The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (5 page)

The Bodysex Workshops continued over the next twenty-five years. They took a lot out of me; I ended up sacrificing my hip joints to women’s sexual liberation! These groups also offered unique fieldwork in female masturbation, a subject rarely researched in academia, and I ended up with a PhD in sexology.

In 1982 at the age of fifty-three, I joined a support group of lesbian and bisexual women who were into consensual S/M. Perhaps I had avoided this small subculture because I suspected there was something unhealthy about mixing pain with pleasure. Instead of finding sick, confused women, I discovered a group of feminists who were enjoying the most politically incorrect sex imaginable. One of our first big mistakes as feminists was to establish politically correct sex, defined as the ideal of love between equals with both partners remaining monogamous.

For heterosexual women, politically correct sex put us in the age old bind of trying to change men by getting them to shape up and settle down. That meant men had to also practice monogamy—a project that has consistently failed for centuries. Most men are hardwired to have multiple sex partners while women who want children need a more lasting and secure relationship in order to raise a family. Those of us who remained single also wanted multiple sex partners. Our efforts to expand
the idea of feminist sex were censored by mainstream feminists and the media at every turn.

The night of my first S/M meeting, I entered the small apartment and as I looked around the room, I didn’t see one familiar face among these younger women. My internal dialogue was like a broken record: “They’re probably all lesbian separatists and the minute they find out I’m bisexual, they won’t let me join.” I’d been discriminated against so many times in the past that the chip on my shoulder weighed heavily. As I sat there wallowing in my anticipated rejection, I visually fell into lust with every woman there. What a marvelous variety from stone butch to lipstick lesbians. When the meeting began, each woman introduced herself, then stated whether she was dominant or submissive, and said a few words about how she liked to play. The closer they got to me, the faster the butterflies in my belly fluttered. When all eyes were on me, I defensively said, “I’m a bisexual lesbian who’s into self-inflicted pleasure!”

Several women smiled. One asked how I inflicted my pleasure, and when I said it was with an electric vibrator, the room broke up laughing. A group of lesbian and bisexual feminists who were willing to explore kinky sex was my fondest dream come true and within no time, I was right at home.

Gradually I began to understand that all forms of sex were an exchange of power, whether it was conscious or unconscious. My focus had been on the pleasure in sex, not the power. The basic principle of S/M was that all sexual activity between one or more adults had to be consensual and required a verbal negotiation, followed by an agreement between the players. All my years of romantic sex, when we tried to read each other’s minds, were basically nonconsensual sex. Romantic love is one of the most damaging concepts on the planet for women—little girls raised on Disney’s
Sleeping Beauty
are taught to wait for a prince to awaken them.

By the time I was in my midthirties and sport fucking, I learned to take control and be a top as a means of getting what I wanted. But none of these sexual activities were ever discussed or agreed upon openly. As I looked at sexuality in terms of this power dynamic, it felt like I was waking from a deep sleep.

That spring, Dorothy, the founding mother of our group, invited me to join her at a conference organized by Women Against Pornography (WAP). Her commitment to feminism was contagious and she was aware of all the current happenings in the movement. By then I had dropped out of feminism so I was learning a lot from Dorothy, a thirty-year-old radical lesbian who had been trashed by other feminists because of her
S/M sexual preferences. As a post-menopausal hedonist in my fifties, I looked forward to my first public feminist forum dressed as a leather dyke.

The two of us trooped into the WAP conference arm in arm, wearing boots and jeans with large silver studded belts under our black leather jackets—high-visibility leather dykes sitting in the front row just to the left of the podium. The women glared at us, signaling that we were out of place, while we wore our political incorrectness like a badge of honor.

At the time, I had difficulty taking this group seriously. After feminists had fought against censoring information about birth control, abortion, sexuality, and lesbianism, the idea that there was now a group that wanted to censor pornography seemed absurd. Surely WAP was only a small percentage of feminists, but Dorothy said they were gaining strength and growing in numbers. Ms. magazine had contributed money to WAP, and under pressure from members, NOW (National Organization for Women) had approved a resolution that condemned pornography without defining it. Several local NOW chapters actively supported WAP. Censorship was coiled like a rattlesnake ready to strike at our freedom and poison people’s enjoyment of masturbating while looking at pictures of sex. Unbelievable!

The large meeting room at NYU was packed with women only—nearly a thousand had assembled. A red cloth banner with big black letters stretched across the back of the stage: WOMEN AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY. That had to cost a pretty penny. There was also a first-rate sound system, along with expensive printed flyers—all done very professionally. This was no makeshift feminist conference where we had mimeographed handouts. Dorothy leaned in close and asked, “When have you ever seen a conference dealing with women’s issues that had this kind of money behind it?” We both agreed that WAP most likely had been secretly funded by the CIA, the Christian Right, or both. The Good Old Boys were setting us up again—divide and conquer!

Drifting into a reverie, I thought about the 1973 NOW Sexuality Conference. I remembered how brave we’d been, questioning sex roles and sexual taboos, exploring female sexual pleasure, and daring to create better sex lives for women with information and education. We’d been so sex positive and filled with excitement that we would change the world. How, in just ten short years, could we have ended up against pornography, which put feminists in the same bed as Christians preaching the gospel?

The WAP conference featured many speakers. Each gave a brief, personal history, and nearly every one had a horror story of sexual abuse at
the hands of a father, brother, husband, lover, or boss. There were stories of rape, battered wives, child abuse, harassment, and forced prostitution. Dorothy was busy taking notes while I sat there stunned by the realization that I was in the midst of an orgy of suffering, angry women. Each speaker’s words and tears were firing up the group into a unified rage. Emotionalism without intellect from victims without power was how lynch mobs and nationwide hate groups were formed—the basic strategy of fascism, I concluded with a shiver.

It saddened me to hear how these women had suffered, and I would never deny that their pain was real. For most of them, sex had truly been a misery or a violent trauma. No sane person was for rape or incest, but this one-dimensional attack on images of sex was totally unacceptable. Blaming pornography as the sole cause of women’s sexual problems was ludicrous. Why weren’t they going after big problems like war, poverty, organized religion, and sexual ignorance due to the total absence of decent sex education in our school system?

An attractive blonde in her midthirties stood at the mic. With her rage barely controlled, she described her childhood sexual abuse. Every Saturday when her mother pulled out of the driveway to do the grocery shopping, her father got out his “disgusting, filthy pictures” and forced her to perform an “unnatural act.” She didn’t say what it was, but the audience was surely fantasizing an adult penis penetrating an eleven-year-old girl. The whole room was emotionally whipped up into a rage with their own private images of child rape, while at the same time, reveling in the awfulness of it.

The speaker went on to blame the entire incident on pornography! There was no mention of society’s denial of sexual expression, especially masturbation. Maybe the father was a devout Catholic who knew he’d go to hell if he took hold of his own penis. How about the nuclear family taking some of the blame with its restrictive sexual mores? But none of these other possibilities occurred to her. She was adamant that “dirty pictures” had been the sole cause of her incest.

The WAP meeting ended with an open mic session, and within moments, emotional chaos broke loose. Women were crying and screaming hysterically, so we got out fast. Once outside, we took a deep breath to release our own tension. We both felt drained. Although we disagreed with WAP, they had a right to their opinions even though they didn’t respect our rights. We remained sexual outlaws.

The 1980s also ushered in AIDS, and the Reagan government was slow to respond to this looming crisis. How perfect: AIDS ended casual sex and sent the population back into committed relationships and
monogamy—the glue that binds. Child sexual abuse was rampant and getting national attention, while no one paid any attention to how poverty was really hurting our kids. Finally women were being heard, but it was only half the conversation. We were not getting ahead by avoiding central issues—and we certainly were not liberating our sexualities.

During this time, women showed up at my workshops and broke down in tears as they began to talk about being sexually abused. Each time, I would ask them to leave, with the explanation that my groups were about exploring pleasure, not sexual abuse. They needed to see a therapist and then come back for a Bodysex Workshop later on. Some women accused me of having a hard heart, but I simply stayed on mission of liberating women’s independent orgasms so we could come back to life—actually and fully.

My Bodysex Workshops were well received, so I decided to film one. You just can’t beat the moving image; it’s an opportunity to give people images of what sex might be. The best way for us to learn is to find out what’s going on with everyone else. My girlfriend and I used a home video camera, and it took me two years to edit it on two clunky tape decks. My films were automatically labeled porn, because if you see a pussy or a penis, it’s porn. But you can’t teach sex without getting explicit, so, again, I found myself embracing the role of pornographer.

Before the Internet, every time I said “masturbation,” it either sent folks into gales of laughter or provoked embarrassed looks as they quickly changed the subject. My articles for magazines were canceled and interviews for television ended up on the cutting room floor. The bottom line of sexual repression is the prohibition of childhood masturbation. This humble activity is the basis for all of human sexuality. The Internet was the first place in my long career that I was not censored.

My old lover Grant ran my first website. At the end, he was classified as legally blind, and held a magnifying glass, with his nose an inch from the screen. When I joined forces with law school grad and cyber geek Carlin Ross, we created a new website. I believe that once Grant met Carlin, he was able to leave his disintegrating body. He made it to his eighty-sixth birthday and died proud with his boots on, with the next upload for my website sitting on his hard drive. I miss him terribly to this day. We had the most passionate love/hate affair of the century.

Carlin and I offer free, accessible sex information, both visual and written, to women and men. We call the clips where we show sexual skills, “The New Porn.” Sex education must be entertaining, not academic, dry, boring, or stilted. I’m not afraid of the word porn. If people
are going to call my explicit sex education porn, then I say embrace the word. Be the new porn, be the porn you want to see. While it’s true that a lot of pornography out there is shitty for the most part, it still works: it gets people hot. The biggest turn on for me is to have a fully orgasmic partner, not someone pretending or playing. We all know the real deal when it’s happening—authentic orgasms are unmistakable. I’m a sex-positive feminist, liberating women one orgasm at a time.

Our site represents a new feminist sexual politics that’s well beyond any victimhood of rape and sexual abuse. We represent orgasmic feminism—a new movement of women who have taken control of our sex lives, and who dare to design them in any way we choose whether we’re straight, bi, lesbian, or a combination, and we can enjoy our bodies in any way we desire.

Recently, I love answering sex questions for free from all kinds of young, middle-aged, and older women, as well as boys and men. I’m learning about the concerns and sexual problems of Americans and people from around the world. Let me tell you: sexuality is in a lot of trouble. Young women today do not know what, when, where, or how to have an orgasm. Many of them have grown up without childhood masturbation, thanks to the growing influence of religion and the censorship of sexual information. Without access to proper sexual information, porn has been their primary form of sex education. The issue here is that the most readily available porn is basically entertainment for men. One young woman said she was sure she’d never had an orgasm because she’d never ejaculated. Unfortunately, the G-spot has become the new name for vaginal orgasms. It’s unfortunate because a very small percentage of women squirt when they experience an orgasm. I wrote my first book to help those few women know that this response was natural. Now we have a nation of young women trying to learn how to ejaculate.

Well-meaning friends suggest that I should drop the word “feminist,” and perhaps the entire concept, because feminism is so “old hat.” Young women today have lost interest in feminism because they believe it’s antisex and that all feminists are man haters. Let me tell you something, girlfriends. That’s exactly what the powers-that-be want us to think and do. Feminism has become a dirty word, and I want to save it, to revive it. I want feminism to signify a woman who knows what she wants in bed and gets it. Guys will be saying, “I’ve got to find me a feminist to fuck!”