It was lunch time and I went looking for Hadley. Outside one of the rooms in the corridor there was a knot of women, half in, half out of the door, and the noise of raised voices inside. I stopped to ask what was going on.
“It’s Miko’s workshop,” someone said. “It started out with Miko talking about the historical repression of sexuality and the danger of the puritanical wing of the feminist movement trying to stop women from exploring what their sexuality really was. Then she showed two short videos—the first one something from your typical peepshow, with two lesbians making love sort of as a preliminary to the man coming in and giving them what they really wanted. Then Miko showed one of her own videos, which was a lot of revolting-looking close-ups of women’s genitals and their hairy legs. And she asked what the difference was.
“Some women shouted that there was no difference, that both were products of the pornographic imagination, which essentially objectifies women and separates their sexuality from their personalities. And other women thought there was a difference—that Miko was showing women the way they really were and not all prettied up for the camera. They thought that Miko’s video would actually turn off most male viewers. It turned off a lot of women anyway.”
“Is that what they’re still arguing about?” I asked.
“No, it’s taken a new turn. It started when Miko was talking about being an erotic dissident and this contingent of women took over and said Miko wasn’t really, that she still was representing established notions of sex, that it was just the same old vanilla sex as always. That they were the real sexual outlaws, because they were pushing the boundaries back.”
“They’re the S/Mers,” someone else said. “One of them’s even wearing a dog collar with a leash attached.”
“This I have to see,” I said, and squeezed into the room.
Nicky Kay, the woman I’d seen at the Espressomat the other day, was standing up in front of the roomful of women and talking. I hardly recognized her. Gone were the Oxford shirt, jeans and glasses. She was wearing a silky sort of see-through dress with black lacey underwear and a garter belt holding up sheer black stockings. Her eyes were heavily made-up and she had a hectic flush to her cheeks, and around her neck was a dog collar, black leather studded with silver spikes, the leash dangling over one shoulder. Next to her stood Oak, in black leather pants and a leather vest with no shirt underneath, wearing heavy black boots. On her wrists were wide leather bracelets with studs.
“Most of you know nothing about S/M and yet you condemn it,” Nicky was saying. “What is it you’re so afraid of? The lesbians here talk about being a minority sexual community and yet they refuse to allow us to have a forum to speak. Christians Against Pornography is invited to speak on a panel—not even about sexuality, but about pornography—but we’re not invited. Why are we so threatening? I’ll bet most of you haven’t even thought about it. You take your cues from the rest of society, which is repressive and puritanical. You take your cues from the wave of the feminist movement that says sex is something that men do to us, that women don’t like. Even the lesbians here are ashamed of female desire—or their lack of it. A lot of lesbians became lesbians for political reasons, not because of being attracted to women. It’s that wing of the feminist movement that doesn’t want us to speak our desires, that wants to silence us!”
“S/M isn’t about sexuality, that’s why!” someone shouted back at Nicky. “It’s about degradation and patriarchal power and woman-hating!”
I saw Hadley over in a corner of the room and tried to move in her direction.
“S/M is about power, that’s true, but it’s about the flow of power. Power in heterosexual relations is frozen and static, with one side always dominant and one side always submissive. S/M is about movement and the exchange of energy.”
Oak took up her line smoothly. “Unlike in the so-called real world, nothing in S/M is ever done without the consent of both people. That makes things a lot clearer and cleaner. There’s a lot less of the emotional bullshit and power games between S/M dykes than between vanilla dykes.”
“Sex between most lesbians isn’t mutual,” affirmed Nicky. “It’s just a trade-off, first me, then you. But in S/M the possibility exists of opening all the way up, breaking limits you thought you had, satisfying yourself and your partner with incredible erotic intensity.”
In spite of myself I was listening hard. That part sounded great. But…
“Why don’t you talk about the pain and humiliation, Nicky?” A woman said. “About women with scars from razor blades all over their breasts, about women who’ve had internal hemorrhaging from being fist-fucked. About women who have to eat shit and drink urine. Don’t just talk about power and trust; talk about broken arms and whip marks and burns from hot wax.”
“S/M is about safety,” Nicky said, two hot stains of red in her cheeks. “And you ought to know—you did it for years!”
Shock and scandal. The speaker was a well-known lesbian therapist.
I was still trying to get to Hadley. Over in the corner of the room I could see her familiar silver-blond head and straight nose.
“That’s why I know about S/M from the inside,” said the therapist bravely. “I know what a lie it is, and how it perpetuates the idea that degradation is acceptable and even good. Some women who’ve been sexually abused get into it as a way of trying to work through old feelings and to conquer them. I know, I was one. But it doesn’t work, it’s never going to work.”
The room was buzzing. It was strange that Miko seemed to have retreated and was letting Nicky just take over like this. Maybe she was filming it from somewhere.
“Oh Christ, let’s not be so melodramatic and hypocritical,” said Nicky. “I bet three-quarters of you in this room have had rape fantasies, or fantasies of being tied up or forcing someone against her will. Let’s be honest for once, okay, and not put it all on us. We’re simply the most outspoken, but I bet most of you here have turned yourself on to some kind of S/M fantasies at one time or another.”
Did she want a show of hands? She wasn’t going to get it in this charged atmosphere. Instead, people seemed to be giving credence to Nicky’s charge of hypocrisy and to be avoiding each other’s eyes and trying to sneak out the door.
I moved to the back of the room through the gaps, and finally got close to where Hadley was. And Miko. Now it was obvious why Miko hadn’t been participating in the discussion. She was whispering in Hadley’s ear, and her hand was on Hadley’s thigh.
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About the Author
Barbara Wilson is the pen name under which Barbara Sjoholm has published the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries and the Pam Nilsen Mysteries. Gaudí Afternoon, of the Cassandra Reilly series, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film by the same name. Like her detective Cassandra Reilly, Sjoholm is a translator, but of Norwegian and Danish books. In addition to her fiction and the memoir Blue Windows, Sjoholm is the author of the travel books The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, Incognito Street, and The Palace of the Snow Queen. Her essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Harvard Review, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Slate, among other publications.
For more about Barbara Sjoholm, please visit www.barbarasjoholm.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1986 by Barbara Wilson
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-5515-3
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