|
Pornography, by women, for women
All stories on this web site are purely FICTIONAL. The people depicted within these stories only exist in someone's IMAGINATION. Any resemblence between anyone depicted in these stories and any real person, living or dead, is an incredible COINCIDENCE too bizarre to be believed. If you think that you or someone you know is depicted in one of these stories it's only because you're a twisted perverted little fucker who sees conspiracies and plots where none exist. You probably suspect that your own MOTHER had sex with ALIENS and COWS and stuff. Well, she didn't. It's all in your head. Now take your tranquilizers and RELAX.
Notes from the transcriber:
In the book, the notes (here referenced in square brackets) appear at
the end of the essay. To make it more convenient in this forum I have
placed them just after the appropriate paragraph, set off by brackets.
She also had a few footnotes (marked by asterisks) which, again, I
have placed just after the appropriate paragraph, set off fore and aft with
double asterisks.
Finally, where she used italics for emphasis I have substituted ALL
CAPS.
This essay appeared in a collection titled, "Magic Mommas, Trembling
Sisters, Puritans and Perverts" The version here is unabridged and
unchanged except as noted above.
================================================================
Pornography By Women For Women, With Love
by Joanna Russ
================================================================
Yes, there is pornography written 100% by women for a 100% female
readership.
Surely I mean erotica?
Well, let's just say that to call something by one name when you like it
and another when you don't is like those married ladies we all know who
call what they do "making love" while what is done at singles bars is
"shallow and trivial sex," and what homosexuals do is "perversion." (There
are also those folks who call a work of art that supports the status quo
"art" and works that question it "political".)
I tend to get restive at such honorifics, yet in the anti-pornography/anti-
anti-pornography fight, "pornography" HAS become a loaded word, so for the
purpose of this discussion we need a neutral one. Now that the title has
caught your eye, and made some of you bristle, I'm going to talk about
neither erotica nor pornography, but "sexual fantasy."
But first I must tell you about Star Trek.
In the late '60s, Star Trek brought into science fiction fandom a large
number of women. Science fiction readers are very often amateur printers
who publish their own non-profit fan magazines, or "zines," who attend
science fiction conventions (and run them), and who know each other via all
sorts of friendship networks, amateur press associations, and discussion
groups. Pre-Star Trek fandom was roughly ninety percent male; Star Trek
has moved the sex ratio much closer to equity, though nobody seems to know
the exact figures. This influx of women is surprising in view of the fact
that the Star Trek television show focused on the work relationship and
friendship of three male characters: James T. Kirk, the ambitious,
sometimes impulsive and emotional, rather macho Captain of the starship
Enterprise; Spock, his First Officer and Science Officer, who is half human
and half alien (from the planet Vulcan) and who is almost completely
unemotional, logical, and self-controlled; and the ship's doctor, Leonard
McCoy, a peppery, outspoken cuss, who serves as a foil to the other two,
who (because of their very different personalities) serve as foils to each
other. While the usual science fiction fanzine consists of personal
essays, letters, gossip, Amateur Press Association news, book reviews, and
philosophical or scientific speculations, the Star Trek zines (certainly
the ones I'm going to consider) specialize in the fan writers' own stories
and poems, which are based (often very minimally) on the TV show and now
the two Star Trek movies. Within the Star Trek fan world lies a
specialized sub-group of writers, editors, and readers who edit, write, and
read fanzines called "K/S."
"K/S" zines are anthologies of fan-written stories about the relationship
between Kirk and Spock. The authors rate their own stories G, R, or X, and
their premise is that Spock and his Captain are lovers. This fact is often
assumed in the G-rated work, very often talked about in the R-rated poems
and stories, and the X-rated work shows sex between the two characters
again and again and again. (And again. Ditto the illustrations.)
And all of the editors, writers, and readers are women.[1]
[ [1] Several K/S editors give these statistics. Moreover, only one piece
of fiction or poetry out of forty volumes bears the statement that it was
written by a man. The zines themselves always refer to writers. readers,
or editors as "she". ]
If your autonomic nervous system does the nip-ups mine does upon reading
merely the premise of this material, it's quite irrelevant to talk about
the beauty of friendship or the necessity of empathic compassion in human
affairs. These are sexual fantasies. I've shared this material with eight
women I know who like science fiction and Star Trek; they all shrieked with
delight and turned bright red with embarrassment upon hearing only the
PREMISE of the K/S zines.
Briefly: not only are the two characters (Kirk and Spock) lovers (or in the
process of becoming so; many of these are "first time" stories), they are
usually bonded telepathically in what amounts to a life-long, monogamous
marriage, which is often literally impossible for either party to dissolve.
Sometimes the union of minds lasts only until death (often the death of one
bondmate precipitates that of the other) but often it is assumed to last
after it. Like Tristan and Iseult, the two are fated to love; even stories
that don't specifically state this fact assume it. Anyone who knows the
K/S literature knows that in a sense this love already exists -- an
assumption which imposes a kind of retroactive inevitability on the K/S
"marriage," no matter whether the story chooses to comment on the
inevitability of the relationship or not. Sometimes the stories show the
death of one or the other or both, or separations (either final or
temporary) or the impossibility of combining love with career. Moreover,
even in the stories that end happily there is an extraordinary amount of
frustration and delay; in these tales Spock's Vulcan notions of propriety
(emotionlessness and pure logic) are used to postpone the declaration and
consummation of the love, or the conflict between Spock's Vulcan and Human
natures, or Kirk's pride, or everybody's scrupulousness and doubts and
reasons not to -- which sometimes go on for sixty or seventy pages. These
endless hesitations and yearnings resemble the manufactured
misunderstandings of the female romance books (themselves sexual fantasies
for women). In fact, so paralyzing are these worries and scruples and
hesitations to the two characters involved that over and over again the
lovers must be pushed together by some force outside themselves. Somebody
is always bleeding or feverish or concussed or mutilated or amnesiac or
what-have-you in these tales. Either both are starving to death on a
strange planet, in which case they can at least die in each others' arms,
or they are (temporarily) immured in a cave and Spock, concussed, thinks
he's dreaming and acts on his passion for Kirk, or Kirk is suffering from
brain-burn and is reduced, mentally, to childhood, in which condition he
innocently makes sexual advances to Spock, who is horrified, not by Kirk's
innocent actions, but by his own response.
In short, the stories, over and over, set up situations in which the two
are not responsible. Other (R- and G-rated) stories present various
beatings, blindings, and mutilations which necessitate not only intense
emotional intimacy, but also one character's touching and holding the other
with an eroticism only lightly veiled in the story (and probably not veiled
at all in the readers).
So far the material sounds like the irreverent description by two of my
friends: "Barbara Cartland in drag."[2] But if that's all K/S stories are,
why don't the women who read them and write them simply read romances and
be done with it? Why the "drag"? Why project the whole process on to two
male science fiction characters?
[ [2] Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith, "The Romantic Myth and
Transcendence: a Feminist Interpretation of the Kirk/Spock Bond,"
Conference on Fantasy, Boca Raton, FLA, 1982. ]
First of all, K/S is not about two men. Kirk is a man, to be sure, but
Spock isn't; he's a half-human alien. Susan Gubar has speculated in a
recent essay[3] that when women s.f. writers write about aliens they are
very often writing about women. Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana Veith also
suggest (brilliantly, I think) that although Spock is not literally female,
his alienness is a way of "coding" into the K/S fantasies that their
subject is not a homosexual love affair between two men, but love and sex
as women want them, whether with a man or with another woman. Lamb and
Veith cite many more details which support this view: briefly, that Spock's
reproductive biology is cyclical and uncontrollable, that although "a
prince among his own people," Spock is just another Fleet officer in a
Federation ruled by Human men, that he is isolated both from Vulcans and
from Humans (as non-traditional women are alienated from both traditional
women and from men), that he has no command ambitions, that he often gets
Kirk out of difficulties caused by Kirk's impulsiveness and rashness
(qualities Spock does not and cannot afford to display), that Vulcan is
matrilineal, that he must be self-controlled and guarded, and so on. (The
argument is much more detailed and convincing than I can mention here.) I
would add that the lovers come from literally different worlds (the stories
constantly emphasize the difference in their natures and backgrounds), and
that the sexuality in the stories is only nominally male. (There are
betraying details: the characters leap into anal intercourse with a blithe
lack of lubrication that makes it clear that the authors are thinking of
vaginal penetration, both approach orgasm with a speeded-up intensity of
pelvic thrusting, and in many stories there is multiple orgasm.)
[ [3] Susan Gubar, "C.L. Moore and the Conventions of Women's Science
Fiction," S.F. Studies, 7:1, March 1980, pp. 16-25. ]
Although Spock encodes many female characteristics, what is striking in
these stories (again I agree with Lamb and Veith) is the androgyny of both
characters, the way responsibility, initiative, activity, passivity,
strength and weakness shift constantly from one to the other. Spock, for
example, is the "female" alien, but he is also physically stronger than
Kirk, and is unemotional and an expert in scientific logic, all
characteristics we associate with masculinity, while Kirk, his superior in
the Federation hierarchy of command, and also the "tomcat" many-times-
lover, has the emotionality and impulsivity we consider "feminine." And so
on.
As Lamb and Veith point out, the "marriage" of these two is in many ways
ideal: neither has to give up "his" work in the world; both have adventure
AND love; telepathy provides lifelong commitment and the means of making
such a union unbreakable and extremely intimate; and while both partners
are "masculine" in the sense of being active in the world, they yet provide
tenderness and nurturance for each other in a very "feminine" way. And the
sex is marvelous.[4]
[ [4] Lamb and Veith, unpublished. ]
And yet--
If you ask "Why two males?" I think the answer is that of eighteenth-
century grammarians to questions about the masculine-preferred pronoun:
"Because it is more noble." Certainly the TV series made the Kirk-Spock
friendship a matter of real respect and real love, in contrast with Kirk's
absolutely pro forma affairs with various women. Lamb and Veith simply
state that no one (including themselves) can imagine a man and woman having
the same multiplex, worthy, androgynous relationship, or the same
completely intimate commitment.
Camilla Decarnin's "Interviews with Five Faghagging Women" in Heresies No.
12 have almost the same point to make. "A faghag is a woman, whether
lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual, who devotes an important part of her
social, affectional, or sexual attention . . . to homosexual men and who
finds them erotically interesting because of their homosexuality. This
attention need not be overt; it can take the form of fantasies."
Decarnin's explanation of the motive for this behavior is almost identical
with my explanation of K/S: "the woman recognizes in the faggot a socio-
erotic position she herself would like to hold, as the recognized peer AND
lover of a male, a position impossible for women in sexist culture to
secure."[5]
[ [5] Camilla Decarnin, "Interviews with Five Faghagging Women," Heresies,
No. 12, III:4, 1981, p. 10. ]
One of K/S's best writers says, "The problem is {women who} don't like
their own bodies enough, they can't see themselves saving the universe once
a week, they can't let their own sexuality out without becoming dependents
or victims. So Kirk and Sock do it for them." She notes also, "the sex in
Trek fiction (written by women for women) is female sexuality . . . The
readers . . . want to be strong, beautiful, complete adults who choose to
love without limits, to trust utterly and never have their trust betrayed.
. . ."*
** For legal reasons -- these writers and editors are open to legal action
for violation of copyright, even though their work is very different from
the TV and movie plays of Star Trek -- I will not name any of the women
quoted or list their fanzines. I AM quoting real people, though. Honest.
**
I agree with both writers. It's very, very difficult even for art, with
its complexity and thoughtfulness, its inevitable alloy of reflection, its
complicated evocations of emotion, to transcend the culture's givens. To
do so in sexual fantasy (necessarily pretty primitive) is, I think, totally
impossible. The K/S sex scenes are usually just as interchangeable, just
as full of magic words, as those of male pornography, and just as anti-art.
What! (says the reader). All that tenderness and empathy and commitment
and nurturance and scrupulous delay merely pornographic? On the contrary,
the superiority of female sexual fantasy is proved by precisely those
things: The lovers' personal interest in each others' minds, not only each
others' bodies, the tenderness, the refusal to rush into a relationship,
the exclusive commitment one to the other. Is all this merely a sexual
turn-on?
The subject gets very difficult here, but what I'm trying to make clear is
that fantasy isn't simply an attenuated version of reality, and the same
imagination that provides the tender loving care (in the extremely common
"hurt-comfort" scenes for instance) also provides the battering,
mutilation, and torture that are the pretexts for the nurturance.[6] In
fact, the nurturance in these stories is quite unreal, just as the
misunderstandings, the scrupulousnesses, and the worries that keep the
lovers from declaring themselves, are pure ritual, manufactured for the
occasion. By "unreal" I don't mean simply glamorized or idealized but
TOTALLY UNLIKE REALITY; if your beloved appears at your door bleeding and
battered in real life, you probably don't feel a rush of erotic tendresse.
In fact, once you've called for an ambulance, covered said beloved with a
blanket, made sure the patient's head is lower than the patient's feet, and
administered what medical help you can, you are far more likely to go into
your bathroom and throw up. The nurturance in these tales is like Bette
Davis's resolution in Jezebel to care for Henry Fond, who has yellow fever,
while she looks heavenward (in a very becoming gown) and the sweetness of a
thousand violins swells up on the sound-track. Nowhere do you see, for
example, Fonda vomitting blood or Davis ugly with lack of sleep or
resentful of her never-ending, grueling contact with such romantic objects
as full bedpans.
[ [6] In one self-parody (K/S writers enjoy such pieces and write them
surprisingly often) the two alternately beat each other in the head with a
shovel, and then say, "Let me be with you in your hour of pain," and
similar statements. The self-parody seems to be to be a tongue-in-cheek
recognition of the necessity for hurt IN ORDER TO show comfort. ]
I do not believe that the supposed female virtues of the K/S material (and
that of similar female fantasy, like the romances) are morally privileged
-- though some feminists talk as if this were so. Rather we have --
ingeniously, tenaciously, and very creatively -- sexualized our female
situation and training, and made out of the restrictions of the patriarchy
our own sexual cues.
For example, women wait. Women are (quite realistically) wary of
heterosexual activity. Thus the endless analyses of motives and scruples
for pages and pages, a delay that is in itself erotically arousing, since
it's a sexualization of what is or was presented to us as "the real thing"
for women. (Decarnin has suggested, in correspondence, that this waiting
be taken metaphorically, as related to women's need for long "foreplay' in
order to achieve orgasm.) Women must not initiate sexual activity. Thus
the enormous plot conventions which finally free the lovers to be sexual,
in which that lack of responsibility is itself exciting, an intensifier of
arousal, vulnerability, and emotion made out of condition. Thus the "hurt-
comfort" material, which pictures nurturance as a lot of open sexual
touching and strong emotional intimacy (generally in the stories which lack
explicit sex) is (again) something that has become a sexual cue, not
anything resembling real help or real illness. Thus also the material
about the death of one or the other or both (so ubiquitous, I'm told, that
editors now refuse to accept it!), the meditations at the graveside, the
grief that is somehow beautiful and exciting, not painful, all of it
delicious. And let's not pride ourselves on the monogamy, either; this is
another patriarchal imposition which women have sexualized -- in fact, I
believe it can be seen in the K/S material (as in the romances) as a
metaphor for intensity. The telepathic union can also be read as a way of
expressing intensity and completeness, not duration, but here too sexual
expression waits on "love" while desire, by itself, is not enough. Again I
think we're dealing with a sexualization of the feminine condition. What
was, historically, the female terror of pregnancy, the main enforcer of
women's anti-sexual training, has here been made into something sexually
arousing in itself. That is, in the K/S world, THE MYTH OF ROMANTIC LOVE
WORKS.
But that's not all that's in the material. In many ways the K/S world is a
great advance over the standard romances. For one thing, there IS explicit
sexuality instead of the old Romances' one-kiss-in-the-moonlight. And I
believe Lamb and Veith see rightly when they describe the androgyny of the
relationship, the impossibility (despite the coding into the Spock
character of so many female traits) of assigning gender roles to either
partner, ever -- obviously this is very different from the romances, in
which a woman's problems in life are solved for her by a dominant male.
The K/S insistence that the characters be first-class human beings is
inevitably compromised by the social necessity of awarding that V.I.P.
status only to men.
To me one important conclusion we can draw from these stories is that
sexual fantasy can't be taken at face value. Another is that no sexual
cues are morally privileged (though some kinds of sexual BEHAVIOR certainly
are) since sexualizing any kind of behavior drastically changes the meaning
of that behavior. Translated into real life, the "hurt-comfort" theme of
K/S would simply be pernicious, from the woman who can do sex only under
the guise of pity, to the lover who wants to keep her beloved dependent and
powerless, in which condition she can then "love" the beloved. What
excites in fantasy is both far more exaggerated than real life and not the
same as in real life; that is, fantasy isn't just a vicarious substitute
for real experience; its meaning as experience becomes changed when it's
made into fantasy. Without understanding the rather complicated context of
the fantasy, one "reads" it literally -- like the woman friend of mine (new
to Star Trek) who said in disgust that K/S was about rape and power games.
This is simply not true in terms of the genre. In fact, the story that
evoked this response is a classic K/S tale in which Spock goes into pon
farr* again after pages and pages of agonized misunderstandings, thus
(thank goodness!) providing a way for the lovers finally to declare
themselves and make out like crazy.
** A state of heat in which he must "mate" or die. Kirk must, of course,
offer himself to save Spock's life. **
What seems to be happening in sexual fantasy is that any condition imposed
on or learned with sexuality is capable of becoming sexualized, either as
sex or a substitute for sex or as an indispensable condition of it. Such a
process is certainly at work in the K/S universe. Yet it's perfectly clear
to me that K/S writers and readers don't literally wish to become male any
more than they literally want their dear ones to bleed and die in their
arms or to die with their lovers. What they do want is sexual intensity,
sexual enjoyment, the freedom to choose, a love that is entirely free of
the culture's whole discourse of gender and sex roles, and a situation in
which it is safe to let go and allow oneself to become emotionally and
sexually vulnerable. The literal conditions and cues of the K/S world, far
from being impeccably moral, are sexualizations of situations and behavior
K/S fans did not choose and quite likely wouldn't want in reality.
Moreover they are situations and behavior that are absolutely antithetical
to getting sexual and emotional satisfaction in the real world, which fact
at least some of the K/S readers and writers know perfectly well.
I'm convinced, after reading through more than fifty volumes of K/S
material (most of it "X-rated") that only those for whom a sexual fantasy
"works," that is, those who are aroused by it, have a chance of telling us
to what particular set of conditions that fantasy speaks, and can analyze
how and why it works and for whom. Sexual fantasy materials are like
icebergs; the one-tenth that shows above the surface is no reliable
indicator of the size or significance of the whole thing. Sexual fantasy
that doesn't arouse is boring, funny, or repellent, and unsympathetic
outsiders trying to decode these fantasies (or any others) will make all
sorts of mistakes.
I've spent so much time on this material partly because it's the only
sexual fantasy I know of written without the interposition of interests
that are political or commercial.[8] In some ways these stories stick to
the old Romance formula (I find this aspect of K/S destructive, although it
too can be read metaphorically) but in others they put forth an emphatic
claim to experience that radically transcends the conventional. These
readers and writers want a sexual relationship that does not require their
abandoning freedom, adventure, and first-class humanity (these are points
I've taken from Lamb and Veith), they want sexual enjoyment that is
intense, whole, and satisfying, and they want intense emotionality. They
also want (and I find this absolutely fascinating and aesthetically very
valuable) to create images of male bodies as objects of desire. One of the
worst things forced on us in the name of "femininity" is passivity, a
distortion created by the heterosexual institution and a guarantee of
sexual and human paralysis. The writers and readers of these fantasies can
do what most of us can't do in reality (certainly not in heterosexual
reality), that is they can act sexually at their own pace and under
conditions they themselves have chosen. The K/S stories, ritualized as
they are, are the only literature I've ever seen in which women do describe
male beauty -- NOT "masculinity", mind you, but the passive, acted-upon
glories of male flesh. Some of this is very well done, e.g., the lovely
convention that Spock, when sexually aroused, PURRS like a giant cat, and
Kirk praising his lover's alien genitals as a beautiful flower, an orchid.
(Shades of Judy Chicago!)
[ [8] I am thinking of Samois, Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on
Lesbian S/M, Up Press (Palo Alto, California: 1981). The purpose of the
book, stated in several places, is explicitly political, AS WELL AS erotic. ]
Until recently I assumed, along with many other feminists, that "art" is
better than "pornography" just as "erotica" is one thing and "pornography"
another; and just as "erotica" surpasses "pornography", so "art" surpasses
"erotica." I think we ought to be very suspicious of these distinctions
insofar as they are put forward as moral distinctions. I've said elsewhere
that material presented outright as a sexual turn-on and nothing else can
be a lot less harmful than material that is presented as if it were a
thoughtful and complex depiction of real life. One of the great virtues of
the K/S stories is that there is far less misery and death in the X-rated
stories, by and large, than there is in the G- and R-rated ones. I think
we are probably right in seeing sexual repression as a very important
source of violence in the patriarchy -- though we must at once remember
that we're talking about all spontaneous pleasure, not just sex, and about
quality, not just quantity. (Elizabeth Fisher puts forward this idea in
Womans's Creation.)[9] Wilhelm Reich (with whom Fisher agrees) also said
flatly that if you lift sexual inhibitions part-way (which is certainly the
situation today, with the mass media force-feeding us plastic sex which is
not only limited as to color, age, gender. and "flawless" personal
appearance, but which is still very rigid about tactility and the real
nature of real human sexuality and emotionality), you get sadism -- by
which Reich did NOT mean S&M (he did not discuss it at all in The Sexual
Revolution) but rape, violence, brutality, and callousness.[10]
[ [9] Elizabeth Fisher, Woman's Creation, (New York: Doubleday) 1980. ]
[ [10] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing
Character Structure, 4th ed. revised 1969 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux) 1971. ]
If female sex fantasies can't be taken at face value, maybe male fantasies
can't either. Books like Punished Slut[11] (I have fifteen S&M paperbacks
on my desk and am wading through them) don't excite me, so perhaps I
shouldn't speculate about them. But it seems to me that such fantasies may
be a kind of half-way house OUT OF violence rather than into it. This
isn't the common feminist view, but I think the comparison holds: if female
K/S fantasies are complex and multi-dimensional and if one of their
achievements is the reversal of women's substitution of romance for
explicit sexuality, then (if I read them correctly) male fantasies of
violence, either accompanying sexual activity, serving as a precondition
for it, or as a cue to it, are attempts to partly undo the violence in the
"respectable" part of the culture, where violence has be SUBSTITUTED FOR
sexual enjoyment. I believe that movies like "A Clockwork Orange" or
"Apocalypse Now" are far more dangerous than The Sadistic Sisters of
Saxony.[12] The latter are AT LEAST sexual. I agree with Fisher and Reich
that quality counts, and by "sex" I mean pleasure that isn't joyless,
furtive, perfunctory, unspontaneous, forced, guilty, partial, or
trivialized (or made into a plastic goodie, either). I'm convinced now
that the patriarchy damages male sexuality just as it does ours, though
perhaps less than ours and certainly not in the same way. (Gay men don't
seem to me exempt from the process; they're raised in the same culture and
educated much the same.) Feminists who live apart form men (as one
heterosexual feminist told me) forget how limited and foolish most of them
are, and how thoroughly they are controlled by the culture's expectations.
From the viewpoint of the female situation, I think we sometimes see men's
sexual freedom as greater than it is, because it is in fact greater than
our own. If you see male freedom as absolute, or close to absolute, then
male fantasies of sexual violence will look, in a sense, worse than they
are. We know that women don't want to be raped; episodes in female
fantasies that look like rapes really are something else, i.e., Will
somebody, something, for heaven's sake, enable me to ACT? I think male
pornography in which a woman is "raped" (i.e., made to experience sexual
pleasure against her will) may be struggling with a similar problem of
permission -- not that the man can't initiate sexual activity, but that he
can't let go while doing it. And without letting go, self-abandonment,
whatever you call the opposite of self-controlled and rigid behavior,
sexual activity will be minimal and partial.
[ [11] Punished Slut (no location: Dame) 1980. ]
[ [12] The Sadistic Sisters of Saxony, Monks Secret Library, (New York:
dame distributors) 1980. ]
I've always thought that patriarchal male sexuality must be a rather
difficult business. To over-simplify: A partners's hostility or boredom is
ordinarily a real turn-off -- and yet this is exactly the situation under
patriarchy, where so many women are not interested, not excited, not
participants, and not happy. Yet men must penetrate and ejaculate if there
are to be any babies -- and so the problem for patriarchy (whether you
think of this as a one-time invention or a constant process) is to
construct a male sexuality which can function in the face of a woman's non-
cooperation or outright fear and hostility. Of course such a sexuality is,
in fact, common. It is also furtive, guilty, miserable, unspontaneous,
forced, unfree, and minimally sensual. No wonder Philip Slater writes
about the perfunctoriness of sex for so many men ("the quicker it is done
with, the better") and maintains that women's complaints ("he's only
interested in sex, in my body") are missing the point: "A man who behaves
this way is not interested in sex, either . . . he is interested only in
releasing tension." Slater interprets male fantasies of rape as twofold:
"First, it expresses the common masculine wish for some kind of
superpotency" (notice: not superreactivity!) and "it is MEN who have
bottled up feelings and long to burst their controls. But since this
yearning endangers the whole of our culture it cannot be allowed direct
expression and is projected onto women . . . . the emotional specialists in
our society."[13]
[ [13] Philip Slater, "Sexual Adequacy in America," in Intellectual Digest,
November 1973, pp. 17-20. ]
It sounds odd to say that men's fantasies of rape have their roots in a
desire to be overwhelmed and acted on, but I think this may be at least
part of the truth. Women, after all, fantasize "rape" as the solution to
issues of permission and forced passivity; why shouldn't men (who must deal
with the issues of forced activity) use the other side of the same fantasy?
What frightens me is not those sleazies on my desk (in one of which a woman
puts needles through a man's nipples). It's the mainstream American habit
of substituting violence FOR sex and presenting the result as "real life"
and, even, Heaven help us!, "decency." In the one Star Trek TV show in
which Spock went into pon farr, the first twenty minutes titillated female
America with the promise of the controlled, logical Vulcan engaging in
uncontrolled sexual behavior (a consummation greatly to be wished). But
the second twenty minutes gave us, not sexuality (which the K/S writers
know perfectly well ought to be there and which they do put in their
stories) but a good old (and very disappointing) American fight -- between
Kirk and Spock! I certainly prefer sex. Think also of "Klute" in which
Jane Fonda as a call-girl (aha! bad) is threatened by one man and saved by
another. And for a particularly nasty example, try the Hitchcock Hour's
10-second advertisement of a few years ago: a montage of different women
screaming in terror. Or the plastic cheesecake of Playboy, as drearily
fake as the expensive stereos and fancy cars the readers probably don't
have either. Get stuck on those photos of women and your sexual failure is
assured; for one thing, women don't come airbrushed.
Well, I'm speculating. What I'm sure of is that we do not have nearly
enough knowledge about female sexuality. For example, "masochistic" rape
fantasies have bedevilled the women's movement for a decade AS IF THEY WERE
A LITERAL REPRESENTATION OF WHAT WOMEN WANT, when they are quite obviously
nothing of the kind. I'm sure there are female S&M "tops" who like S&M
because they're into power over others -- but I also have two friends, one
of whom still does S&M and one who dropped it non-traumatically, and they
like(d) it because they found it a SEXUAL (not characterological) turn-on.
Similarly, there may be women in the K/S network who are really turned on
by a lover's illness or mutilation -- but I doubt it, since what the
writers obviously want is not twenty-four-hour-a-day nurse duty or people
really bleeding and dying in their arms, but the sexual turn-on that the
fantasy of touching and holding the lover gives them.
Fifteen S&M paperbacks is probably no representative sample, nor have I
read all the K/S fanzines. Women probably read romances in much greater
numbers than the K/S readers anyway. (About 125 zines have been published
since 1975-6, in editions of 500-1500.) Yet in all these stories I've
found a lot less to complain about than I can find simply by turning on my
TV at random on any evening at all. I don't believe that men are taught to
be violent by commercialized sexual fantasy; there are for too many worse
teachers around. If anything, commercial, male-oriented sexual fantasy is
(I suspect) a half-assed attempt to undo masculinity training, rather than
the reverse. I don't want to idealize it, but it's certainly less
offensive to me than (for example) "The Short and Happy Life of Francis
MACOMBER," Hemingway's macho-misogynist short story which was taught to me
(to us!) as "great literature," full of "eternal truth," and so on.
Many feminist women seem only to be following their gut reactions in hating
male sexual fantasy and spending so much of their energies on it. I agree
that it's important to know one's gut reactions, but before we make the
jump from "It offends me" to "Therefore it is bad," to "Therefore we must
fight it" we need to know a lot more than we do.
I hope I haven't offended anyone by calling K/S "sexual fantasy." IF IT
WEREN'T, I WOULDN'T PAY ANY ATTENTION TO IT. I love the stuff, I love the
way it turns me on, and I love its attempt to establish a very radical
androgyny in its characters. So many feminist creations of Amazons and
Goddess-worshippers and so on simply don't work -- most are very thin --
BUT K/S WORKS, if you know and like Star Trek, and (as I mentioned) it is
the only sexual fantasy by women for women that's produced without the
control or interposition of censorship by commercial booksellers or the
interposition of political intent by writers or editors. It's also a labor
of love for the women involved, since it is (and must be, because of the
possibility of lawsuit) non-profit. I find it raw, blatantly female, and
very valuable and exciting, a judgment I owe to Lamb and Veith, since they
had the courage of their reactions and continued to study this material for
close to six months, while I merely got embarrassed (because, I think, the
stuff was so female and my response to it so intense) and hid it away -- in
the closet, of all places! I know now that it does not mean what it seems
to mean -- that we don't like sex except in committed relationships, that
we think about "love" all the time, that we are sentimental, that we are
altruistic, or any other sexist litany of our supposed virtues. What is so
striking in K/S is the raw sexual and emotional starvation the writers are
expressing so openly -- and the attempt to picture a a totally androgynous
situation, NOT "Brigitte Bardot scotch-taped to John Wayne" (as I once
called "androgyny") but a situation in which questions about who is the man
and who is the woman, who's active and who's passive, even who's who,
CANNOT EVEN BE ASKED. This is very heady stuff. Instead of presenting us
with a couple who are of different sexes but the same species, K/S creates
a couple who are of different species, but the same sex. I've already
mentioned why that sex is pictured as "male" -- and what subverts that
"maleness" and makes it ambiguous -- but the stuff works (at least on some
of us) as fantasy. Such statements cannot be made in realistic literature,
and one of the crucial things the K/S material has done for me is to make
me glad I write science fiction and fantasy. And now, if you will excuse
me, I must go back to my ancient Vulcan castle with the carved bedposts
where I have left my two characters, Guess Who and Guess Which, in a very
dramatic and painful situation. In fact, I left Spock preparing to beat
Kirk, whom he has bought as a slave in an alternate universe in which
violent Vulcan (Spock's planet) never reformed. Of course the point of the
whole scene is that Spock can't bear to do any such thing because he is
madly in love with Kirk. So he smites his forehead with his hand (or some
similar gesture) and rushes out to agonize.
Meanwhile Kirk (who's of course in love with Spock) agonizes too, but in
the opposite direction, so to speak.
They will do this for as long as I can contrive, and then they will make
great music together, also as long as I can stretch the scene out.
Yum.
And so on.
Author's Notes
An editor: "It is pornography for women produced by women." Another notes
that readers "fear their own interest in K/S will be interpreted as lesbian
by friends and family."
About the "hurt-comfort theme," a writer friend of mine writes, about her
playing at adventure with a friend (both were preadolescent): "An
increasingly regular feature of this business was that characters who were
sworn and bitter enemies were continually forced into situations in which
one . . . would be wounded in some specifically painful manner and the
other would grudgingly but lovingly, take care of him."
In "Big Brother is Trekking You" by James Wolcott (Village Voice, 2/2/76)
Wolcott describes "Star Trek LIves!" by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra
Marshak, and Joan Winston (a commercially published book): ". . . these
women have their libidinal thermostats turned up pretty high . . . {Fans'}
stories . . . are sexually charged-up . . . the return of the runaway boys
on the biggest damn raft your can imagine . . . . 'Star Trek' also hooks
the women by the sexual tension beneath that buddy-buddiness. . . . Spock
becomes a parody of the unreachable woman. He's practically an extra-
terrestrial Garbo." (Wolcott's "raft" refers to Leslie Fiedler's Love and
Death in the American novel, in which Fiedler derives a theory of American
fiction from American novelists' male pair-bonding. Lamb and Veith also
begin their first paper by citing Fiedler.)
A newspaper-catalogue of media fiction in toto (of which Star Trek is only
a part) lists twenty-two kinds of media fiction, from The Chronicles of
Amber to The Wild Wild West. The list includes Dracula, Battle Star
Galactica, Sherlock Holmes(!), MASH, and Hill Street Blues. One story I
have read from Starsky and Hutch media fiction, as well as one story I've
managed to find from Magnum, P.I. media fiction both treat the male pair as
Spock and Kirk are treated in K/S fiction, i.e. the two are lovers, yet
somehow without being homosexuals. (There is no homosexual subculture
presented, no awareness of being derogated, no friends or family,
absolutely no gay friends, no gay politics, and so on. The men are
masculine, even macho figures -- and somehow they are lovers without ever
thinking of what they do as "homosexuality." I would guess that other
male-bonding pairs are treated in the same way in other media fiction.)
Final note from transcriber: there was also this note:
[7] Monk's Secret Library, 1983.
But there was no reference mark to it in the text, so your guess is as good
as mine where it belongs.
|
|
