The unoriginal and still the lamest

I recently had a social media-induced eye-rolling moment. It was a post that said Playboy magazine was about to have its first lesbian Playmate of the Month. Yeah, right: displaying one’s naked body for men’s pleasure is a heterosexual act, making this bimbo actually bisexual, if she’s not just faking it. And faking it she just might be, as I read more and discovered she’s a musician. Oh, a “flirty heterosexual girl” faking lesbianism (even if temporary) as (male) audience and media titillation. Like we’ve never seen that before. Madonna mia, Santa Lucia!

We have evidence of that in a lesbian sex-oriented magazine from the 1990s, On Our Backs. The name was a play on the long-running feminist newspaper off our backs, at which there was the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. Erotica—good erotica—is difficult to produce, and On Our Backs eventually got lost in the trendy. Even when they’re acting sultry, there’s something friendly and welcoming in the way women pose for other women. Breast volume is not a priority; cute and perky often is.

In general, one could do worse in thinking about women together than Toulouse-Lautrec’s observation of two women of his demimonde looking “like two doves nestled under each other’s wing.” I can’t find a citation, but I remember this clearly from my early adulthood. There is a long, long history of women pretty much forced into prostitution for lack of economic alternatives; it is estimated that one woman in five in 18th century London was reduced to it. It could be up to other women to provide emotional sustenance.

Well into the 20th century, discrimination pushed “femme” women in the direction of porn, sex work or stripping, while “butch” partners, passing or not, would find blue collar employment. Many office building elevator “boys” were actually passing women. Sad to say, a residual illicit/cool factor persists in some circles. For a few years before the lockdowns (I can’t remember exactly when), one San
Francisco Dyke March sponsor with a large visual presence was the Lusty Lady, a worker owned and operated strip joint in North Beach. And, they touted working at their establishment—by titillating men—as “liberation” to the lesbians at the March.

I blame the response to the AIDS crisis in part. There was a meme going around that lesbians could teach gay men how to have relationships (lessening the risk of infection from random sexual encounters) while gay men could teach lesbians how to have sex. This perpetuated a myth of lesbian disinterest in sex, likely true among the political lesbians in name only, and also among other women for whom a relationship with another woman was a refuge from being constantly sexualized out in society. Trust me, we never needed any help in this department. That didn’t stop one wave of trying to explain away lesbian disinterest in men, on the cusp of the 1990s, by trying to turn us all into “sex radicals” with (unneeded) Saranwrap, dental dams, and mandatory sex toys. (Hint: they’re optional. So very, very optional.)

There have been strains of feminism that have tacked to the other extreme, at the risk of falling into puritanism. In the late 1970s, a couple of organizations emerged, Women Against Pornography and Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media. The latter made a distinction between erotica and the porn that encouraged physical assault as part of sex (like today’s thing about women supposedly enjoying being choked). They began by highlighting subliminal advertising, but eventually turned all anti-porn.

In 1982, the Women’s Center at Barnard College decided to make sexuality the theme of their ninth annual Scholar and Feminist Conference. Hoo boy, did that blow up! Academic Coordinator Carole Vance wrote in the invitation letter that “sexuality is a bread and butter issue, not a frill.” The aim was to “move beyond debates about violence and pornography and to focus on sexuality apart from reproduction,” on the premise this was important in light of the growing Women Against Pornography movement led by Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, and Robin Morgan.

And the angry letters and phone calls began, followed by picketing by WAP. The day before the conference was scheduled to begin, Barnard College officials—in response to phone calls from angry members of anti-pornography groups—confiscated 1,500 copies of Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a compilation of steering committee minutes, personal narratives, information about conference events, and work by feminist artists intended for distribution to conference participants.

And thus began the Feminist Sex Wars, which spilled over into the Lesbian Sex Wars with the organization of Samois, a lesbian S/M organization. Lesbian sex did not escape efforts to make it politically correct, some of which insisted women only make love side-by-side, gently, and have simultaneous orgasms. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It sounds pretty standard, though it’s far from universal. Not having a standard model of foreplay leading up to penetrations, women can get pretty creative together.

The Diary has not completely disappeared. It appears to have been packaged by Carole S. Vance in 1984 as Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality. With registration, an electronic copy can be checked out for two weeks from the good old Internet Archive. There are also a few used paperback copies floating about.

I’ve started reading Carol Vance’s lead essay, and wow, is it brilliant! Totally brilliant! She starts off with “The tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure is a powerful one in women’s lives.” So true! “Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency. To focus only on pleasure and gratification ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to speak only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live.”

Later on, she says that “The overemphasis on danger runs the risk of making speech about sexual pleasure taboo. … The result is that sexual pleasure in whatever form has become a great guilty secret among feminists.”

Times have changed, even if “girl boss” feminism and socially mandatory hooking up in colleges are not positive changes. “Lesbians” in Playboy and at the Lusty Lady are not the answer. Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but I think there’s a lot still to be said for second wave feminist discourse and consciousness raising. I’m looking forward to reading more from the Diary.