Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia Read Free Book Online Page A

foundation of commerce will be disrupted by bored and frustrated workers who use any excuse to come in late, get high as often as possible to alleviate their tedium, rip off their employers, and spend their evenings trying to pick somebody up in a bar or going to political meetings organized by antisocial elements. Nobody will go to church. Children will be thoughtlessly conceived and carelessly reared, and venereal diseases will flourish. This is, of course, in wild opposition to our present system.
    I suspect that what is really being protected by censorship, antiabortion, and homophobic campaigns is the self-image of the so-called majority. Consider how narrow the range of acceptable sexual behavior is. Nobody comes out looking normal once you know the whole truth about how they fuck and what they think about when they jerk off. The citizens are terrified of losing their heterosexual privilege, which will happen if the assumption that there is a sexual consensus, a few simple sexual things that are (or should be) enough for any normal person, is challenged.
    Sex alone can’t liberate us, but in the meantime, it comforts us. Women want and need the freedom to be outrageous, out-of-doors, out-of-bounds, out after dark, without being silenced or punished by stigma, battery, forced reproduction, or murder. We have a right to pleasure ourselves, and access to pornography is a part of that.
    There’s another reason why some of the new lesbian porn doesn’t get me wet. My fantasies (and my library of bedtime storybooks) are not limited to women-only material. Before you throw rocks at me, you might ask your friends how many of them are lesbian separatist masturbators. Many people do not fantasize about the kind of sex that they actually have. Fantasy is a realm in which we can embrace pleasures that we may have very good reasons to deny ourselves in real life (like the fact that something might not be nearly as much fun to do as it is to think about).
    Hasn’t anybody but me wondered why porn produced for lesbian consumption has to be about women only? If the point is simply to turn lesbians on, why limit our sexy literature to lesbian sex? Straights and gay men take it for granted that they can use material about other groups of people to turn themselves on. Why should lesbians get tied up in knots because we have straight fantasies, faggot fantasies, fantasies about animals, and intense fantasy relationships with shoes and other inanimate objects? A straight man flipping through a “lesbian” photo magazine doesn’t worry about his masculinity. Why shouldn’t we feel equally free to exploit non-lesbian sex objects?
    What we find erotic about gay men or straight sex is probably different from what gay men or straights consider important or arousing about themselves. They might not recognize themselves when they are dressed up for lesbian consumption any more than we recognize ourselves in the lesbian magazines produced for straight men. (Although I certainly have no objection to non-lesbian readers enjoying this book.) If fantasies about men aren’t erotic at all for you, you might want to skip these stories (“The Surprise Party” and “The Spoiler”) or mentally change the male characters into women wearing strap-ons.
    Lesbian writers must have the option to write about men. There ought not to be any subject that we cannot give our attention to. A lesbian perspective on the world is as valid and can be as interesting (or as trite) as anyone else’s. Non-lesbians write about us without ever thinking about whether or not they are qualified. There is so little lesbian literature that the temptation to write only about ourselves, our own people, is understandable. And it is certainly possible to create a body of good work that is exclusively lesbian. But writers ought not to be ghettoized. We live in this world, and escapist fantasies about other worlds where we dominate or