The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (6 page)

At eighty-two, I’ve decided to make a documentary based on the Bodysex Workshops. In a sense, I’m going back to the beginning, to document the heart of my work. The all-women’s masturbation circle is
my sewing circle. “How do you feel about your body and your orgasm?” is a question still worth asking and the resulting conversation is one still worth having. We are there to listen to and honor each woman’s personal story. We celebrate our independent orgasms without a partner or with one.

This time around, it will be captured professionally with a film crew and better quality lighting and sound. I want to document this with the esteem it deserves, so I can leave the planet happy in the knowledge that this incredible workshop, designed by the early women who first attended, will be captured for all to see. It will be my most brilliant work of art, my Sistine Chapel. Now I have to have the courage to be an old Crone on film. I’m willing to set an example for seniors who are giving up on sex way too soon. After all, my ageing body can still see, hear, eat, drink, laugh, talk, walk, sing, dance, shit, masturbate, fuck, create, draw, write, and have orgasms!

In my heart, I believe that women and girls will not be self-motivated and self-possessed if they cannot give themselves orgasms. If they rely on someone else for sexual pleasure, they are potential victims of whatever society is pushing as “normal.” Masturbation is a meditation on self-love. It is essential. Sex-positive feminism is alive and well and we
will
change the world. It’s just going to take a bit longer than expected. Viva la Vulva!

The Birth of the Blue Movie Critic

SUSIE BRIGHT

Susie Bright
’s legacy in porn criticism and debate is detailed in her latest book,
Susie Bright’s Erotic Screen: The Golden Hardcore & the Shimmering Dyke-Core.
She is the author of the national best sellers
Full Exposure
and
The Sexual State of the Union,
as well as her memoir,
Big Sex Little Death.
She is the host of Audible’s
In Bed With Susie Bright,
the longest-running sexuality program in the history of broadcasting. Bright was co-founder and editor of
On Our Backs
magazine, and the first journalist to cover erotic cinema and the porn business in the mainstream press. A progenitor of the sex-positive movement, Bright taught the first university course on pornography, and brought lasting sexual influence to her role and writing in films like
Bound
and
The Celluloid Closet,
as well as by playing herself, “the famous feminist sex writer,” on
Six Feet Under.

I
was hired by Jack Heidenry in 1986 to write for
Penthouse Forum,
a pocketbook-size sex journal that porn mogul Bob Guccione published during his heyday. I had no idea that Jack’s plan was so experimental. All I knew was that I’d never been paid to write professionally before, though I’d worked tirelessly on newspapers and underground magazines since I was a teenager, including one that got me suspended for distributing birth control information in high school. My first “sex advice column” was written for a 1980s underground magazine dedicated to “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.” I was always the enthusiastic volunteer of the sexual liberation front.

But I’d never watched an X-rated movie.

I didn’t tell Jack my secret. It was such an amazing opportunity that I wanted him to think I wrote for piles of money all the time and knew everything about erotic theater.

Unlike Guccione’s flagship title with its pin-up girl centerfolds,
Forum
was full of sexy words instead of sexy pictures, and was read by men and women alike.

Heidenry found me because he admired my writing and editorship of a two-year-old, antiestablishment, lesbian sex magazine called
On Our Backs.
I was shocked he’d even heard of us. Our tiny posse in San Francisco didn’t publish our manifesto with men in mind.

Jack asked me to write a monthly column, “The Erotic Screen,” to review and report on the latest in erotic cinema. A year later, he added an advice column so I could respond to erotic film questions.

It must have been a red-letter day in 1986 for women’s lib at the Guccione Empire—Heidenry hired me, Veronica Vera, and Annie Sprinkle as monthly contributors. Has any leading circulation magazine in New York ever again hired three talented women as contributing editors and paid them handsomely? I was blissfully out of the loop about how few women worked in these capacities.

I was twenty-eight years old. All those famous hardcore films like
Deep Throat
and
Behind the Green Door
had came out when I was in Catholic grade school wearing saddle shoes and plaid skirts.

When I was a kid, I was curious about “X-rated” movies, of course—but by the time I was a teen, I was a radical, and I considered blue movies, the whole idea of them, to be pathetic. I thought the people who made or watched
those
films must be lonely, at best. They needed to take their clothes off and go have sex with everyone else at the nude beach. My actual life at the time would have made a good porno.

By the time the 1980s arrived, I was creating lesbian erotica every day with a talented band of art radicals at our all-dyke office above a Chinese take-out restaurant in the Castro. I worked at a day job in a closet-sized feminist sex toy shop, the original Good Vibrations founded by Joani Blank. It was the only place of its kind. Our great inventory disadvantage was that hardly anyone in the “erotic” world made anything of interest for women.

My vibrator shop colleagues and I talked about “someday” publishing a book of erotic short stories by women—it had never been done. I saw only a few customers per day, and in between talking about the miracle of the Magic Wand vibrator, we talked about how no one seemed to believe that women had erotic, aesthetic interests of their own.

At
On Our Backs,
we were inventing everything from scratch. How about mounting a lesbian strip show performed by real dyke whores and strippers who wanted to perform for their own kind? Done! How about making videos of real butches and femmes and punks, people who looked like us, out dykes with real faces, having sex like real women do? Let’s do it!

It slowly dawned on us that there’d never been an erotic magazine
put together by women of any persuasion—straight, bi, or gay—nor had lesbians ever published a periodical, even non-erotic, so blatantly and visually out of the closet. Our names and faces were on the line.

My start at
Forum
was clumsy. I asked Jack, “You know I’m a lesbian feminist, right? I’m not going to change my mind about how I see things.”

But that wasn’t the half of it. I wasn’t a professional journalist, despite my political credentials. My first
Forum
review, to my eyes now, reads like a high school book report. Furthermore, I had no contacts in the business, no introductions. I had to buy a ticket like every other dirty old man and march into the Pussycat Theater for a theatrical viewing. I didn’t know what a VCR was—none of my friends watched videos at home.

Now I’m glad for my initial deprivation. I ended up seeing amazing 35 mm films on some of the biggest and most elegant screens in San Francisco and New York. They raised my expectations, in a good way.

I was the only woman in the porn theater who wasn’t working. I thought at first that the male customers would hassle me as I sat down in a torn velvet seat with my little notepad. But they didn’t bother me—they moved away as if I were a detective. I would have the entire aisle to myself.

I also realized that a lot of the men were having sex with each other in the back of the theater, both inspired by and indifferent to the largely heterosexual activity on screen. I remember feeling annoyed when I would hear them grunting, and I’d yell, “You’re missing a good part!”

I had a friend, now deceased, named Victor Chavez, who worked out of the Local 2 HERE (the San Francisco hospitality services union) banquet hall. We were both union organizers, a subject close my heart. But we discussed other things besides unfair contracts! He’s the one who opened his briefcase one day and told me that the two books he always carried with him were, one, the Bible, which he set out before us on a table. Next, he pulled out
How to Enlarge Your Penis,
which he told me was the second best-selling book in the world next to Genesis.

Victor had a Betamax video player, and a screen, which he insisted on loaning me so I could be a better critic. He believed in my potential. The screen was enormous and I could barely fit it in my single room. But I instantly grasped the intimacy of this new viewing experience. I could plug in my Magic Wand and make as much of a fuss as those guys at the Pussycat.

I understood the dual whammy of porn. All those people fucking and breathing hard, it gets to you—at least before you’ve reviewed a few thousand of them. It arouses you to distraction. On the other hand, I
was a huge movie buff, a film nerd, and I couldn’t help but critique the bombs, the gaffes, the weird porn canards—as well as appreciate the directors who were obviously great talents.

You see, erotic filmmakers were the original indie filmmakers. The fact that their films turned you on was no different from a different genre scaring the daylights out of you, or making you cry. Films are great vehicles to elicit strong emotion. When they touch you on multiple levels simultaneously, we call them “masterpieces.”

The hardcore era that began in the late 1960s is now understood as part of the wave of independent films that broke away from the Hollywood studio system. The erotic filmmakers were pioneers in the same league as the spaghetti western directors or the producers of clumsy horror and sci-fi flicks. Sometimes, they were the same people. The permanent ghettoization of blue films was bizarre, and unwarranted by anything but the priggery of politicians.

When
Forum
hired me, there were a lot of porn “fan magazines,” but no independent reviews or genuine reporting. You would never see an article in a daily newspaper or legitimate magazine about the economics, aesthetics, or workaday world of the adult film industry. (The whole expression, “adult,” as a euphemism for “sex,” came into our vernacular because of legal battles that defined sexuality as a subject forbidden for young people’s eyes).

It was truly the “twilight zone,” only referred to in legal and moral debates about obscenity. No guild reporter actually went out to a movie set or an office; no non-adult journalist knew the numbers. It was untouched territory, and I was the unlikely character who wandered into it with a pencil and pad.

There was one trade newsletter, like a one-sheet version of
Variety,
edited by Jared Rutter, called
Film World Reports,
which was read by producers and directors in the business. It listed the best-selling movies, who was buying what, classic insider bullet news. After all, they were certainly making money and deals, despite the indifference of the rest of the entertainment media. Decoding that sheet was one of my first accomplishments.

Yes, you could buy men’s magazines where you’d read breathless interviews with the starlets, or read peanut-sized reviews that said things like “Steamy! Ceci is
so hot!
” It was advertising barely disguised as editorial. The people who wrote the reviews did not use their own names. It was as closeted a world as a pre-Stonewall gay bar.

The closest thing to erotic cinema criticism was at
Hustler
magazine, which deployed a famous graphic they created called the “peter-meter”
to cover the latest releases. With each title, the little penis would rise from the merely pudgy to raging hard-on.

“Peter” was always at least at half-mast, until one shocking day,
Hustler
gave a film a complete limp-dick rating. I was riveted by the reviewer, who used his own voice to say how revolted and disgusted he was by this insult to masculinity and good, clean X-rated fun.

Wow. Obviously
Hustler
had not been paid for this review. I decided if they hated this movie, it must be great.

I was right. The film was
Smoker,
made by a pair of film students from NYU who’d done art direction for Rinse Dream’s
Cafe Flesh.
Their names were Ruben Masters and Michael Constant. I saw
Smoker
the very next day at the Pussycat, and sure enough, it rattled several customers enough to leave the theater. I think it was the moment when David Christopher slipped a filmy blue women’s chemise over his chest and started slapping his cock against his belly, masturbating and fiercely monologuing to himself as he spied upon a neighbor next door. He’s not announced as trans, or cross-dressed, or any label at all. What he is doing is just his unexplained intimacy, so well acted and shot you feel like you’re in
Hiroshima Mon Amour
meets seventh-floor walkup in the Bowery.