Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia Read Free Book Online Page B

are the exclusive inhabitants can keep us entertained and in high spirits, but when we open our eyes, reality will still be here, and it cries out for comment, criticism, rearrangement, a mirror.
    None of the stories that include men describe the exchange of body fluids because of Alyson Publications’ policy against eroticizing high-risk sex. After overcoming my inhibitions about putting the smell and taste of male sexuality on paper, it gave me a bad case of cognitive dissonance to go back and write it out. I hope I managed to retain the highly charged emotional content of these stories without cum touching taste buds or mucous membranes. Porn can be a valuable way to teach people how to have hot and satisfying “safer sex.” But I don’t believe “unsafe” porn causes AIDS any more than I think “violent” porn causes rape. Nobody ever caught a disease from or got assaulted by a book. Images and descriptions are forever getting confused with live acts. It seems a shame to me if people must relinquish fantasizing about all the aspects of their partners’ bodies as well as experiencing them directly. Keeping these stories in this book was so important to me that I was willing to rewrite them, but I also need to say that it feels like a form of bowdlerization, even censorship, and if it were my choice, I would have left them in their original, sleazy form.
    Safe sex porn (or guidelines) written for gay men aren’t much use to lesbians. Most of the lesbian stories in Macho Sluts were written prior to the AIDS epidemic, and all of them include sexual activities that could transmit disease. I wouldn’t want any of my readers to think that lesbians are magically exempt from AIDS. Please read “A note on Lesbians, AIDS, and Safer Sex” which follows.
    The title of this book was a piece of graffiti that had been spray-painted by an anonymous street artist above the Broadway tunnel in San Francisco. I don’t know the gender or the sexual orientation of the person who coined this phrase, but if the shoe fits, I’ll go dancing. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women (Perigee/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981, pp. 199-202), Andrea Dworkin writes:
    The word pornography , derived from the ancient Green porne and graphos , means ‘writing about whores.’ Porne means … the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens … The word pornography does not mean ‘writing about sex’ or ‘depictions of the erotic’ … or any other such euphemism. It means the graphic depiction of women as vile whores … In the male system, women are sex; sex is the whore. Buying her is buying pornography. Having her is having pornography … Seeing her sex, especially her genitals, is seeing pornography … Wanting her means wanting pornography. Being her means being pornography.
    Never mind that the term “pornography” was coined by Victorians, not by the ancient Greeks. (This was first pointed out to me by Gayle Rubin. More information on the etymology of the term appears in Walter Kendrick’s The Secret Museum , Viking, 1987.) Never mind that the anti-porn movement has done at least as much as “the male system” to make “whores” seem vile in the popular imagination. This book is available to anyone, male or female, who can pay for it or steal it. It will certainly seem vile to many people. Therefore, this book is a whore. And I wrote it, knowing that meant being a pornographer, being a whore. After all, “Being her [the whore] means being pornography.” What’s one more stigmatized identity? In my time, I’ve even been a lesbian housewife.
    Feminists who believe there was once a matriarchy say that prostitutes were once also priestesses. In some societies, every woman had to enter the temple of the goddess and receive payment for her sexual services before she