EROTICA AND THE FEMINIST SEX WARS:
A PERSONAL HERSTORY continued

by Jean Roberta.
Copyright 1999. Not to be reproduced without author's permission.

So what exactly was "art" by anti-porn standards, and what was its connection to "life"? As a graduate student in English, I was aware that socially-unacceptable sex is a crucial element of the plots of most of the best-known nineteenth and twentieth-century novels and operas. I loved their tragic whores and adulteresses. Most anti-porn feminists seemed to feel that an act veiled in metaphors (like the extramarital trysts in THE SCARLET LETTER and LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, the gay male seduction in THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, or the famous night in THE WELL OF LONELINESS when Stephen the dyke "was not divided" from her beloved Mary) couldn't be pornographic. It seemed as if vague euphemisms and the passage of time could transform stories of damning passion into literature which was above reproach.

Some feminists defended "erotica" (especially "feminist erotica") as a very different thing from "porn," although the boundaries were never clear. The National Film Board of Canada produced a documentary on "porn" called NOT A LOVE STORY, and this film became the manifesto of Canadian anti-porn feminists. Its title, along with the often-repeated claim that for (good) women, sex is more emotional than physical, raised questions about how to define "sex," let alone "porn."

Enter the sexual outlaws: while the anti-porn movement was heating up (or cooling down), Dominance/Submission or Sadism/Masochism (with its links to the sex biz) became increasingly visible in the cultural mainstream, especially in urban centers. Gender-specific (butch and femme) roles made a comeback in the lesbian and gay male communities. Not coincidentally, self-identified dykes, women "of color" and working class women increasingly organized apart from, or in opposition to, white educated feminists who argued for the regulation of porn, prostitution and violence by various branches of government.

The "pro-sex" and anti-porn communities provoked each other worse than the heiress had ever provoked the cowboy. A book of feminist essays linking porn and violence against women would no sooner appear in print than a book against censorship and government regulation of sex would appear. In 1982, a pioneering lesbian SM group (identifying themselves as "feminist") in San Francisco published an anthology, COMING TO POWER. Almost immediately an anthology of "feminist" essays, AGAINST SADOMASOCHISM, appeared. Women's and other "alternative" bookstores, under pressure to take sides, either banned "pro-sex" (especially SM) material from their shelves or tried to show fairness by displaying books from each camp in their windows.

This cultural and political divide was played out in my social life with other lesbians. Working-class dykes were generally better in bed (just as they bragged), even if they hadn't read the new lesbian sex books, because they had none of the squeamishness of "politically correct" lesbian-feminists. On the other hand, my conversations with women who could discuss ideas were more stimulating than my conversations with women who didn't read. When I tried to promote literacy, I was usually accused of preaching conventional values.

Several other college-educated lesbian-feminists "came out" to me as survivors of childhood sexual abuse, a topic which could now be mentioned aloud. They wanted the feminist movement to lobby government to intervene more effectively to (1) protect the public from the harmful influence of porn, and (2) protect innocent children from "unfit" parents and caretakers. As the lesbian prostitute mother of a child of mixed race, I could guess what "unfit" might mean to a typical social worker. When some of my "sisters" also suggested that enforcers of the law should "protect" women from prostitution (by throwing more whores in the clink), I was further alarmed.

By the mid-1980s, one of the regulars (a man in his 60s) from my stint with the escort agency was regularly visiting me at home, and I strenuously kept him away from the women in my life. (He didn't see why, and often suggested a threesome.) The lesbian-feminists I knew, apparently smelling something male, tended to drift away. The non-reading dykes did the same as soon as they realized that I would never be "normal" by their standards. My life, like the "women's movement," lacked coherence.

The polarization of sex-positive and anti-porn approaches was crazy-making even on a purely ideological level. If androgyny was now boring, as many born-again butches and femmes were saying, why was Molly Bolt so popular in her time? Did no one remember Molly, or the writer who created her? Did no one remember Germaine Greer, a sassy Australian feminist who wrote magazine articles in the early 1970s about her sexual adventures with men she had no interest in marrying? Sex for her was hot, wet and groovy.

But if all erotic expression was now chic, did that include the sexual harassment of women in "non-traditional" occupations by men determined to drive them out? If the spankings of the 1950s were back in style, did that mean the morality of the 1950s was back too? Mass rapes in various wars were now openly reported in the media, making it clear that rape as a military strategy was a widespread method of destroying the lives of those defined as the "enemy." How cool could this be by any feminist (or humanist) standards?

DS or BD or SM was a philosophical pretzel in itself. It had several features I found appealing: it sounded like theater (with scripts, scenes, costumes, props), it was not vague, it promised orgasms and catharsis for the novice/slave/victim and luscious, forbidden power for the Mistress or Master, and it involved rules, suggesting a code of honor which all true players were committed to upholding.

This feature especially appealed to me after I had spent too much time in feminist groups run by women who claimed that any formal group structure was "patriarchal." These groups always had an unofficial structure consisting of ruling clique which could never be voted out because they had never been voted in. As a result, the groups couldn't withstand conflict and fell apart faster than my relationships. In an SM scene, democracy might still be nowhere in sight, but by the Goddess, everyone would know who was who and what was what.

On the other hand, I remembered being threatened with spankings for my outrageous belief that I and all other women should be able to exercise the rights we already had in theory. Was SM just the latest expression of male backlash, even among lesbians? Anti-porn feminists thought so. Was it a diversion from more serious political work? And if so, could women afford to be diverted at a time when things seemed to be getting worse?

As if to dramatize these qualms, a few women began showing up in the local gay bar in black leather and heavy metal. They did not seem to have anything in common with me. On principle, I defended their freedom of choice to scandalized lesbian-feminists who saw these outlaws as a threat to all they held dear.

At the same time, if leather dykes represented "sex-positive" culture, and possibly the future of the queer community, I didn't see how there could be room for me in it. There seemed to be only one way I could possibly earn a tiny shred of acceptance from the likes of them. Why go there after escaping from an abusive husband in the 1970s? Why defend that sexual style at all if it was only going to bring back snobbery ("reverse" or not), as well as the same control and abuse that anti-violence feminists were trying to stamp out with the slogan "Zero Tolerance"? A plague on both their houses.

The Siege of Atlanta (remember GONE WITH THE WIND?) in the civil war between American feminists over sexual imagery was the legal fight over the Minneapolis Ordinance in the mid-1980s. When I attended the International Feminist Book Fair in Montreal in 1988, I met the lawyer, Catherine McKinnon, who was hawking unbound photocopies of this law which she had drafted with anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin, complete with background information. This sheaf was thicker than any of Dworkin's books. In brief, the city ordinance (intended to be a model piece of legislation which could then spread to other cities and higher levels of government) identified pornography as an expression of violence against women, and allowed victims of actual violence to bring criminal charges against "pornographers" (writers, producers, distributors of material defined as porn) without having to pay for private lawsuits. This, according to McKinnon, was progress.

The possibility that women might be defined as pornographers under this law seemed to have escaped her, but it did not escape the "pro-sex" women at the book fair, including lesbian artist, writer and photographer Tee Corinne, probably best known for her CUNT COLORING BOOK, also published as LABIAFLOWERS. I was warned that McKinnon's buddy Dworkin had a dangerous ability to work up a crowd into a lynch-mob frenzy.

At this time, feminist publications were full of items about the progress of the ordinance. A group of concerned citizens (including relatively well-known erotic and/or lesbian writers) quickly formed an ad-hoc committee to oppose it. They failed to block passage of the ordinance by Minneapolis City Council, but they kept up the pressure and helped to get it revoked. By this time, a pro-ordinance group (including other "feminist" literary divas) had formed. Women writers stopped speaking to other women writers. The ordinance was eventually killed, and has not been revived since.

The original plan of Dworkin and McKinnon to get this particular law passed throughout North America seems to have died before 1990, but they have served as advisers to American AND Canadian government bodies, since their agenda fits in with that of some officials who don't even claim to be feminist.

Government-run boards or committees for the regulation of controversial reading and viewing material actually existed for a long time before anti-porn feminism was born. In the early twentieth century, an obsessed employee of the United States Post Office named Anthony Comstock persecuted his many enemies, including nurse Margaret Sanger who coined the term "birth control" and founded an organization, Planned Parenthood, to provide needed information on sex and reproduction, two related topics which were largely unmentionable in her time. Comstock made it his mission to disrupt the spread of "obscene" material (including biological information now taught in schools) through the mails. "Comstockery" entered the language as a synonym for censorship. Comstock's effect on American culture was such that the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once refused to tour the United States for fear of being arrested for writing controversial plays.

Governments in general tend to be in a no-win position regarding anything currently considered controversial (and the scandalous topics of today are not those of yesterday). Governments are often called on to maintain general standards of "decency" by setting limits on what can be published, circulated, shown or performed. On the other hand, voters in supposedly democratic countries like to believe they are free to choose what to read, see and think. What's a politician to do? Appoint someone else (the current Comstock) to do the dirty work.

Censorship in Canada is further complicated by Canada's economic and cultural relationship with the United States. Most art (loosely speaking) in North America is produced in the country that contains 90% of the continent's population, so Canadian booksellers and video stores import reading and viewing matter from American producers and distributors. Limiting the type of material which can be legally bought, read or shown in Canada is largely a matter of patrolling the border. (A popular button of the 1980s shows an American flag with the slogan: "Keep your porn and your guns.") While Americans who disapprove of "porn" have to admit that the devil is loose (so to speak) in their own culture, like-minded Canadians can claim that much of it is a foreign import which does not meet local "community standards."

So anti-porn sentiment in Canada has a vaguely patriotic flavor that it doesn't have elsewhere. The trendiness of this sentiment in the 1980s seemed to encourage a small number of individuals, none directly responsible to the Canadian voting public, let alone to women or to feminists, to make sweeping decisions about what Canadians could legally get their hands on. And although most Canadian provinces have had a federally-funded feminist "action committee" (affiliated with the National Action Committee on the Status of Women) since a ground-breaking government study on the status of women was done in the late 1960s, Canadian feminists were so divided on the issue (or just plain confused) that government boards were free to do what they would without much opposition. This led to several disasters that hit the media in the 1990s.

The problem seemed small at first: a gay/lesbian bookstore started by two gay men and a lesbian in Vancouver in 1983 began attracting the attention of Canada Customs, which had to clear the bookstore's frequent orders of books, magazines and other items from American sources. A contact person warned the store owners that if they continued to order (homo)sexual material, Canada Customs was prepared to cut off their supply. By then, the bookstore (Little Sister's) had become a gathering-place for the Vancouver queer community, and the owners did not want to disappoint their customers. The warning was ignored.

Canada Customs dropped its bomb in time for Christmas 1986: box after box of goodies from the U.S. was seized at the border. The two men who were the remaining owners of Little Sister's were told by their lawyer that going through Canada Customs' internal appeal process would involve an expensive court case. They realized that they would have to go public and take the offensive, or go bankrupt.

The first protest rally for the bookstore was held outside the Vancouver office of the Conservative federal minister responsible for Customs. The protesters demanded the replacement of the Customs officers responsible for the seizures and also demanded a re-evaluation of the regulations which allowed individual officers to decide what is and is not fit to be seen in Canada. Glad Day, the Toronto gay/lesbian bookstore, was currently suing Canada Customs for seizing THE JOY OF GAY SEX at the border in 1986.

No one at Canada Customs made an official response, but within days, some of the detained material found its way back to Little Sister's. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association offered to support Little Sister's in a general court challenge to Canada, not just an appeal of particular seizures. The legal basis for this daring move was the Charter of Rights (mentioned earlier in this essay) which was part of the new Canadian constitution. So on the level of federal Canadian law, equal rights for women were associated with ANTI-censorship.

The court case which was eventually heard from October to December of 1994 was a three-ring circus. Little Sister's called in an array of expert witnesses, including the American authors of some of the banned books. A key issue under debate was whether customs officers could put their personal prejudices aside when applying obscenity laws to particular reading and viewing material. The expert witnesses for the government claimed that legal concepts of "obscenity" and "pornography" have no connection with sexual orientation OR with personal bias.

Expert witnesses for Little Sister's challenged Canada Customs' claim of objectivity when assessing the legality of sexually-explicit material. It was pointed out that much heterosexual material flowed into Canada from American sources during the period when lesbian and gay male erotica was being intercepted on its way to Little Sister's. It seems unlikely that one particular bookstore would have been singled out for repeated government seizures of stock if its area of specialty hadn't been controversial in the first place.

As a small bookseller, formerly a member of the collective which ran an "alternative" bookstore, I was ordering similar material at this time. My main source was Bookpeople, a large distributor in California, and their boxes arrived at my door or the local post office without a hitch. I give credit to those who knew how to pack books discreetly.

In 1995, a Vancouver publisher (Press Gang) published RESTRICTED ENTRY: CENSORSHIP ON TRIAL, an account of the Little Sister's case to that point. The book was written by a manager of the bookstore, Janine Fuller, and a writer from Toronto, Stuart Blackley, and was sold as a fundraising project to help provide for Little Sister's ongoing legal costs. The authors mention the feminist claim that pornographic material degrades women, but they argue that concern for women does not hold up well as a possible motive for the seizures of material by Canada Customs. Like the birth control information which was taken out of circulation by Comstock and his allies in the nineteenth century, some of the material stopped by Canada Customs dealt with health issues, including the spread of HIV and the safe sex practices which minimize the risk of catching it.

At about the same time, a gay male writer of erotica, Stan Persky, wrote an editorial for THIS MAGAZINE, a leftist Canadian periodical, asking why material which describes male-on-male sex was so often identified as "porn" and banned accordingly if the problem with pornography (according to Dworkin and McKinnon and most other anti-porn "experts") was that it incited, or actually embodied, violence against WOMEN. Where was the threat to women in books or films with titles like "Boys on the Beach"? Indeed. But in general, Canadian feminist organizations either had an anti-porn policy or had nothing to say on the issue.

In 1996, the judge who heard Little Sister's suit against the Canadian government ruled that the bookstore had been discriminated against, BUT that the law that Canada Customs claimed to be applying at the time was not unconstitutional. Little Sister's appealed that ruling, and the appeal was heard in 1998, when two of three judges confirmed the 1996 decision. However, Little Sister's has been allowed to take the appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, and is now waiting for a hearing date. Meanwhile, Canada Customs has continued to seize material earmarked for the bookstore. According to Janine Fuller, much of what offends the censors could be described as SM-related. Quel surprise.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1993, I was recruited onto the Saskatchewan Film Classification Board. I was no longer working as a nude model OR a call girl, and I had finally achieved a Master's degree in English. I was in my forties. I wanted some degree of safety and respectability, partly for the sake of my daughter, who was now in high school. I was a volunteer board member of the Saskatchewan Action Committee on the Status of Women (SAC). I was marginally employed by the local university as a "sessional" instructor of first-year English. My salary from this was not enough to live on, so I juggled several part-time clerical jobs..

The recruitment offer was too good to resist. Another SAC board member, appointed to the classification board as a token feminist, had resigned on grounds that all the porn films she had to watch were giving her nightmares. I was asked if I wanted to replace her, and receive a "per diem" for watching movies six days a month. It was explained that the money I would receive was not to be regarded as a salary, and I agreed not to call it that.

I was also told that most of the movies I would be watching were current Hollywood releases destined for local movie theaters. The "porn" films available for rent in various stores was also supposed to be rated according to the Saskatchewan Film Act, but since this legal requirement was really impossible to police adequately, "porn" was only viewed and rated by the board if someone complained to the police, who were then obliged to hand the stuff to us, the Film Police.

Considering that I was not really in a position to halt the flow of sexually-explicit films into the part of Canada I lived in, my role as a film cop didn't trouble me much. I got paid for my time, local video stores did a thriving business, and life went on. I sometimes wondered whether I had been recruited onto the film board as a SAC board member because I was expected to be anti-porn, but the film board's apparent lack of power actually reassured me. I was obviously not in charge of the media or of modern culture, so no one could seriously accuse me of being Mrs. Grundy the art censor. So I thought.

Then the Hollywood movie EXIT TO EDEN, based on an Anne Rice novel of the same name, arrived in Saskatchewan in October 1994 for the film board to rate. The movie, like the novel, traces the relationship of Elliot, a male submissive, and Lisa, one of the "trainers" in the "Eden" of the title, an SM resort. The other four board members found the scenes of "s and m lite" (as one of the stars described it) more offensive than all the violent deaths in all the action movies we had watched. They agreed to give it a rating of "Not Approved," making it illegal for anyone in Saskatchewan to buy, sell, rent or view the piece. The legal basis for this decision was the "degradation" in the movie, something which, according to the Saskatchewan Film Act, COULD (but would not have to) be a basis for banning.

I offered to loan my copy of the novel to the other board members so they could make a more informed decision. One of the men accepted my offer, and what he read strengthened his resolve to ban the movie. The cops-and-robbers comedy which was added to the plot of the novel to give the film more mainstream appeal was the last straw for the other board members. They thought porn should stay in its place: far away from them.

The majority ruled. The chairperson (or chairwoman) of the film board asked the rest of us to refer all questions from the media to her, as the board spokesperson. Since I couldn't defend the decision to ban the movie and didn't want to trash my fellow board members in public, I agreed not to talk.

The banning of the movie was big news in the local media. The chairperson refused to speak in public, claiming that judges don't have to defend their decisions. For three days she was nowhere to be found, so the press came after the rest of us. Our names were shown on local TV. I could hardly have been more aghast if my transactions with johns in motel rooms in the early 1980s had been secretly videotaped and then broadcast to an audience of people I knew.

Articles appeared in the local press, the Canadian press, and the American press. We were described as a "shadowy board," but I didn't feel shadowy enough. My daughter was the center of attention when the issue was discussed in her English class.

I was phoned at my office at the university by a young woman I knew slightly, who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). I dodged her questions and refused an interview until she asked if she could come ask me to explain how the film board is normally run. I recklessly agreed.

"Aura," born in the early 1970s, came to my office dressed in hippie revival style, carrying a tape recorder. Her questions got sticky. She asked if I had pressured to agree with the ban. I said yes. She asked if the decision was based on certain controversial scenes. I said yes. She asked me to describe them. At that point I phoned the board chairwoman, who was only accessible to board members. She told me not to say anything to anyone. I told Aura I had given my word of honor not to talk, and couldn't give permission for my comments to be used. We argued about this, then she left quickly with the tape. Her supervisor phoned me, and I argued with him until he agreed not to air any part of the interview.

At 6:00 the next morning, the chairwoman woke me up with a phone call. My comments had been aired on CBC Radio at 5:00 a.m. and would be run again at 7:00. I offered to resign from the board. She told me not to do anything, and not to go to the film board office until further notice. I left messages for several higher-ups in the Saskatchewan Department of Justice. The chairwoman phoned me back to ask what I wanted, and to tell me that I was to direct all my questions and comments to her.

Two days into the media circus, the Saskatchewan Minister of Justice appeared on TV. He claimed that the provincial film board would soon be replaced by a regional board, possibly by December 1994. We lasted until October 1997, when we were disbanded; since then, the film board of another Canadian province, British Columbia, has had the job of rating films and videos for Saskatchewan.

The Appeal Film Board, called together on rare occasions, was quickly locked into a room to reconsider EXIT TO EDEN. They voted to overturn the ban. When the film opened in Saskatchewan, people flocked to see it. Were the hordes of voyeurs corrupted by what they saw? Your guess is as good as mine. If the viewing public was damaged by that movie, we who saw it first were the first casualties.

So bring on the dancing girls, I say. Let the rude and the crude flow freely across borders. After all, the devil has no nationality and can fit comfortably into every human culture. I am still haunted by questions about the relationship between sex and oppression which will probably never be answered conclusively, but as I approach my fiftieth year (the beginning of Cronedom in wiccan or neo-pagan terms), I know a few things that I didn't know before.

I don't want to be more of a hypocrite than absolutely necessary. I don't want to be ignorant or philistine while I still have a mind that functions well enough. I could live in the world of literature for the rest of my life, but ironically, the products of imagination pull me back into the joyful and suffering world of the senses. Sex is still messy (not only on a physical level), but I will never be a neat freak. Whatever ambivalent feelings or ambiguous messages are brought up by sex in art, we all have to live with them. The prospect of a morally "clean," sex-free culture is just too scary for a vulnerable woman like me.

© (c) 1999 by jean roberta All right reserved.