Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

“Next week!” I said. “Next week, I promise.”

  “All right,” she said. “Next week.”

  Later in the morning we “stopped by” the Espressomat. Even though Hadley had three full- and two part-time employees, she was putting in long hours herself. The Espressomat was open from seven in the morning to eleven at night, seven days a week.

  Today both sections of the place were full and the steady hum of the washers and dryers underlay the rattling of cups and saucers.

  I picked up part of The New York Times, Hadley made me a frothy decaf mocha and I sat down in a corner, underneath a poster from The Threepenny Opera. After a while, two women I knew came in, Debi and Sarah. They weren’t washing their clothes; it was purely social.

  We chatted generally for a while and then the conversation turned, as it had the day before at the reception, to the sexuality/pornography conference next week.

  “I’m really looking forward to hearing Loie Marsh speak,” said Debi. “She’s been one of my heroes for years.”

  “Me too,” said Sarah. “I remember when I read The Silenced Heart. It just blew me away. It expressed so many things about men and living in a male world that I had just taken for granted.”

  “They don’t write books like that anymore,” agreed Debi. “Really groundbreaking books like that.”

  I hadn’t read it, just like I had never managed to read The Female Eunuch, Future Shock and Carlos Castenada. No good reason—I just happened to be reading something else at the time and then the historical moment passed. I said, “I wonder why Loie hasn’t written anything else since then?”

  “She’s probably too busy going around speaking. I saw her on Phil Donahue once. She was fabulous. It must have been—five years ago?”

  “What else is going on at the conference?” I asked. I still hadn’t decided if I wanted to go. From the corner of my eye I watched Hadley pouring a stream of hot milk into a row of cups. She was concentrating hard, a furrow between her brows. She’d once told me that waitressing was the hardest job in the world.

  Debi pulled out a flyer. “There are some really interesting workshops: here’s one on the Green River murders, another on legal aspects of censorship, something on sexist images of women in the media, Elizabeth Ketteridge talking about use of pornography by rapists and child molesters, lots of others. And in the evening there’s going to be a panel discussion: Loie Marsh, Gracie London, Elizabeth Ketteridge, Kimiko Lewis and some woman named Sonya Gustafson from Christians Against Pornography. What a line-up.”

  “I heard,” said Sarah, lowering her voice, “that some S/M women wanted to present a workshop. But the organizers refused.” She nodded over in the direction of two women who were sitting quietly reading The Seattle Times in an alcove under a poster of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. “Those are two of the main ones, the main S/Mers—Nicky Kay and Oak on the left.”

  My gaze covertly followed hers. The women looked perfectly ordinary. The one called Nicky Kay was small, with a rather athletic body and a pleasant, nondescript face; glasses, brown curly hair. She was wearing a crisp striped shirt and jeans. Oak, if that was really her name, was taller, with a head that seemed slightly too big for her body. It made her look a little wobbly somehow. She was wearing a leather vest over a white tee-shirt and heavy boots. Otherwise, she didn’t look too threatening.

  But Debi and Sarah obviously found them both very threatening. They began to whisper: “orgy chambers… dog collars with spikes… Mary said… hot dripping wax… and nipple clamps!”

  I knew, of course, that there were lesbian sadomasochists around, but I had never paid them much attention. A few years ago, in Seattle, as in San Francisco and a few other cities, there’d been something of an uproar, but it had died down and even radical feminists seemed to have resigned themselves to its presence in the community. I’d heard it said that Seattle was an S/M mecca of sorts, but it didn’t intersect much with my world.

  “I heard that Nicky Kay supports herself and Oak by dancing downtown at the Fun Palace.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t quite picture it. She looked so… well, quiet.

  But Debi and Sarah’s attention had been diverted by the entrance of someone else into the cafe. “Now, there’s a character! At least Nicky and Oak keep a low profile.”

  Miko Lewis had never kept a low profile in her life. She bounced in wearing tight black stretch pants calligraphed with neon pink, a black bustier underneath a flowing, pink silk shirt. Her spikey black hair had been bleached white on the tips and her rough complected face exuded joyous energy.

  “Hadley! How’s my favorite Texan today?” She hopped on to one of the chairs at the counter and leaned over so (I imagined) Hadley could get a good look at her thrusting cleavage. “Steam me up a double, darling. I’ve got a heavy day of editing sex scenes ahead.”

  Hadley laughed good-naturedly. “So when are we going to get to see some of these famous lesbian sex videos?”

  “At the moment I’m only giving private screenings,” she drawled in a low voice that was nonetheless audible to everyone in the room.

  Debi and Sarah looked at me sympathetically, and I flushed. But just as I was thinking about going over and pushing her off her stool, Miko (who had certainly been aware of my presence all along), turned casually and said, “Oh hi, Pam. You come along too. A week from this Thursday night, my studio.”

  She downed the espresso in one gulp, slapped a dollar on the counter and, with a wave, flung herself out the door. Someone applauded.

  “She doesn’t just make stupid videos,” was all I could mutter. “She fucking thinks she’s in one.”

  That evening we went to Penny and Ray’s for dinner. Ray and Hadley decided to take Antonia for a little stroll in the park while there was still some light. They may have thoughtfully been giving Penny and me some time to talk. Or, more likely, a chance to get in a good fight before dinner.

  We worked well together usually and tonight was no exception. We moved around the kitchen, Penny making vegetable ratatouille, me whipping up a lemon mousse for dessert. I tried not to feel that everything was strange and different between us. I’d lived in this house much of my life and inherited it with Penny when our parents died. Now Penny lived here with a baby and a husband and was talking about buying my share of the house.

  “It’s only fair,” she said. “You’ll want to have a house of your own…”

  “I like what you’re doing with the windows,” I interrupted. “I never did like those curtains.”

  “I hated to get rid of them. Somehow their pattern reminded me of being a kid and eating dinner in the kitchen. But they were falling apart. These blinds are much better.”

  She returned to her subject. “Are things okay with Hadley? Are you going to move in together after the experiment with the houseboat? You know, we need to get this house settled and then you could think about buying something together…”

  “We’re not that far along,” I cut Penny off. Inside I was vaguely aware that it pissed me off that she seemed to think the house belonged to her. “So far living together seems like a vacation. Both of us have a lot of things in boxes. We’re living in someone else’s space. It’s fun, but it’s not real life.”

  “Oh, I think it will work out,” she said encouragingly. “I think you should think about buying a house together.”

  I tried to switch the topic to something innocuous. “So, are you going to that all day workshop on pornography/sexuality—whatever it is—this Saturday?”

  “The one with Loie and Gracie and everybody, you mean? I don’t know. I might try to go to the panel discussion in the evening. I’ll probably skip the workshops. I’ve got to do some work for the Nicaragua benefit next month. I said I’d work on the mailing.”

  “The conference will probably be interesting…”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Penny paused. “To tell the truth, pornography seems like such a middle-class white issue to me. When people all over the world are strugglin
g just to get enough to eat, much less retain some individual freedoms, it’s pretty weird when countries like America are so obsessed with defining under what conditions attractive naked bodies can be displayed.”

  I was silent.

  “And no, I’m not turning into some kind of Marxist hardliner. I don’t like seeing pictures of women being objectified for sale in every convenience store any more than you do. But compared to people getting murdered every day for their beliefs—well, all I’m saying is that for most of us porn is a kind of intellectual debate about civil liberties.”

  I couldn’t help it. “Porn isn’t intellectual,” I said. “Of all the millions of discussions in feminism, porn is about the least intellectual. It’s physical, it’s about bodies. It’s not about speech, unless men can only speak using women’s bodies.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think men are the problem.” Penny turned away coldly. “And I don’t know why every conversation with you has to turn into some kind of lesbian lecture.”

  “Well, I feel like I’m in some kind of indoctrination camp when I’m with you. Six weeks in Nicaragua! You’d think you were with Mao on the Long March! Some radical you are—I’m about a thousand times more radical than you are in the way I live my life.”

  “Oh, now we’re going to talk about the wedding, aren’t we? I knew it was going to come around to that. I knew that’s what you really wanted to talk about.”

  “You’re crazy if you think I want to talk about your wedding. That’s the last thing I want to discuss—talk about bourgeois issues!”

  “What’s a bourgeois issue?” said Ray mildly, coming in with Hadley and Antonia. He was carrying Antonia in a backpack and they all looked fresh-cheeked and healthy after their walk in the park.

  “Marriage!”

  “Pornography!”

  Antonia began to cry and Penny snatched her up and started to feed her. The sight of her maternal breast was like an insult in the present circumstances and I put my head into the refrigerator to check the lemon mousse and to cool off.

  “Poor little thing,” Hadley said and I think she meant Antonia. “Let’s hope they’ve resolved some of this before you grow up.”

  3

  THE SEXUALITY CONFERENCE WAS structured so that there were slots for two workshops in the morning and two in the afternoon, each an hour and a half long with an hour for lunch. At four-thirty there were to be two closing speeches, the first by Gracie London on “A Decade of a Single-Issue Politics—Time to Move On?” and the second by Loie Marsh: “Sexual Liberalism—the Death of Feminism?” In spite of the question marks there seemed little doubt which way the speakers leaned and what conclusions they were expecting to draw.

  There were to be about twelve different workshops, some given twice. They ranged from “Current Research on the Effects of Pornography” to “Sex Workers Speak Out,” from “Whose Sexual Revolution Was It, Anyway?” to “Sexist Images in the Media—More Dangerous Than Porn?” There were workshops on sexual abuse and bisexuality, on safe sex and the politics of disabled women’s sexuality. The nearest the organizers had gotten to the S/M controversy was the workshop/video presentation entitled, “Is It Porn When a Lesbian Makes It?” given by Kimiko Lewis. The organizers had also stayed away from the Christian element in the planning of the conference, though they had invited Sonya Gustafson of Christians Against Pornography to speak that evening at the public panel with Loie, Gracie, Elizabeth and Miko.

  The conference was being held at Catholic-owned Seattle University and was well-attended, albeit by most of the usual feminist crowd and a few earnest-looking students. Hadley and I split up immediately. She headed off for Loie Marsh’s workshop on the history of the anti-pornography movement because she was curious to hear this woman everybody had been talking so much about, while I decided to begin on solid footing with the current research workshop.

  “Miko’s talk is at ten-thirty,” Hadley said as we parted. “It’ll probably be packed.”

  “Ummm.”

  “She’s not really so bad, you know. She just likes attention.”

  “Yes, that’s obvious. But I’m still not impressed.”

  “See you at lunch then?”

  I nodded and she went off. I was fairly certain she was planning to go to Miko’s presentation, and didn’t know why that upset me. I couldn’t be jealous of Miko, could I? Could it be that all this talk lately about sexuality was somehow getting on my nerves, making me wonder how satisfied Hadley and I were with each other? It’s true we weren’t getting it on like bunnies anymore, but we hadn’t yet drifted into a state of complete indifference. At least I hadn’t. And maybe I needed to make sure that Hadley hadn’t either.

  The very serious graduate student in my first workshop talked about the research Edward Donnerstein and others had been doing, most of it based on the response of male college students to pornography of different sorts. It went more or less like this: College-age males were exposed to pictures or films of varying degrees of sexual or violent behavior. Soft-focus, pleasurable sexual incidents were juxtaposed next to hardcore violence. The students were then given the opportunity to aggress against a male or female accomplice of the experimenter by supposedly delivering an electric shock or an aversive blast of noise. What the studies showed, the grad student said cautiously, is that the harmful effect of violent pornography came primarily from the fact that women were depicted as finding sexual violence arousing. Other than that the studies were somewhat inconclusive. In fact, it sounded as if men would respond aggressively to non-sexually explicit material if it were violent, material that wasn’t classed as pornography at all.

  The graduate student ended her talk by turning off the lights and showing slides of photos from Playboy juxtaposed with those from popular male detective magazines, magazines that were sold in many convenience stores. As images of women gagged and bound flashed by, she quoted from a study by Park Dietz that said that seventy-five percent of detective magazine covers depicted domination and thirty-eight percent bondage.

  I got out of there before the discussion began. I was more agitated than I’d bargained for when I’d set out so eagerly for the conference this morning. It was hard to get the images of the bound and gagged women out of my head. I went out of the building and walked for ten minutes around the campus. Then I found a deserted place and did fifty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups.

  I was a little late for the next workshop, “Sexist Images of Women in the Media.” To my relief it was more witty than angry, facilitated by a woman I knew slightly, Mona Harris, who had run a small independent cinema once and now taught media studies at the university. She asked each of us to go around the room and to tell the group one image, one ad, one TV commercial that we found particularly stupid, offensive or just plain sexist. At first it was difficult to think—the outrage of the seventies was gone and we’d pretty much gone back to being accustomed to seeing partially naked young women used to sell products. One woman said it was the age of the models that really bothered her. Since she’d read that ten-and eleven-year-old girls were being made up to look older, that’s all she saw now, and it infuriated her that children, not even teenagers, were in Vogue and Cosmo. Another woman told a funny story of watching an innocuous program on robins with her young son and suddenly realizing how gender polarization was being inculcated on children’s TV.

  One of my pet peeves was a TV commercial for some brand of pantyhose, where a man’s voice talked about how fascinating, exciting, unpredictable, etc., Tracy or Stacy was, giving you the impression that she was to be admired for her strength, charm and personality, while at the same time he was lifting her up and throwing her over his shoulder so you got a good view of her long, stockinged legs.

  “Ros Coward, an English critic, writes in her book, Female Desire, that ‘the female body is the place where this society writes its sexual messages,’ ” said Mona. “Whether we want to or not we’re all looking at women, all the time.”

  A c
ouple of women, probably lesbians, chortled selfconsciously, and Mona smiled, but went on seriously, “Coward makes the point that looking isn’t a neutral activity in Western culture. It’s an activity which men have constructed in order to express domination and subordination. The way women’s bodies are portrayed over and over in the mass media is sexualized, not just in a way that shows the possibility of violence against them, but almost more insidiously, in a way that shows their lack of economic and social status relative to men.”

  Someone spoke up, “But studies show that porn causes rape and sexual abuse. Sexist imagery might be unpleasant, but it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  “I don’t agree,” said Mona. “The constant bombardment of images that show women as subordinate does more real damage to our sense of ourselves as women than hardcore pornography, which is actually seen by a relatively small part of the population.”

  “It doesn’t matter what women look at,” someone else said firmly. “It’s what men look at that’s important. And if they look at women being raped and enjoying it in pornography, that’s what they’ll act out.”

  “I think it is important what messages women take in,” Mona argued. “And I see the reduction of the complexity of looking to the causal anti-porn theory that ‘porn leads to violence and so it equals violence against women’ as simplistic and ultimately harmful.”

  Mona stopped and looked at the clock, “We’ve run over, I’m sorry.”

  But someone had one more question: “So would you advocate censorship of any material?”

  “Censorship of the kind Dworkin and MacKinnon advocate arbitrarily divides imagery into ‘bad’ and ‘not so bad’ material. Their call for censorship doesn’t deal with important questions of how imagery is produced and for what reason. It doesn’t come close to analyzing how the female body is used in this culture. All they’re saying is that certain kinds of portrayals of sex and violence shouldn’t be allowed.”

  I left the room enlightened, but still somewhat disturbed. Why did everybody have to talk about rape all the time?