| Susie Bright, the godmother of intelligent smut, discusses sex columnists, being the mother of a teenager, and why she misses Bill Clinton. |
Susie Bright was writing about sex way before every men's magazine and college newspaper boasted its own dirty-talking columnist. As an author, pornographer, advice columnist, blogger, and radio-show host, Bright's career combines one part Emily Post, one part Larry Flynt and one part Fran Lebowitz.
Bright was one of the founding editors of On Our Backs, the groundbreaking lesbian porn magazine whose tongue-in-cheek title and subversive photos rendered it, in the '80s, Women's Bookstore Enemy No. 1. Since then, she's written a slew of books on sex, culture, politics and motherhood, and edited a bookstore's worth of smutty-writing collections. There are few folks who've had the kind of front-row seat to our culture's wacky, way-conflicted dealings in sex and politics as Bright, and she's an excellent source of perspective.
Andi Zeisler: In your essay collections Sexwise and "The Sexual State of the Union," you wrote about the hypocrisy of our government meddling in the sex lives of its citizenry. You were one of the first people to talk about politicians in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way as these people whose values are so misaligned with their actual behavior. Do you think it's become more obvious how hypocritical government policy is when it comes to legislating and policing sex?
Susie Bright: One of my favorite fairy tales is "The Emperor's New Clothes." And it seems like, for a long time, puritanism in America has had this very tight class structure that dictates who can be unmasked sexually. I mean, you can always take some poor wanker and make him out to be a dirty old man. But historically, you could never do that with the rich, the protected, the elite. And yet here they were, making the decisions about what everybody else got to read or look at.
I always wanted to make people see that sexual freedom is actually one of the ultimate tests of a real democracy: Do you have the nerve, the courage, to let people educate themselves, make their own decisions about their sex lives? Or are you going to take the mommy-and-daddy-know-best position, where [the government] gets to look at everything, prescreen and then decide what everybody else is going to do?
I think a lot of people misinterpret puritan leadership as being a group of people who want to outlaw all sexual expression. No. They're very interested in looking at it themselves. They want the full range of emotions about everything; they want access to all the esoteric knowledge. But they don't want you to have it, and that's where it becomes so important that sexual speech is the No. 1 suppressed speech in America. Anybody in this restaurant can stand up and say that they wish Bush were dead, or that they'd like to take an ax to Donald Rumsfeld, but when it comes to sexual speech, we are so parochial, so repressed. So as far as I'm concerned, in the recent couple of decades since I've been writing, the unmasking, the closet doors that are being kicked in, like it or not, it's been a heyday for me.
AZ: Has that evolution made you reassess your own ideals?
SS: I was one of those people who could say that the Bill Clinton years were very good to me [laughs] in the sense that I had so much opportunity to write about what I call "lovers' ethics." It was a great opportunity to talk about, How do we do right in sex? And I don't mean do right in terms of the Judeo-Christian idea, but [in terms of] an ethical sexual philosophy that does right by the community and at the same time feeds your soul.
We haven't had that role model from the left wing of American politics, either, because many of them [are] just as puritanical as conservatives. They often feel like -- and a lot of radical feminists felt this way too -- until the revolution comes, keep your legs crossed, because you can't have a genuine sexual feeling under this insane society.
We've talked a bit about Ariel Levy's book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, and the aspects of what I'll call "ambivalent sex" in it -- experiences that look from the outside like exploitation, but are also learning experiences. We allow for learning experiences in every other arena -- we give them that generosity. Nobody says, "Was that school that you went to fabulous? Or was it pure hell?" You say, "Well, it was a mixed bag." And that's OK. So why can't sex be like that too?
AZ: That's the trouble with trying to legislate sex and reproduction. Take the whole thing with restricting access to Plan B: There's this idea that if young girls have access to it, they'll use it and be wildly irresponsible, and they don't have enough knowledge to deploy it. They can drive a car at 16 -- they can have a baby -- but they can't pop a pill.
SS: Can we have a little ad for Plan B here? I want everyone to go to the drugstore and get Plan B. I don't care if you've been celibate for years: Go get it. Then go to another pharmacy and get it. You have a gynecologist? Say you want [Plan B] for yourself, your mother, your daughter, your sister. And believe me, they'll get on the bandwagon; most of them are all for it. You want to have Plan B there the way you'd have Band-Aids. By the time you're in that situation, saying, "Oh, shit -- am I pregnant?" you've got it.
I feel so glad that even before there was the thing that we now call Plan B, I had a gynecologist who, years ago, told me how to do this routine with a certain brand of birth-control pills, where if you take a certain regimen of these pills, not the ordinary way, but a special, supersonic way, you'll have the same effect as what Plan B does.
AZ: Do you talk to your 16-year-old daughter about all this?
SS: It's exciting to be kind of a militant mom about this. I don't know if "fun" is the right word, but it's empowering to be in a place where I can make something better for her and her friends than they were for me. When I was a teenager, I was always dragging girls from school who were "in trouble" to free clinics, and we never dreamed of telling anyone's parents -- everyone over 30 was a shithead. It didn't even occur to me that you could talk to your parents. But now, there are girls whose moms are right by their sides. And there always were -- it was just my own family situation that didn't make me realize that the support could be there. And now I'm so glad to be on that side of it.
AZ: Do you think things have gotten better, in terms of there being recognition of obvious hypocrisy? Or do you think things have gotten worse because the climate is retrograde -- abstinence-only sex education, vigilance over preventing gay marriage, etc.?
SS: That's a tough question. Some of the material conditions have really gone down the toilet, and there's an absence of stark feminism in most aspects of modern life. And the notion that feminism didn't take over, but was rather some little blip, the Carrie Nation of the history books -- that's just started occurring to me lately.
I remember the first time I went to a sex-radicals convention; we talked about this new conservative movement that was calling itself the Moral Majority. I was like, huh, that's catchy. And we were all spinning various nightmare scenarios that might happen, but we never guessed the half of it! But the intellectual and cultural ideas that were so rich ever since World War II -- the outrage and imagination that swept music and cinema and writing -- it's kept going. Minds keep churning. The wheels keep going. It's not like we decided that, since Jerry Falwell was running things, we would just turn off the switch. [There are] magnificent dreams and subversions and examples being set in the midst of this scorched-earth policy.
[Our culture] just takes so many odd twists: Who would ever have thought that gay liberation would turn out to be "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?" And I'm not saying that that's my idea of something awful; it's just that it's fun and it's frivolous and it's this crazy candy box in a world where you can't get married to your gay partner. And that's another thing: If you had told me that the gay-rights movement was going to turn into a struggle about whether you could join the army or get married, I would have laughed my head off. That wasn't the plan.
AZ:I remember being really aware of how the media was framing feminism when I read about you and Lisa Palac and, I think, Annie Sprinkle in the famous 1994 "do-me feminism" article in Esquire. I'd like to hear what you have to say about the evolution -- or devolution -- of feminism and media representation.
SS: I'm still in touch with the editor of that story, Bill Tonelli, who was at Esquire for years. In light of Ariel Levy's book, a lot of people have written to me wanting to read that article. No one can seem to find it.
AZ: Reading Female Chauvinist Pigs made me think about it again, because it seemed like as soon as the phrase "do-me feminism" was coined [by the article's author, Tad Friend], people started to twist what you all were talking about into something that was for consumption rather than for female autonomy.
SS: It's so weird the way that story happened. In the heyday of On Our Backs, we would often reflect on how strange it was to be smeared as pornographers or sex maniacs -- the kinds of things that men have historically been accused of. I knew that so many of the accusations were just rank, elitist b.s., and I would have this sympathy, this kinship with how pornographers everywhere got attacked.
I was also interested in considering the lesbian position of what it's like to desire and pursue a woman, particularly if you're the one with those desires, and experiencing what it's like to be the one who makes the first move, the one who might be rejected -- those are things that every young man is brought up to deal with.
We wrote a lot of editorials in On Our Backs, and Bill Tonelli was on some sort of talent search for Esquire, and he had seen one of the amusing anti-PC things we wrote -- it was a parody of women's music called "My Date With Holly Near," and it was all about wearing Earth shoes and having vegan soup together. I hadn't had much experience writing for the mainstream press, so the idea of writing for Esquire was like catnip to me.
I told Bill that I wanted to do a story called "What Lesbians Have in Common With Straight Men." He ended up [assigning] me a story that had a much more middle-of-the-road title, "How to Make Love to a Woman," but the do-me feminist feature came out of that, because he was intrigued by the women he'd met in San Francisco. He seemed struck by our sauciness, but I remember Germaine Greer being treated like that too. She was sexy, she was hot, she had tiny little cutoffs and was braless -- she was that emblem. The American media treats politics like fashion: Innocence is in! No, being a vamp is in! And anyone who's lived long enough is like, yeah, right.
I'm sure a lot of people who saw that story thought it was absurd. They probably remembered decades previous, when the sex kitten of the year was revealed in the media to be "surprisingly intelligent." There's always been that character.
AZ: But this was more like, surprise! Feminists might want to have sex with you! Which was the opposite of what men, and people in general, had been schooled to believe about feminism.
SS: Oh, I know. That article had nothing to do with representing how I felt. If I'd been interviewed in a more realistic way, you would have heard my exasperation. I would have said, "Sexually liberated people have always been more fun to go to bed with, in the sense that they have a tolerance and a curiosity and a sense of regard for the other person." Of course a gender-liberated woman is going to be sexually intriguing. That aspect of what we were saying didn't come out [in the piece], even though that is what we were all about.
I wasn't raised to think I was going to be valued for my looks. But I came out into the media world and had people look at me as a young woman who was white and tall and fit that notion of what they thought of as a pretty girl who thinks she's hot shit and who's a smarty-pants. I had famous journalists express shock and surprise that I could write at all -- that happened all the time, and some of those people are the biggest names in the media today. It's embarrassing, you know -- you'd like to think that people are interested in you because you're [sarcastically] so brilliant with your writing -- that's what I wanted to think. I wanted to think that Tad Friend would leave my apartment and just go, "Wow, she raised my consciousness" [starts laughing uncontrollably], and I'm sure that was the last thing on his mind!
AZ: What do you think of the proliferation of young female sex columnists, most of whom are writing for a male audience in magazines like GQ, Esquire, Maxim and others?
SS: I wrote this in my blog: "I like chick candor. But I think the soft flesh is missing from a great deal of the current crop of most-hyped writers. It's like that book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, which doesn't once discuss making love. There's no there, there. These publishing decisions are made by media executives who look at the success of "Sex and the City" and say, 'What we need is more chatty, acquisitive, materialistic celebration of the most shallow and superficial elements of sex in our culture.' Bring it on, indeed."
Sex columnists used to be pretty radical and feminist. They had broad sexual experience. Now that's not true: It's more of a shopping experience. I think it's an example of success spoiling something with capitalist reward. It's great that sex writers are not treated like syphilis carriers anymore, but the tradeoff is that the "job description" has become commodified into something rather hard to live with. I think there are lots of fine sex writers around -- I love Dan Savage and Steve Almond, and Katha Pollitt sometimes. But they're not the ones with the six-figure book contracts and TV shows.
AZ: What do you think about the so-called alternative porn that's been so hyped in recent years, like Suicide Girls? Is it interesting to you?
SS: It annoys me that you even call it alternative. I was making alternative porn before alternative porn came down the pike. At that time, gonzo didn't exist, the term "amateur porn" didn't exist -- all the terms that are around now were not in anyone's vocabulary yet. And it was fantastic. It was fantastic doing the first Herotica books, making those first lesbian movies and our first G-spot movie. In the beginning, when I was reviewing porn, I was kind of fascinated by all of it; I was like Linus, looking for the Great Pumpkin. I wanted sincere porn, and I did find some of it, and I was thrilled to tell people, "This is the real McCoy, and you should check it out."
And I would -- I still do -- get enraged when people would say that porn is all the same and perpetuates stereotypes. I would say, "No, you're thinking of Hollywood." In porn, the variety is so much greater than in mainstream entertainment, you can't even make a comparison. But then the commercial aspects took over, and what you're calling alternative porn, like Suicide Girls, is one of those strange examples. It's like saying "The Cosby Show" is the Black Power movement. It's not a collective. It wasn't started with people who had stars in their eyes about [Pollyanna voice] girls doing it for themselves! That's a myth.
AZ: But that's a myth that they perpetuate, and people buy it.
SS: The look on my face right now says more than I can say. I hate it when people take something good and pure and fabulous and say, "I can make Spam out of that!" You know what it's like? It's like the way organic and natural foods are marketed. You can say anything is a natural food these days. They sell salad at McDonald's, but it turns out that it has more calories than a cheeseburger! It's all this false packaging. And if there's any counterculture that I identify with right now, it would be everything that focuses on authenticity and sincerity and genuineness.
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