"Rethinking Kink"

© San Francisco Bay Guardian - September 8th, 1999

article by Danya Ruttenberg

~~ S.F. sex radicals have created a city where porn is ubiquitous and dominatrix stories are a dime a dozen. Now more than ever, they're working in a whole different kind of taboo zone: the murky realm of human emotion. ~~

This is a strange time for sex-positive culture. In San Francisco, 3-D porn can be playing at not one, but two art-house theaters, simultaneously, and the Power Exchange fetish club can hold a breast cancer fundraiser aimed at nice, suburban-type women - featuring striptease lessons and seminars such as "Scarves: How to Use Them to Tie That Man Down." The taboo's been taken out of sexual transgression, at least here at its fulcrum. Yes, the rest of the country is a different story. Certainly life under the bubble in no way mirrors what's happening out in that big, scary, queer-bashing, vibrator-banning abyss they call mainstream America. Still, the mainstreaming of kink in San Francisco is exciting, and important; the more pervasive pervery is in S.F., the more likely it is to seep out into the rest of the country.

As the possibilities expand, the possibilities expand - and for every Walnut Creek yuppie hitting the fetish scene with hedonistic abandon, there's a housewife in Kansas who has begun to demand oral sex from her husband. These days, the Good Vibrations mail-order catalog is selling 125 times the dollar value in merchandise that it did in 1985 - from $25,000 to well over $3 million. Hip young women are comfortable and confident about their sexuality in ways unthinkable even 10 years ago, and hip young men have hopped on the clue train in record numbers, too. The popularity of an anal sex how-to video aimed at heterosexuals called "Bend Over Boyfriend" is alone testimony to a whole bunch of changing cultural values and practices.

But as is the case with just about everything under the sun, the popularization of perversity has largely been through its flashiest bits - hip costumes, dramatic role-play, scary-scary whips and chains - and the true substance of the stuff has been left in the dust.

Anyone who's played knows that there's work to be done before the play party starts. Conversations about what folks' boundaries are, what they're comfortable with, and perhaps what gets their groove on are considered de rigueur in S/m and polyamourous (that is, open relationship) circles. What do you like? What do you want? What's not OK? Tough questions about articulating consent and negotiating sex acts have, for a long time, served as the glue for "instant intimacy" and have helped people get closer not only to their own inner chaos but to their partner's as well. Explicit articulation is one of the most radical and useful tools for any relationship, when it works. But as kinky culture has grown, expanded, mainstreamed, allowed new people and younger generations in, the subtleties of communication have at times been run over roughshod and its grand visions grown a bit dingy, leading to a spate of criticisms by the scene's most devoted.

There seems to be a subtle, delicate thread running through the sex-positive universe; a vocabulary temporarily left behind is slowly creeping back into the perv lexicon. For the first time in a long time, people have begun to talk about what intimacy is, what it means. Perhaps now that folks have won the right to have any kind of sex (again: in San Francisco anyway) they've begun to question whether they always want the whole enchilada. Any kind of decadence is available in the city. What fulfills the individual, at different times in his or her life?

A postmodern relativism has permeated the kinky corners of S.F.; almost anything is OK somewhere in the city. Whatever your kink, bet on the fact that there's a support group or dance club night somewhere specializing in just that. But some are beginning to regard the current vibe as a bit coercive; in some circles it's so very OK to be sexually free that those who choose differently are regarded as repressed and uptight. A recent issue of the local dyke magazine On Our Backs asks readers to "tell us! Why you like casual sex?" Because, it seems to imply, we all do, don't we?

Even some folks at the helm of sex-positivity feel it; Karlyn Lotney, whose "In Bed with Fairy Butch" cabaret night showcases lesbian strippers, sex toy raffles, and impromptu fisting demonstrations, along with a designated "cruising" segment after the show, says, "I think the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. There's a judgment against monogamy and long-term relationships, and it affects people. We can't react against mainstream culture indefinitely." Sex activist Bari Mandelbaum thinks that part of the problem is that now, "feminism is so passé that people are pooh-poohing the valuable things we learned from it. In my mind, part of being a healthy, functioning sex radical is being able to say no" The assumption that one must have a kinky sex life with many partners is, of course, as disrespectful as the assumption that one must not have those things.

These days, extremism seems to inspire more rolled eyes than it does deep, reverent awe. "For people who want to maintain that level of forbidden excitement, it becomes a sort of game to [find something that will] shock the legions of college girls who're reading Pat Califia in their gender studies classes," observes Carol Queen, author of The Leather Daddy and the Femme (and host of some of the city's most beloved sex parties). Now that less is off-limits, those who get off on "edge play" - that is, who find their eroticism in the untouchable - seem to be creeping closer and closer to the edge.

At "My Sucky Valentine," a reading of erotic fiction by some of San Francisco's smutty elite, the packed room of hipsters got more than just a standard-issue-kinky platter of work. There was a story about the erotics of destruction; getting turned on by hurricanes, volcanoes, and mangled bodies on the side of the road. Another member of the pornerati offered up a tale wherein the narrator's girlfriend dies during orgasm, ending as he grows aroused again - clearly intending to finish the job - inside her dead body. A crabby, leather-clad "top" offered up a couple of poems depicting violent, nonconsensual rape, wherein the "bottom" was punched in the face, slammed against a chain-link fence, ground facedown in the dirt, fucked as a means of inflicting pain, spit on, and left for dead.

"When it's so easy to break taboos, they become less important. I'm not always sure what the substance is," asserts Hannah Doress, whose Hanarchy Now! produces "intelligent and sexy" events for queers on both coasts. "Sometimes it becomes silly." Queen is careful to note the enormous range of gray areas within pervert circles - and that most of the kinky are perfectly content to pursue that which gets them off and don't worry about the shock value to outsiders. "It's not true that as a community we're running like a herd of lemmings towards the cliff," she says wryly.

Insiders come out

That insiders have begun to grumble publicly about this current vibe is an indicator that the pendulum is already beginning to swing back; Doress notes that "we may have moved beyond the P. R. stage of S/m, where we're just smiling and holding the product box to make it look good on TV" and sell it to the skeptics who might otherwise condemn it and its practitioners. Pervy culture has been around long enough now and has established a strong enough foundation that perhaps it's time to look at its problems. As Mandelbaum says, "We created this world, we chose it, and we're glad it exists. So now we have to figure out how we can fix the internal inconsistencies."

Attacks on S/m, porn, and such have long been levied by those who wish the stuff never existed at all. More recently, however, a body of writing critical of the scene has begun to emerge from genuine insiders - the people who are capable of separating superficial, misinformed judgments from the real problems within radical sex culture. S/m guru Pat Califia addressed domestic abuse in the leather community in The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, and queer theorist Mark Simpson took on the bland conformity of homo culture in his recent book Anti-Gay. Donna Minkowitz, a writer for the Village Voice, who's earned her stripes as a leather top, offered a complex and ambivalent look at her people in the book Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God and Fury. She writes, "All of us have something in us like the desire to ... treat people like dirt. Do we get anywhere by not talking about it? No. But embracing it uncritically doesn't get us very far, either.quot; She asserts that the unquestioning pursuit of our darker impulses does not, necessarily, help expunge the demons of our repressed desires. For her, S/m became a means of raising walls rather than tumbling them; even as the confines of role-play freed her dominant side, it forced away much of her compassion and tenderness - to the ultimate detriment of her relationships.

"I've found one of the loves of my life," she writes, "and the only way that I can touch her is with variously stinging bits of leather." Her dissatisfaction with the scene is mirrored, too, in Eurydice's Satyricon USA: A Journey across the New Sexual Frontier, which investigates a nation consumed by morgue sexuality and UFO fetishes; the chapter on San Francisco showcases blood-play aficionados. This author too, takes to task the limiting effect of labels, from "lipstick bottom" to "amputee fetishist." "We still don't depend on our distinct psyches to define our sex lives, but on the ideology of a society that divides human sexuality into rigid categories to control it," she asserts. Like Minkowitz, Eurydice regards the subcultures and extremism built around boxy labels as safety shields, vehicles for people to work out their anger, pain, insecurities, and other fundamental human needs. She writes that there is a "robust, unruffled normality plodding beneath these Americans' skin-deep, self-determined perversions. I learned that [kinky] desires grew out of a deeper, less-hip need for continuity and safety - and love."

What is this thing called love?

Annie Sprinkle observes that "people who have been into S/m, polyamoury, strap-ons, etc. for a long time are getting out of those things, and going back to simple monogamous sex," not because there's anything inherently wrong with the other stuff but because sometimes stripping away the layers allows for a more direct connection with the sexual, the emotional, and for some, the spiritual. Minkowitz writes, "It's not that I think S/m hurts people or is evil; I just realized that it was preventing me from having other kinds of sex and love."

For some, getting to the "other kinds" necessitates an abdication; for others, it merely requires greater attention to the heart and its needs. Doress observes that two long-polarized groups - those who've focused on breaking the taboos against porn, S/m, and sex toys, and an alliance of therapists, health advocates, and antiviolence advocates - have begun to merge, creating a more holistic vision of sexuality and sexual possibility. "On the one hand, women have been oppressed by 'all sex has to be intimate' for many years,' " she muses. But it's taken some time for folks to realize that "being sexually liberated doesn't require giving up that intimacy; people who had moved away from it are now starting to look for meaning and depth" in their sex lives.

It would seem that Susie Bright has covered every possible issue under the sun concerning sex; she's written about the cultural, political, literary, and, of course, the technical aspects of getting laid. But her new book, due late this summer, makes it clear that she's still charting new turf. Full Exposure is an exploration of the more personal aspects of the erotic, covering everything from the fears associated with true sexual vulnerability to lovers' ethics and self-esteem.

This delving into the depths of sexual feelings, and acknowledging that even the basics of vanilla sex are laden with issues, scary emotions, and challenges - it's new stuff despite the profusion of horrible, Men Are from Mars, Where the Beer's Really Good and So Is the Football-esque books about "bedroom communication" one finds in the "couples" section of the bookstore, there simply isn't a lot out there for sane, reasonably grounded people about the very real, oft-unspoken funky feelings most people have about some aspect of their erotic lives.

The kink-positive community is breaking new ground regarding some other difficult emotional realities surrounding sex as well. Cleis Press's recent release The Survivor's Guide to Sex is already being heralded as a major innovation: a sex-positive guide for those who've suffered through incest or rape. It covers everything from disassociation (that is, "checking out" during sex) and understanding psychological triggers to - yes - healthy ways to engage in S/m and role-play. This new body of work transcends the preoccupation with hot sex or fun sex; rather, it serves to help people integrate more parts of themselves into their bedroom behavior.

The scene's tendency toward compartmentalization and limitation - as critiqued by Eurydice, Minkowitz, and others - may, with this next level of discussion, be on the wane. Certainly, by bringing in more open talk of the real obstacles to intimacy and expression, folks will be able to have a more sophisticated, multilayered fuck. As one woman says, "Part of what's so radical for me, as a sex radical, is being so out about being a survivor, and being able to own my pleasure," as well as the full history behind it.

With renewed attention to the machinations of the heart, and the slightly rusty tools of consent, negotiation and articulation may become renewed; certainly neither Bright's latest work nor The Survivor's Guide could have grown out of a mainstream culture that's still giggling about come stains on a dress and Pamela Lee's tit job. Once again the sex radicals are leading us in directions we very desperately, as a society, need to go, even if we didn't know it yet. And once again the money's on the bet that this stuff'll seep out into the Midwestern pastures, just as soon as we can convince Oprah to stop bringing John Gray onto the show. Sure, it'll take a while for this talk about the very real ways in which sex affects us to become as prevalent as corsets and PVC pants at a celebrity gala - but don't give up hope. As long as there are talk shows, love will find a way.

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