Document Date: September 6, 1996Originally appeared in November 1996 issue of Sojourner
I write erotic fiction. I write about sex. I write stories where characters (who are essentially me underneath it all) kiss and lick and suck and hump. They also tie one another up and get spanked. And go wild with ecstasy and fall in love. I did a reading recently at the Jamaica Plain Multicultural Arts Center where I read erotic stories about gay men, lesbian vampires, Interstellar sexmagick, a little of everything you might say. The reading matched the audience, which had some gay men, some lesbians, some married couples, some younger, some older, and I thought to myself: my gosh, the open-minded, sexually-tolerant utopia I dream of must be coming to be...!
Well, almost. After the reading one young woman approached me struggling with the feelings one of my stories brought up for her. The story, entitled "Daydreaming" (Switch Hitters, Cleis Press, 1996), is about a young gay man coming out. Because he is a virgin and hasn't figured out how to meet men yet, he has a series of erotic daydreams about random passers-by. And, because he doesn't know how to be the initiator, in every fantasy he imagines the other person being in complete control. A frat boy hazes him, a street hustler comes on to him in an alley, etc. Other characters say things to him like "Here it comes, like it or not." When the young woman in the audience heard those words, she explained, it shut her out of the story, she could no longer enjoy it as a piece of fantasy fiction. I was somewhat taken aback that my fictitious fantasy of a character's fantasy, which never happened in real life nor even in the story, could still chill somebody as if I'd described a mugging. We talked a little about about the difference between fantasy and reality, and she asked me, point blank, "But why is it okay to have a fantasy about forced sex?" Here's what I wish I had had the time, preparation, and wherewithal to say to that young woman.
One of the basic tenets of what my mom (a charter subscriber to Ms. magazine and my first feminist role model) called "women's lib" was that we must fight to change this society where our choices are limited, where the image of our gender is defined by men, where our sexual reality is defined by men, where men tell us who to have sex with and when. In such a society women do not have the freedom to control their own erotic lives. As such, some women (and men) can only fantasize that their sexual desires are satisfied if, in the fantasy, they pretend they are powerless to stop the pleasure. It's not a secret that a lot of housewives read (and write) bodice-rippers for exactly this sort of erotic release. Yes, but, why should a liberated, educated, 90s woman like me have to retreat into a sexual fantasy of forced sex to have my itch scratched? When I was young and inexperienced and seemed to have no control over my sexual destiny, I had these kinds of fantasies. Is it simply a matter of telling my libido to forget those, we're above that now? That would be, I think, a naive view of how the imagination and sexual arousal work. One's tastes may evolve, but one does not merely cease to enjoy past fantasies. Also, I don't feel I "have to" fantasize about forced sex; I have plenty of other fantasies, too. But I like my forced sex fantasies and refuse to be ashamed of them. For me, it is in refusing to be ashamed of them that I take the biggest step toward my liberation in this sexually repressive society.
And it is, most definitely, a sexually repressive society. How else would you define a place where consenting adults can be arrested for their consensual sexual practices because they both happen to be men, where consenting married heterosexual adults can have their children taken away because they practice S/M sex in the privacy of their bedroom, where the women at Camp Sister Spirit live in a state of siege? The only place where we can possibly be free is in our own imaginations, but even there we are being challenged. We are challenged by puritanical outlooks against pleasure, Catholic guilt, "family values" anti-eroticism, and more, but perhaps most damaging of all is the anti-eroticism that masquerades under the guise of feminism. I don't know exactly why that particular young woman questioned the validity of my character's fantasy. Perhaps she had a personal experience or was herself a rape survivor. But too often those who draw the line at forced sex do it under the mistaken impression that they are helping to liberate women. If feminism is the philosophy behind the practice of women's liberation, how can it limit our erotic possibilities and still succeed in freeing us? We have to have the freedom to like, respect, and claim for ourselves our sexual fantasies, or this thing called "women's lib" will never be anywhere but on the surface because we'll still be repressing ourselves.
Feminism continues to evolve and yet the strains of thought that label anything that can be construed as forced sex (a written character's fantasy, S/M role playing, etc.) as evil linger on. I had an erotic story published in Ms. magazine last year, the "Hot Unscripted Sex" issue, a feat of which I (and my women's libber mom) am very proud. Regardless of what positions the magazine may have taken in the past, they do not condemn sex as a whole. There'd be no human race without it, after all, no institution of motherhood, and no way to fully condone the joyous act of child-bearing if all sex were labeled evil. But that lingering need to be careful not to condone certain kinds of sex (so much for "unscripted") was at work in that issue. Greta Christina's essay "Are We Having Sex Yet?", which had previously appeared in the 1992 book The Erotic Impulse: Honoring the Sexual Self (ed. David Steinberg, Tarcher, 1992), was edited to remove mentions of S/M and sex work. The editors relied on doublespeak when they described sex activist Carol Queen this way: "She is intoÑand frequently writes aboutÑ'erotic power exchange.' a sort of sanitized '90s version of S/M that she views as a form of play." Whew... how to untangle this one? "Erotic power exchange" isn't "sanitized" S/M, it IS S/M, and Ms. only has to describe it this way because for them S/M is a dirty word. They can't come right out and say what S/M players like Carol Queen and myself have been saying for years: S/M doesn't need to be sanitized; S/M is about playing roles and "let's pretend." And so we return to the fantasy issue again, the issue of what is acceptable to play through in your own mind.
Of course, the real problem is that Carol Queen and I don't keep these fantasies in our minds. We write them down. We publish them. We read them out loud in bookstores. We let our mothers read them. (Well, I do. I can't speak for Carol on that.) Because this is the only way I know to effect change in this world, this is the way I know to liberate myself and others from the silent tyranny that mainstream society puts on us. When I finally burst my chains, shut off my internal censor and started writing the kind of sexual fantasies I really had, it was like someone had turned on a light. I'd been sitting in the dark, struggling to write, all those years. And then, click, I found my voice. How many women out there are still sitting in the dark?
Feminism for me is about many of the things it was for my mother: having the right to choose what to do with our bodies, fighting rape, fighting stereotypes. But until women are allowed to define within their own minds their own sexual reality and their own sexual fantasies, they will continue to be manipulated sexually by men and dominated by the cultural "norms" of beauty/desirability and behavior. We have to be allowed to have our fantasies, the fantasies that let us escape this oppressive world, the fantasies that let us dream of the utopia that I am trying my damndest to bring about.
Now you're going to accuse me of doublespeak. How can a fantasy about being helpless be an escape from oppression? I don't want some random stranger to do me violence; that's not the world I wish for. My fantasy is an escape because I control it in a way I can't necessarily control real world circumstance. I'm the one who creates the fantasy lover who, in a fantasy where I am helpless to stop him or her, does exactly what I want. All the things I'd be afraid to ask a real world lover to do, maybe, or all the things my society tells me are naughty or bad or illegal. But hey, if I'm tied up like Penelope Pitstop, in my fantasy, I am guilt-free. My libido gets what it wants, it's the engine that drives the fantasy machine, and I feel stronger about my sexual identity because I've accepted my fantasies.
There's one more thought that twists into this issue, and that's the evil fact that men who do oppress, rape, and sexually abuse women make the claim "But she really wanted it," and use women's forced sex fantasies as evidence. This is all the more reason for women to seize control of their fantasies. If we were allowed to explore our forced sex daydreams, we'd realize what is at their heart--not a sick and self-destructive desire, but a need to script a scenario where our every whim is fulfilled. Men can only make this kind of bogus claim because too many of us don't know ourselves why we feel the way we do, and we're ashamed to think about why. The last thing we need is feminism making us feel ashamed on top of all the other societal forces that do.
I'm fighting for a world where women are free to define their own sexual realities. For those who don't know what they want, who, like the young gay protagonist in my story, do want sexual fulfillment but aren't sure what to look for or how to find it, I say it begins with exploring fantasies. And trying on other people's fantasies for size. There's more out there in sexual reality than the honeymoon suite and more erotic fantasy than bodice-rippers, as anyone who has read any of my work or much of the other women's erotica available today would realize. Ultimately, that is how I fight for women's liberation, by writing sexual work meant to arouse and celebrate arousal, and putting it into the hands of as many women as possible. I write, I publish, I share, I liberate. And best of all, my mom approves.
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