Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia Read Free Book Online

domestic animals with suffrage.
    It takes a lot of guts for lesbian writers to push beyond our anger about what women aren’t allowed to do. We are prey to the suspicion that it’s our fault and women don’t deserve anything better. We are afraid of more opportunity, because we might fail. This affects our ability to engender new (or at least accurate) sexual images that are genuinely exciting. The power of the censor within is awesome. The only way I could write some of these stories was to pretend I wasn’t going to publish them. Nobody’s an expert on women’s sexuality; most women aren’t even experts on their own libidos. I doubt anyone ever will be qualified to generalize about what all women want or proscribe certain sexualities as being anti-woman. But if enough of us speak out about our dreams and obsessions, a body of genuine knowledge can accumulate, and make all of us feel less crazy and less alone with what we cannot live without. When you are dealing with an area as permeated with ignorance and superstition as sexuality, it is more important to be honest than it is to be correct; to say “I want this now” before rushing to assert, “I will want this when I know and accept what is best for me.”
    Lesbians are constantly being told by the rest of the world that we are ugly, boring, and unimportant. This kind of shit takes a toll on our self-esteem. The same cues that alert other lesbians to our availability and sexual prowess seem odd, annoying, and unattractive to straight people. And they don’t have any tact about letting us know it, on the bus, at work, in the grocery store, on the street, in the gym, at the tie rack in the men’s wear department. Lesbian pornography, especially if it has some humor, is a powerful antidote to this dehumanizing grind. It reassures us that it’s worth putting on that white silk shirt and bomber jacket and polishing our boots before we go out, that somebody is going to get the message. It says, there’s a woman out there looking for a girl in a magenta satin dress with spaghetti straps, so fluff up your hair, strap on those dancin’ shoes, and go someplace where she can find you.
    Seen in this light, lesbian pornography is “just” dyke entertainment, but I have never understood why anybody would think entertainment was trivial. If you live in a society that wishes you didn’t exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible. Institutions that provide amusement always come under attack by puritans and fascists, partly because these people know they are pompous buffoons and easy targets for ridicule. The Cromwellians shut down the theater in England. The Victorians attacked the novel as a depraved and vicious literary form that was especially dangerous for women. Today, fundamentalist Christians go after MTV, and some women’s bookstores try to incise pornography from the lesbian body of literature. There is no easier, faster way to transmit information or a system of values than by presenting it in a format that makes people laugh, dance, get turned on, or just feel good. What is it that they don’t want you to hear?
    I do not believe that sex has an inherent power to transform the world. I do not believe that pleasure is always an anarchic force for good. I do not believe that we can fuck our way to freedom. But this is not what the discourse of sexual repression tells us. In that discourse unleashed sex has enormous disruptive potential. Minority forms of sex have to be repressed or the social contract will hang in tatters. People will look to their friends and lovers for warmth, affection, love, and support instead of to their biological families. Women and children will have no protection from male violence. Work for the sake of work will cease to be valued. The nine-to-five, five-days-a-week wage labor that is the