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Supporting Quotes from Feminist Authors

for the S/M Policy Reform Statement

Excerpt from Pat Califias "A Personal View of the History of the Lesbian S/M Community and Movement in San Francisco," Coming to Power, 1981, edited by Samois, the lesbian/feminist S/M organization.

"The Gay Freedom Day Parade was held the last weekend in June. For the first time, an S/M organization (as opposed to leather bars or S/M baths) marched in the parade. The Society of Janus had a small contingent. I was one of the coordinators of Janus so I marched with the group, and a few Samois members joined us. Although Janus had applied for and received a permit to be in the parade, our contingent was hassled by monitors who did not believe we had the right to be there. They tried to expel us from the parade on the grounds that we violated a parade regulation excluding images that were sexist or depicted violence against women.

Ill grant you, we must have looked weird to the monitors. We were definitely out of the leather ghetto, marching with other political and social groups. One of the members was driving a big red jeep, and one of the women members of Janus had chained herself to the hood, to make it look more like a float. At the monitors insistence, she eventually unchained herself. I could understand that their concerns about safety made this a reasonable request. But then the monitors became hysterical about a lesbian couple who were marching together. The bottom had a ripped-up shirt that showed her whip marks, and she was wearing a jewelry chain around her wrist and fingers. The top was holding the other end of the chain. "Take that chain off that woman!" one of the monitors kept screaming. "Unchain her!"

"I cant," replied the unruffled mistress. "I welded it on myself this morning."

The monitors disappeared, frothing at the mouth, and called the head of security, who turned out to be a lesbian who was just as rabid as they were. I argued with her about our right to be in the parade practically the entire way down Market Street. While we argued, photographers kept leaping in front of the contingent and taking pictures of us and journalists kept shoving microphones in my face. One of the reporters shouted at me, "How would you feel about someone who wanted you to cut their leg off?" The crowd was equally hostile. We were booed and hissed, there were shouts of "fascists" and "Nazis," and some people threatened us or spit at us.

There was a lot of confusion about who we were. Many of the spectators assumed we were the gay Nazis, despite the fact that not a single swastika was in evidence. This confusion was increased when Priscilla Alexander published "Masters and Slaves by Any Other Name" (Bay Times, July 1978) and compared us with Nazis.

After the parade, Janus set up a booth and distributed literature. A lot of people came up to talk to us (mostly gay leathermen), but even the S/M people thought it was weird that we were in the parade. They were ashamed of their sexuality, afraid to make it public, afraid it would attract more missunderstanding and harassment, and didnt understand why anybody would think S/M was a political issue. We also got a lot of shit from gays of all sexualities who thought in the Year of Briggs we should all come to the parade in pinstripe suits. Of course, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a large picture of our contingent with their story of the parade, which confirmed these fears.

Nevertheless, I was proud to march with Janus, and I think it was long overdue for S/M people to make themselves more visible in the gay parade. Individual sadomasochists and the gay businesses South of Market have made a big contribution to the gay community, and we are entitled to recognition and respect. In times of repression, it is always tempting to police and censor your own community. But I dont believe gay people can make themselves conventional enough to escape persecution. We are hated because we have a different kind of sex, the wrong kind of sex. I have always wanted freedom to be as queer, as perverted, on the street and on the job as I am in my dungeon. I dont think radical perverts should obey gay or lesbian or feminist mind police any more than they should obey the vice squad.

Excerpt from "My History with Censorship".
Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country, Firebrand Books, 1987.

"...This is my historical and emotional starting point on the issue of censorship. These were the years I learned about censorship, the overt kind and the more subtle kind; the years I learned about a mentality that reserves for itself the words that mean everything good, and labels dissenters with any term that will send off the alarm. These were the years I learned about anonymous telephone calls warning people about the undesirables among them: the years I learned about visits to places of employment to make sure employers new who they had working for them. It was the time I learned about silence, enforced by the fear of losing whole communities, about words and pictures never born because difference was a curse.

"But all along I had another world to sustain me, the deviant criminalized world of butch-femme Lesbians in Village bars. Here, also, my behavior was policed. Here, also, I was part of a judged community. We were moral dangers. Here I learned that vice squads existed to keep obscenities like myself from polluting the rest of society. Here I learned how to take brutal insults to personal dignity and keep wanting and loving. Here I learned first what a community of women could do even when we were called the scum of the earth.

"I worked in the gay liberation movement and the Lesbian liberation movement and then the women's movement for many years before I thought I could begin to explore the meaning of my own life, before in my own mind I was sure that we had won wnough ground that I could raise some visions of resistance other than the prevailing ones of the seventies. In 1981, I wrote an aricle called "Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s" and published a short story called "Esther's Story". That year marked for me the second McCarthy period in my life. Only this time, many of the holders of truth were women.

"They called the organizers of conferences where I was speaking and told them I was a "sexual deviant," labeling me as a dangerous person who betrays the feminist cause. The place where I earn my living, Queens College, was visited by a member of Women Against Pornography who saw it as her duty to warn a group of students and professors about me. "Don't you know she is a lesbian? Don't you know she practices S&M? Don't you know she engages in unequal patriarchal power sex?" (Butch and femme is what is meant here, I think.) I was told this when I was called to the Women's Center on campus and asked by the group of women students gathered there whether the accusations were correct. Only those of you who remember the cadence of those McCarthy words -- "Are you now or have you ever been..." -- can know the rage that grew in me at this moment. These young women, so earnest in their feminism, were so set up for this sad moment. "I cannot answer you," I said, "because to do so would bring back a world I have worked my whole life to see never come again."

originally published in DIFFERENT LOVING: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (Villard/Random House, 1993 and 1996)
Authors: Gloria G. Brame, William D. Brame, and Jon Jacobs

"[D&S] has long suffered under a vast and oppressive cloud of antiquated mores and pseudo-scientific rhetoric . . . . In order to understand unusual sexualities . . . one first has to consider the question 'what is normal?' If the unique function of sex is reproductive--and the only reason men and women should engage in sex is for the purpose of creating new life--then only heterosexual intercourse is normal. Masturbation, oral sex, and even contraception must be considered aberrant . . . We start from the premise that sex for pleasure is a normal human drive and is acceptable when it brings pleasure to both partners."

"For active D&S'ers, sadomasochism is a thoughtful and controlled expression of adult sexuality that holds the promise of intense intimacy and sharing. The practices and attitudes of D&S'ers largely abide by the credo of 'Safe, Sane, and Consensual.' Partners emphasize equal and honest communication, negotiation, and consent; mutual trust is fundamental."

Different Loving is now in its 5th printing, and has become a standard text in graduate sexology programs in the US and Canada, and is about to published in the UK and Italy.

"A Letter To My Sister, Never Really Sent"
originally published in Some Women, Rhinocerous Books, edited by Laura Antoniou.
Author: Ann C.

Dear Sister,
I was with you back in the days when Sisterhood meant newborn Power, and consciousness raising wasn't the snide middle-class joke it has now become. I was there, in the streets with battered signs, braving the sneers and jeers of the men who screamed at us to go back to our kitchens, go back to having babies. They called us enemies to our culture, our races, our mates and children. We were a danger to the continuity of our nation, our cities, our neighborhoods, our bedrooms. We were easy lays for draft resisting "boys," and we were ugly, frigid bitches who couldn't get fucked by men if we wanted it. But we fought on, because we believed that no woman should be denied a job, or an education, or an abortion, or the freedom to seek her own destiny without hitching herself to a man.

I was there, Sister. And I am here still, in an age when women laugh as they protest that they are not really feminists, because feminists are too negative, or strident, or angry, or "P.C." I am here still, when feminism has been blamed for everything from the poverty and unemployment rates to floods and hurricanes, when the proud supporters of presidential candidates can equate feminism with child-abandonment and witchcraft and get rabid applause from their followers, eager to launch themselves into a pogrom. I am here still, despite the theorists and the intelligentsia who betray their mothers and daughters by declaring that feminism is dead, that perhaps it never lived.

Yet to you, my Sister, I am as alien as they are, a creature whose mere presence in your movement you wish to disown, to deny and cast out. I am an embarrassment to you, a potential traitor to your cause, even though your causes have never been mine. You will fight to the death to insure that I in my maturity and freedom of will may choose to birth or not to birth. Yet at the same time, you accuse me of not having a consciousness that is aware of reality and of my own tastes, desires and fantasies. You tell me that I am male-identified, that I have been hypnotized by the overculture, that my innermost self is damaged and faulty.

I am a sadomasochist. I do SM. I embrace Dominance and submission as concepts of fantasy, as constructs of sexuality and sensuality. I enjoy behavior you describe as destructive, entropic, and sick, with partners gathered in my maturity, chosen of my free will. I am, I know, your worst nightmare. I remember turning through the pages of a Ms. magazine in the early Eighties, and reading a letter from a woman who enjoyed being spanked by her wonderful (also feminist) husband. And I remember being stricken to my core, standing in my kitchen, stirring a cup of coffee for over twenty minutes, reading and rereading her words, feeling that familiar shame creeping through my body, yet exhilarated beyond belief. I wasn't alone! That was all I could think, as my coffee cooled and my feet froze into the tiles; I was not the only feminist woman in the world who had these fantasies and acted upon them. I showed the letter to my lover at the time, and we laughed nervously. The letter was anonymous. And in a month, we would read the anger, the outrage and the hostility that came of it. More then one respondent suggested that the writer had been motivated by prurience; that my comments were written in the style of a Penthouse letter. But I was also heartened to see several responses from women who supported the right of the original writer to explore her own sexuality free from guilt and self-recrimination.

I would have been satisfied to leave it at that--an issue that we, as thinking women interested in political equality, could privately agree to disagree on. After all, if one were to take a cue from what we so often write on our placards, "If you don't approve of sadomasochism, don't do it!" It would seem rather self-evident.

Yet, I see that it isn't.

Sister, why are you trying to instruct me how I should conduct my sex life? How have you determined that my mind is unbalanced, and that my ability to make decisions and act upon them is somehow impaired in this one area of my life? Why do you accept my money, my work, my body, all for the struggle we joined together, yet tear up my words and images, hurl abuse at my lovers and my support systems? Why is it that you are more of a feminist than I, when we have paid the same dues, shared the same stories, carried the same weights? How have I negated my education and my political action, my membership in your community, all by the actions and fantasies I use to bring myself and my lovers to orgasm?

How is it that political correctness, a concept by which we could educate each other and respect differences of culture and Ideology, has become a catchphrase either for ridiculous semantic wordplay or for ironclad rules of acceptable and unacceptable behavior? Why, after thousands of years of the control of women's sexuality by men, have feminists decided that there are improper ways for other women to have sex?

Sister, I am afraid. Afraid of you, and for you. I fear that you will reject me for what makes me hot. I fear that I am not brave enough, after all of my external struggles, to raise a fight within my own feminist family. I am no naive, foolish woman, ready to throw out everything that is "feminism" because a few feminist leaders take issue with me on one subject. But am I really able to speak the words that will make me an outcast? Writing this, I dreaded the final line and the decision I would have to make when I reached it. Would I sign my name? Could I?

After signing, could I ever again see you, meet your eyes, and see friendship there? Or would the knowledge that I have soft leather cuffs and a blindfold and a box of other "toys" under my bed forever narrow your eyes toward me?

After signing, would I be pointed out at a meeting, women uttering their own version of j'accuse!, asked to recant or resign, or merely have to face the betrayed looks of women who have suffered from real battery and abuse, as they equate my life with a life of violence and hatred?

After signing, will I have to go away and hide from you, my Sister, to save you the shame of having befriended such a depraved woman? Will you give me the telephone number of a good feminist therapist? Will you echo the Christian doubletalk of "love the sinner, hate the sin," as you assure me that you love me as a sister, but that I am no longer allowed to call myself a feminist?

And what about you, my Sister? What pernicious turn of our shared lives has given you authority over other women? How can you, a survivor of the "lavender purges" and the horror of our marginalization at the hands of more "mainstream" powers, take upon yourself the power to condemn the identity and behavior of yet another subclass of woman? Where did your ideals of consensus, multiculturalism, and respect for the individual become null? For the minute you condemn me, marginalize me, declare that I was not a part of you, you have imitated the very tactics of the overculture which we have both struggled against.

Why is it that you can't see that this battle is one of horizontal hostility, a destructive wedge to drive in among all of our other wedges, keeping us apart and fighting over issues that, in the end, will not send a new sister to school, engage her in the fields she yearns for, or free her from genuine oppression and abuse. It will send no petitions or lobbyists to Congress, nor will it provide the printing costs for a new radical-lesbian journal of hope. It will neither support a woman candidate nor feed the "single mother" who needs us most of all. As you use your precious resources to write, endlessly, about how I was not, am not, and can never be with you, oppression and genuine violence are growing every day. Yet still, you persist.

After signing, will I become a lost resource7 Will you distrust me, fear me? Will you negate the work I do, because you feel that I am flawed from my most inward spirit?

The deadline is here and I realize that I can't sign my name. Sister, I have maintained the closet door between us, for the sake of our long relationship and because I am so terribly afraid. But I have to ask you, finally, is this what you want? I will not leave you, or the struggles we face, because I believe in them as strongly as I believe that I am entitled to my pleasure and my privacy and my lovers. But there will always be a barrier between us, my own wall of silence, keeping you from my secret because you have taught me to fear you and your disapproval.

I hate doing this. But I can't bring myself to confront you.

Sister, you have dominated me in a way no lover ever has. You have taught me shame and humiliation in a way I would never inflict upon someone I adored. You have caused me an inner pain that leaves bruises that do not fade, lines which will never vanish into the skin, aching in a way that will never allow me to smile in fleeting memory of ecstasy. Sister, I acknowledge that I have submitted to you, fully.

Is that what you want?

Excerpt from The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture
Timothy Taylor, Bantam Books 1997

S &M on the Steppe

We still have no firm idea how gender was constituted (or "performed," to use Judith Butler's term) in Ice Age Europe. Burials are rare exceptions, and it is impossible to deduce gendered clothing codes from them, beyond the fact that both sexes seem to have been adorned with beads, pendants, and other decorations. Only on occasion do the Venus figurines show traces of clothing. The parka worn by the Bouret figure from Siberia is of potentially unisex design, but there is evidence for more sex-specific clothing in the Venus figurines from the southern Russia site of Kostienki.

One of the Kostienki statuettes seems to be wearing some strapping that falls in a V from her neck to converge at the top of the cleavage between her full breasts. From this point, two further straps run over the tops of her breasts, then disappear under her arms. Since I have not seen a published rear view of this figurine, I do not know where the straps go around at the back, but the arms are being firmly held down behind, with shoulders back, so that the breasts are pushed forward. That this strapping was in some sense gendered clothing can be deduced from the way the bands accentuate the breasts, an effect that would probably be lost on a male torso.

A second, broken Kostienki figurine represents a vulva, upper thighs, and part of a rounded abdomen, with hands tied together at the wrists resting on it. In both figurines the strapwork or belts have a sort of feathering incision, a convention typically reserved to depict hair (as in the first figurine) or fur (as in many examples, like the doe-woman). It would thus seem most likely that these are bands of fur.

Given the tundra climate at this time, these clothing items can hardly be considered functional in any sense. Nor are they decorous -in our terms, at least -as both breasts and vulva are exposed. Indeed, in common with a standard convention of erotic or sexual dressing, the fur strapping, which fails to be either functional or demure, draws attention to the sexual aspects of the body. The physical poses, and the tied wrists of the second figure, indicate a submissiveness and an inability to resist. Is some form of women bondage being played out? Are these representations of women about to be initiated? Are they captives from a raiding expedition?

My necessarily subjective interpretation of these sculptures is that they are explicitly sexual, sharing themes of objectification and possession that I feel are inherent in all the so-called Venus figurines. I also think that these objects were not fantasies without reality. Despite the "unreal" facelessness of the first figurine, the strapwork gives the sense of being modeled after a familiar reality. Similarly, with the second figure, I would submit that a sculptor who can depict hands tied together has a pretty good notion of how hands actually are tied together.

Although much of the Ice Age Eurasian material remians ambiguous, the exsistence of a vigorous sexual culture is not in any doubt. The overall trend of my interpretation has been to suggest that there were gender differences in both space and activity, with the caves in particular constituting a reserved a space for one section of society to the exclusion of another (probably the exclusion of women by men). Such an interpretation begs the complex question, which I first broached in relation to the Hua, of what constitutes a "man" or a "woman" in any particular society. Around 10,000 years ago, the ice age cultural system -it's cave art, figurines, and so on -was suddenly abandoned as the ice sheets receded and the climate, within the space of a few centuries, become dramatically warmer.

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Created Saturday, March 22, 1997 11:23:58 PM