotic play, they suggested, were enormously fruitful for examining these issues. The lesbian psychologists gave support to women who wanted to experiment by their hypothesis that s/m—where mind and body, ideas and sensations interplay—was much too promising for opportunities in self-knowledge to remain hidden behind the curtains of taboo.
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Because the sexual play of s/m seemed both to produce catharsis and to create stimulating polarities, its appeal among lesbians spread for a period of time. Even those outside of cosmopolitan cities were instructed in the techniques in workshops at the huge annual wornen’s music festivals all over the country, and they imported what they had learned into their communities. Lesbians in Austin, for example, recall that several of the leaders in the Austin lesbian-feminist community were introduced to the ideas of s/m at the workshops of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival at the beginning of the 1980s and brought those ideas back to Austin. Consciousness-raising groups met to talk about it. Support groups were formed. It felt almost “religious,” the Austin women say. Those who didn’t do it were considered inhibited. It went on for about five years. But none of those groups exists anymore.
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However, while not many women chose finally to make s/m a major part of their sexual repertoire, it has fostered changes among some by demanding that they understand that sexuality, even for lesbians, may be far more complex than loving sisterhood and that it is sometimes connected with deep, dark aspects of the psyche that are not always “politically correct.” The publicity of the debate around s/m served to liberate sexuality somewhat for lesbians who were not tied to the dogmas of cultural feminism; it made them want to experiment with their sexual repertoire, as one woman enthusiastically observed:

I’m not really into S and M, but what I read about it was a wonderful opening for me. The theory gave me the right to practice things I’d thought about, play out fantasy roles I couldn’t before, do penetration. It led me to explore sexual things like being in control and not being in control, to sometimes be a top and sometimes be a bottom. Those aren’t ways to live; they’re not social roles. They’re just sexual. But they’re a part of me and I like to look at them.

One San Diego psychologist who sees many lesbians in her practice believes that bondage and related light s/m acts have become common even among women “who could think no further than vanilla sex in the 1970s.” She attributes the change to a freeing up of sexuality for which the lesbian sexual radicals have been responsible: “It’s curiosity, innovation, playfulness—a desire to know oneself in different ways. And it’s more socially acceptable now.” To the extent that she is right the sexual radicals have been at least modestly successful in their goal of liberating lesbians.
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The resurgence of butch and femme roles in the 1980s can be seen in part as another conscious attempt to create sexual polarities in order to enhance erotic relationships between women and break away from the limiting orthodoxies of lesbian-feminism and middle-class lesbianism. Many young women who claimed butch or femme identities in the 1980s saw themselves as taboo-smashers and iconoclasts. They were no longer primarily working-class women who chose those roles because they were their only models, as happened in the ’50s and ’60s; butches and femmes in the ’80s were just as likely to be intellectuals whose roots were in the middle class and who had carefully thought out the statements they wanted those roles to make. They had been fed up with the “proprieties” of lesbian-feminists, cultural feminism, and conservative middle-class lesbians—all of which seemed to them aimed at molding lesbians into a single image and standard of behavior. In their view, lesbian “propriety,” which even swept into women’s bedrooms, was detrimental to the lesbian pursuit of happiness and an absurd contradiction of their conception of the lesbian as bold and original. In reaction to that propriety they now flaunted the tabooed roles: “I like being a butch,” they said. “I like being with other butches with our nicknames and ballgames—women with muscles and pretty faces.” The newly proclaimed femmes expressed resentment that they had had to “trade in our pretty clothes for the non-descript lesbian uniform of the 1970s.” “Let’s face it,” they said disdainfully of the ’70s style, “feminism is not sexy.”
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Working-class lesbians and some lesbian essentialists tended to identify as butch or femme in the 1980s with the same deadly seriousness that characterized many women of the ’50s. They sought to discover the sexual role most “natural” to them and to stick to it. But some neo-butches and -femmes chose their identities out of a sense of adventure, a longing to push at the limits, a desire to be more blatantly sexual than the doctrinaire lesbians of the ’70s had allowed. They found themselves in conflict with lesbian-feminists and cultural feminism, but even for them neo-butch/femme roles and relationships maintained the lessons of feminism that lesbians had learned from the 1970s.

There were, for example, few butches in the ’80s who would entertain the notion that they were men trapped in women’s bodies, as butches in the 1950s sometimes did. For many of the neo-butches or -femmes the roles actually had little connection with the idealized butch and femme behaviors of their predecessors. While some lesbian historians have convincingly argued that even in the ’50s butch/ femme roles could be very complex, in the ’80s they could be even more so, because they reflected the new complexity of sexual roles in the parent culture. Just as heterosexual roles, through the influence of feminism, ceased to be universally two-dimensional and could legitimately take on all manner of androgynous nuances, so lesbians who wanted to identify as butch or femme in the 1980s could choose to express themselves in a larger variety of images. While distinctions in dress in 1980s butch/femme couples were not unusual, it was also common for both women in the couple to dress in a unisex style or to combine styles. For example, one woman who said she identified herself as a butch admitted that she also liked to wear long dresses occasionally. Her sartorial flexibility was dramatized by her dress at a function in the lesbian community: “a tuxedo with a matching shade of eye shadow, and a necklace along with a bow tie.” “Butch” and “femme” in the 1980s, much more than in the restrictive 1950s, came to mean whatever one wanted those terms to mean. A woman was a butch or a femme simply because she said she was and that self-conception helped her to enhance her sexual self-image. The
Random House Dictionary of the English Language
definition of “butch” as “the one who takes the part of a man” in a lesbian relationship lost whatever inevitable truth it may have once had.
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