If anyone could pen a mercilessly cheerful paen to the erotic potential of internet hating, it would be Susie Bright. She is the sexual up with people, the Herbert Hoover of orgies — one in every pot (or, I’m sure, with pot, if that’s your thing). She faced even giving birth with a sex toy in her hand, and insists it was good for her, Caesarian and all. Every experience is a sexual experience waiting to happen. Even, presumably, the exhaustion of contemplating turning every experience into a sexual experience waiting to happen.
I’m reading Susie Bright’s Sexual Reality because I’m writing about William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, and a certified lesbophiliac (he had a card and everything. It’s in the Smithsonian Archive.) Anyway, Bright has a short essay on male lesbophilia which is about the most positive thing ever written on male lesbophilia. If there is a specialist sexual interest, chances are that there is a Susie Bright essay that is the most positive thing ever written about it. If space aliens land tomorrow and whisk us all away into humiliating sex slavery involving the surgical creation of artificial orifices, Susie Bright will have an article out on Thursday about the beauty of artificial orifices and the appendages what fit in them.
Anyway. The fact is that her article about male lesbophilia is quite good — she argues lesbophilia is about identifying with women rather than saving women or invading women’s spaces, which seems to fit Marston quite well. Someone needed to write the most positive article about male lesbophilia ever, after all, and why not Susie Bright? Same with alien orifices or dildos or incest or sex with dalmations or alien orifice incestuous sex with dildos and dalmations, for that matter. Bright’s smart and her prose is punchy; better her than Camille Paglia or Donna Haraway, that’s for sure.
It would just be nice, occasionally, if there were an acknowledgement that maybe, somewhere, somehow, there might possibly be a situation in which freely expressing sexuality might not be ideal in every way, for feminism or for women or for anybody. Does it really make sense to turn an essay on the Clarence Thomas hearing into a lament about women’s sexual repression? To turn a discussion of a date-rape gang-bang into an excited effusion about the awesome sexual agency of strippers? Surely there are some problems or some situations somewhere to which the answer is not, “Have more and better sex!”
Bright is, of course, strongly anti-censorship; it’s close to the first thing she tells us in her intro to Sexual Reality If you think that 2 Live Crew might be kind of sexist, you are, apparently, repressed and sexphobic. She concludes that same intro with an enthusiastic (of course!) embrace of the power of art. “If others didn’t write words to move me,” she says, “I don’t know if I would move. The best results of my work has been to be a muse, to inspire others to take a chance.”
I’m sure Bright sees these positions as continuous; you shouldn’t censor art, because art moves and inspires. But there’s another side to that, it seems to me. If art can move you to do great things, it can also, presumably, inspire you to actions which maybe aren’t all that great. If what we read and dream can affect us, then it can affect us, for ill as well as for good. And that certainly goes for sexual dreams as well as for every other kind. Pornography doesn’t have to be more evil than anything else…but everything else is pretty evil. Why not pornography too?
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Googling around I found out that I was right; Susie Bright really is the person to write a sex-positive piece about haters. Here she is with a nicely appreciative piece about that supreme hater, Andrea Dworkin.
Bright makes me want to read Dworkin’s novels, actually. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll hate them.
I wasn’t familiar with Susie Bright (although I have picked up the odd copy of On Our Backs, uh, for research purposes) but I loved that piece on Dworkin. It contained some glancing acknowledgements that sex can be represented in problematic ways… anyway, thanks for the tip. I’ll be seeking out her books.
She actually retweeted this post, and asked about WW, and is just generally being super-generous and making me feel like a bit of a jerk.
The piece in sexual reality that I like best is probably her interview with Camille Paglia. She likes Paglia more than I do (shocker), but she also presses her quite hard on a lot of her bullshit, and I think is very insightful about where Paglia’s coming from.
In fairness to Bright, surely she’s aware (who could not be?) of all the ways that expressions of sexuality can be negative and destructive.
However, in reaction to the “any kind of sex other than missionary position between straight married couples for the purpose of procreation is vile, perverted, immoral” attitude, she chooses to focus on the positive side of the many varieties of sexuality out there. (She’s probably the spokesperson for “sex-positiveness.”)
Kind of in a similar fashion to Moore and Gebbie’s “Lost Girls,” where — as I recall; I’m not going to put myself through the trudge of reading it again any time soon — the only hint that sex might not be always wonderful was a glimpse of a very young boy and girl in the residence of some decadent, pomaded-moustached aristo. The kids with an unhappy, downtrodden expression on their faces that could be construed as indicating they were being sexually abused.
This focusing on the positive (in an attempt to counteract the tidal wave of negativity) approach of Bright’s laying her open (um, so to speak; the second I typed out that line I thought, uh-oh…) to being misunderstood as being simplistic.
In the same fashion that, when liberals attempt to make the public’s view of America more realistic rather than simplistically golden by rattling forth all the injustices, massacres, support of vicious dictatorships, etc., committed by this country, they are deliberately misunderstood by right-wingers. Proclaimed to be nothing but “America haters,” who — because they don’t spend much of their time listing all the good things about the U.S. (which, gee, just don’t get enough publicity!), are unaware or dismissive about them.
Not that I’m saying your perception of Bright is of that deliberate, propagandistically-distorted fashion, Noah. Personally — if your description of her book is accurate — I’d have likewise preferred that she at least made regular acknowledgements that sex can be employed in degrading, hurtful ways.
I’m sure she’d acknowledge that there can be negative aspects…but she does also often seem to think that the negative aspects come about primarily from repression and stigma. When sex is bad (or when sexism exists), it’s because there’s not enough sex. And yes, Lost Girls is a good parallel.
As you say, it is because she’s in dialogue with people like Dworkin and anti-porn feminists. The caveat is, it’s really unclear to me that the zeitgeist is, or has ever exactly been, as much with anti-porn feminists as people sometimes claim. Obviously, there’s a strong puritanical streak in American culture. At the same time, capitalism wants sex to be packaged and consumable and everywhere — and capitalism is a pretty strong ideology in our society.
Was trying to find what Susie Bright had to say about Paying for It, but either she didn’t write on it or my google skills failed….
Actually, there’s a fair amount of negative sex in Lost Girls, in the flashbacks. Alice is strung out on drugs and taken advantage of by the “Red Queen”– Dorothy gets involved with incest with her dad which she’s conflicted about…and Wendy ends up being repressed because of her traumatic encounter with the Captain Hook analogue. All three have to emerge from their variably negative experiences by not just having sex, but telling their traumatic stories.
Plus, there’s quite a bit of emphasis on how sex in “real life” can, in fact, be negative… It’s just sex in fiction/fantasy that is only positive (as an outlet, etc. for potentially negative impulses).
I’m not a big fan of the book, really…but it hardly falls into the category that all negative sex is a result of repression…though it certainly is anti-repression in certain ways.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Was trying to find what Susie Bright had to say about Paying for It, but either she didn’t write on it or my google skills failed….
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Couldn’t resist giving it a try. This is all I could find:
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Dwight Garner ?@DwightGarner
Chester Brown’s “Paying For It,” about a man and his prostitutes, is a queasy-making work of art http://tinyurl.com/3fqrwkr
Retweeted by Susie Bright
6:37 AM – 25 May 11
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Mm, if she “retweeted” that comment & link, does that mean she agrees about the “queasy-making” part?
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I’m sure she’d acknowledge that there can be negative aspects…but she does also often seem to think that the negative aspects come about primarily from repression and stigma.
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Those are certainly significant causes, but far more widely damaging is when sex is distorted as a societal tool: for commercial exploitation, twisted into exploitative and shallow usage (i.e., “find ’em, fuck ’em, forget ’em” held up as a macho ideal).
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eric b says:
Actually, there’s a fair amount of negative sex in Lost Girls, in the flashbacks.
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Thanks for the info! I’m afraid I found the book — and its depictions of sex — pretty yawn-inducing; details becoming lost in the mental torpor it induced.
You know, she’s also a big comics fan and is friends with Crumb. There’s a funny anecdote on her site about how Crumb once bitterly complained to her that women are too obsessed with muscular thighs on men.
This is off-topic, but speaking of Paying for It, this weekend I saw a movie called I Am A Sex Addict that has a lot in common with it, and comparing the two works was kind of interesting. The movie seems like the closest thing to autobiographical comics that you could possibly get in movie form, with the writer/director/star, Caveh Zahedi, talking to the camera between and also during segments that reinact his “addiction” to sleeping with prostitutes. (All the Netflix reviewers seemed to think he was ripping off Annie Hall, though.) The thing is, Zahedi seemed to have absolutely no insight whatsoer into himself or his “addiction” other than a sense that he’s adorable; at least Chester’s decriminization and anti-romance agenda offered some food for thought. I wanted to kick Zahedi in the nuts about 30 seconds into the movie, and the feeling just grew stronger and stronger throughout it. But I’m interested in what other autobiographical comics fans would think of the movie.
I had no idea she was friends with Crumb…though it makes sense.
That movie sounds dreadful. Sheesh.