...newsmagazine

Lavender Reader (Fall 1991)

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...forth.

The appeal of this essentially adolescent stance to so many adults says something about the status of queers, perhaps, and about the particularly American obsession with youth culture and ``rebellion''.

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...Derrida

Jacques Derrida, French philosopher whose concept ot textual ``dconstruction'' is currently fashionably among many academics. Highly simplified, Derrida's philosophy is a denial of the possibility of absolute meaning in text or other cultural materials; his adherents are fond of ``deconstructing'' text and visual art to duscover ``subversive'' counter-interpretations. Particularly, pro-porn adovates have ``deconstructed'' pornographic materials and claimed the revelation of hidden, positive messages about women's sexual and political power. The physical and economic meanings of the porn industry are sufficiently present and obvious that I see no need to apply obscure analytical methods in search of other (albeit more palatable) interpretations.

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...mini-phenomenon

i.e. the popularity of sm and legitimisation of gay porn, and attempts to establish ``politics of deviance'' as a primary agenda

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...feminism

I am surprised every time I hear the term ``post-feminist'': it never occurred to me that feminism could be over until women were free.

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...rental

I've certainly said and written this, but it's so good that I doubt it was original. If you can identify its originator, please write to HerBooks and let me know.

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...Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss, social anthropologist, who viewed cultures are primarly systems of communication and used concepts from structural linguistics and information theory in his sociological analysis. He studied Native American cultures in Brazil and the Pacific Northwest, and strongly influenced a generation of sociologists and cultural anthropologists.

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...underworld

In fact the Attic Greek for ``lesbian'' is hetairistria , related to hetaera , prostitute; we'll get back to ancient Greece later.

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...Helms

This game is played over and over again wherever amateur rhetoric prevails; anti-abortionists liken voluntary first-trimester abortion to Nazi eugenic murders because the Nazis advocated forced abortions. Nuclear engineers liken anti-nuke protesters to anti-evolutionists because the anti-nukers cast doubts on certain aspects of modern science. Reductionism abounds. My favourite illustration of this is the vegetarian one. Hitler was a vegetarian; should you be afraid to defend vegetarianism, for fear of being thought a Nazi? Unfortunately, when it comes to the sex industry, many of us are afraid to stand up for our non-violent, anti-racist, anti-capitalist or feminist beliefs because someone might call us Jesse Helms. And this, I fear has something to do with our concept of ideas and politics as just something else that we ``shop around'' for, that we have to buy in pre-packaged chunks from the chosen supplier. It ain't so.

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...sex,

Wendy Chapkis, panel discussion at Kresge College, UCSC, Spring 1991.

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...out

Peter Marin, ``Why are the Homeless Mostly Single Men,'' The Nation , July 8 1991

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...fucked

When women are held as captive prostitutes they are seldom paid at all, and never directly; a pimp or manager receives the money from the customer.

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...choice

For argument's sake, we might imagine a kind of prostitution in which there is not this element of catering and serving, in which the whore's expertise at physical manipulation, like that of a trained masseuse, is the only service expected or provided. In this model it would not matter what she looked like or what she wore, nor would she be despised by other kinds of workers. 1#1layout Standard

Masseuses and masseurs are not generally considered a subhuman servant class, nor are doctors, who must often touch their patients in intimate and sometimes distasteful (for either party) ways. In these cases, the commodity being offered and paid for is a technical expertise. The model can be applied only to a limited extent, however: the mechanics of sexual stimulation are so basic and uncomplex, particularly in the male, that no enormous lore or expertise is required. If that were all the customer required, he could in 99 cases out of 100 do it for himself. 1#1layout Standard

But most men despise or are least embarrassed by masturbation: it's the behaviour of callow youth and pathetic losers, those who can't get any. I have a feeling that it embarrasses them in the same way that it would have embarrassed and humiliated an 18th century Marquis to dig his own potatoes or clean his own shoes: this is a service to be performed by a servant, damn it, not something he should have to do for himself. He wants more than orgasm: he wants his fantasy, and one essential element of his fantasy is power over a woman, power of force or power of cash, to make her (even temporarily) a servant. If she was a plain, muscular, heavy-set matron of 40 in baggy overalls with the no-nonsense manner of a senior nurse, no matter what extraordinary manipulative skills or physiological expertise she might have, only one man in half a million would choose her over a frightened, angel-faced teenager in spike heels€or a woman who manages somehow, in a dim light, to look a little like one. (In fact, take note of the long and strong tradition of male hatred of matron types, older females with professional competence who have temporary authority over males.)

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...lies

We'll take a closer look later at the parallel between this belief and the corresponding belief that Nature itself is merely an inexhaustible storehouse for the sustenance of human beings, and that what we take out of it is ``free,'' or the belief that the market economy is a boundless system capable of infinite expansion.

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...power

Not only men, but women often believe or wish to believe these myths of female sexual power over men; I think they are at best a consoling fantasy.

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...predicted

John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), scathing dystopian satire.

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...etc.

The prolific anti-socialist writer Ayn Rand popularized Logical Positivism for two generations (at least) of American readers. See her Atlas Shrugged for the definitive fictional expression of the philosophy (and note its marked anti-feminism).

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...everyone

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way; see Blumberg's The Predatory Society for some insights into the free market's encouragement of dishonesty.

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...laws)

The more intelligent variety of Libertarian often has a store of entertaining anecdotal evidence of governmental idiocy: cases where blundering, heavy-handed, incompetent State intervention has prevented individuals from exercising initiative, self-sufficiency, industry and other Libertarian virtues. They will often assert that it is only the welfare state that keeps people poor, and that without it there would be room - in a free market and a land of opportunity - for everyone.

Although these arguments fit a number of modern facts, and have a surface appeal, they are historically shallow. There is more than ample documentation of the hideous suffering of the poor and disenfranchised under pre-welfare-state conditions, from the ancient world through feudalism to the nascence of industrialism. Any ascription of human poverty and misery to the top-heavy public sector economy of America in the second half of this century is naÑve in the same sense as a feminist analysis of male violence which simply blames television. The effect of TV on modern citizens (pernicious though it is beyond a shadow of doubt) can hardly explain the drinking bowls of ancient Athens, decorated for the pleasure of carousing males with vivid scenes of men raping, beating, and killing women. (Keuls, Introduction, Chapters 2 and 6). The modern welfare state, however unwieldy it is, whatever niches it offers to petty and spiteful people, cannot explain the workhouses and whorehouses of Dickens' London.

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...sphere

US capitalism is particularly good at commercialising the rebellious urge. ``The commodification of dissent is the great ideological innovation of our time . . . insincere insurgency is now standard in advertising for beer, fast food, cigarettes, radio stations and cars.'' (T. C. Frank, from ``Buy Hip: Why Non-Conformists Make Model Consumers,'' first published in The Baffler and excerpted in Utne Reader #52 (August 1992) p. 102-103).

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...so

The Reynolds Co. pushed the same myths and fancies that the pornographers push today: smoking is glamorous, unconventional, disobedient - will express your rebellious and unique personality - is practised by fast, sophisticated, wealthy people in urban settings - and establishes your adulthood. Now that a few generations of Americans have died of lung cancer, the acceptability of smoking is barely beginning to be questioned, and the old Reynolds ads seem mostly ludicrous, vaguely sinister.

Both the sex industry and the smoking industry share a characteristic requirement for women: to play a dual role. The bourgeoises and their sisters of the upper class must be made to consume products; women of the working class and in the Third World must be made to labour as cheaply as possible to produce those products in quantities and at costs which will ensure large and profitable sales. The two types of woman are not intended to know each other, any more than respectable women are supposed to socialise with prostitutes, or a mistress to introduce herself to a wife.

For every glamorous flapper who flourished her elegant cigarette-holder in a Reynolds ad there were tens of illiterate girls rolling cigarettes for slave wages in the factory. For every liberated woman who expresses her daring by bringing home an X-rated video, there are tens of women (hungry, coerced, cynically cooperative, or infatuated with the men who exploit them) working to make thousands of videos for her to choose from.

I don't know how many generations of women will have to be recruited, broken, used up and spat out by the sex trade before the gloss and glamour of the business wears off and its current PR efforts begin to look dated and silly - and sinister.

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...philosophy

These critics of the nuke business cite violation of Native American land rights treaties to get access to suddenly-precious uranium, abuse of Native American mining labour, long-term storage nightmares, uncomfortably close ties with the weapons trade, and a host of other byproducts of the nuclear-based power plan as indications of the industry's unsuitability, its unacceptability. They believe there is no place for it in a sustainable, healthy, reasonable world. Analogous objects exist in large quantities when we consider the sex industry.

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...conquest

``Yesterday . . . the High Command ordered the opening of all houses of prostitution in the part of France occupied by German troops.'' (Shirer, p. 407) There was certainly disagreement within the Party on this issue: rabid homophobe Himmler, for example, was strongly in favour of legal prostitution, which he claimed would ``save'' German youth from homosexuality.

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...attraction

On the other hand there are the ``alternative'' tour guides oriented to the younger and less wealthy (but still male) tourist, which at one time used to admoish him to respect the people and leave the women in peace. That was a while ago: nowadays the ``alternative'' guide is more likely to advise him where the youngest and cheapest girls can be found. For the women, what is ``alternative'' about this? The only distinction is in the age and the income of the men who will expect and demand sexual service from them.

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...workers

For an overview of these issues see Mies, pp 137-142.

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...affairs.

Keuls, p. 2

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...activity.

Keuls, p. 2

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...etc.

``Such names as Choiris, Choirina, Choiridion translate roughly as Cunty, Cuntina, and Cuntlet.'' Keuls, p. 355

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...city-states.

For a hard and scholarly look at the Golden Age of Athens (which we are all supposed to admire and revere as the foundation of Western Civilisation) I can only recommend that you read Eva Keyls' work in its entirety. I can't give a fair impression of the depth and excellence of her work in this casual overview, but I recommend it whole-heartedly.

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...point.

Koch, p. 89. See also George Mosse on the tension between the implied homoeroticism of the Mannerbund, and the bourgeois respectability which the fascists sought to maintain both in Germany and Italy.

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...fancy.

Harris, p. 242

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...battlefield.

Harris, p. 241

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...domination.

Here, in the patriarchal male's spite and contempt for anyone and anything fuckable, is a strong common ground on which women and gay men might built a joint critique of traditional masculinity.

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...Kªueche

Kinder (children), Kirche (church) and Kueche (kitchen), the top priorities assigned to decent German womanhood at the turn of the century, to which was added a fourth K during WWI: Kaiser .

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...eroticism.

Macho Sluts (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1988) story starts on p. 211, quote on p. 233; but this phenomenon dates from the beginning of the lesbian sm trend. I recal reading in 1980 or 1981 the words of a lesbian sm proponent who proudly said that she would rather be stranded on a desert island with a masochistic ``boy'' than a vanilla lesbian. Although several of my contacts also remember this statement, I wasn't able to attribute it before the book went to press. If you can supply the reference, please write to HerBooks.

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...house.

Audre Lorde, ``The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,'' in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, pp 110-113 (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984).

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...model

There's a traditional concentration of queers in certain lines of work, as there is of women and people of colour in their own ``job ghettoes''. Queers (those who are not deeply closeted) have been marginalised into the sex and entertainment industry, into certain service trades, as producers, raw materials, cheap labour. This has always struck me as similar to the forcing of Jews into merchandising and money-lending in mediaeval Europe; being prohibited from owning real estate, there were few other opportunities for them to make a living. Then, like queers, they became stereotypically associated with those business and stigmatised for it, just as modern Americans vaguely snicker at effeminate male hairdressers, interior decorators, dancers, movie directors - and butchy female cops, truck drivers, dog-breeders, etc.

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...itself.

Engels, ``Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,'' in Marx/Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976) Vol 3.

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...garage.

I should note here that though Playboy now means ``a soft-core porn magazine,'' its original meaning was ``a young, wealthy, and idle man.'' The beginnings of what is perhaps the world's most popular sex magazine lie in the envy and imitation of the upper-class lifestyle.

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...one

For example, at one time aristocratic and wealthy men could rape women of lower classes, and sometimes of their own, with impunity. They could commit murder (called duellng) without arrest or imprisonment. The argument that these privileges should be extended to ordinary men of all classes, in the name of freedom and democracy, ought to make us laugh. Similarly, at one time the wealthy members of the ante-bellum Southern culture owned large numbers of slaves. A governmental edict redistributing slaves more equally, so that even the poorest white could own one or two black slaves, would not have contributed much to social justice.

Subtler and more interesting examples abound in our post-industrialist age. At one time only kings and queens could enjoy peaches and strawberries in December, fresh fish in inland cities. Nowadays the average consumer can have almost any food product at almost any time of the year - a great advance for society. Or is it? We are only now beginning to assess the hidden costs of the long-distance trucking and shipping network that transports our out-of-season treats, the preservatives and pesticides that make them perfect to look at, the economic wreckage of the countries where the cash crops are grown that end up on our tables.

At one time, only the very rich could own and run an automobile. The ingenuity and determination of one Henry Ford and his competitors ensured that by the late 20th century, almost every American could own independent transportation. It was a great advance for society. Or was it? Now we are facing the sobering fact that our vast fleet of automobiles may be costing us far more than we thought they were worth, and wondering how we might reconstruct the rail and trolley systems that were destroyed to make way for them.

On the other hand, there have been times when only the well-off could afford expert medical care, an education, decent nutrition, housing, or even a bath. No one would argue that these things should have remained limited to a small segment of the population; their extension to as many people as possible practically defines most progressive concepts of the public good.

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...supremacy

It's worth mentioning Nietzsche, whose works did inspire some of the more intellectual Nazis, because he is still respected as a Great Thinker and still fashionable among young (mostly male) intellectual amoralists and nihilists. It's worth remembering that he himself was much inspired by those same Attic Greeks whose politics with regard to women we have briefly examined: ``Among the visceral misogynists should be counted Friedrich Nietzsche, who began his career as a classical philologist. In his essay 'The Greek Woman,' he finds it inevitable that an advanced and creative culture should reduce its women to the status of vegetables.'' (Keuls, p. 9)

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...land

The charge of ``censorship'' has been hurled about in many contexts recently, usually with little regard for accuracy. The educate Right, for example, has discovered its new intellectual champion on Dinesh D'Souza, whose Illiberal Education is rapidly becoming both tract and handbook for the new academic conservatives. Mr. D'Souza and friends maintain that American academic freedom has been destroyed by the efforts of progressive activists. The revision of core reading lists to include works by women, people of colour, and gays is (in their eyes) no less than censorship. According to d'Souza, freedom of thought and speech no longer exists on American campuses. Student confrontation of professors for sexist, racist or anti-gay classrom remarks or actions is compared by the d'Souzites to Nazi thuggery.

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...Oakes

Douglas Oakes had photographed his 14-year-old stepdaughter posing topless on a bar, in the fashion of a Playboy model; this was kept secret from the girl's mother, and the girl herself tore up and buried the prints when she saw them. Oakes forced her to dig them up again; she informed her mother, who filed for divorce and initiated charges against Oakes under a Massachusetts child pornography law. Oakes was convicted and received a ten-year sentence, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the sentence and it went to the US Supreme Court. The ACLU was involved in Oakes' defense, and invited the American Sunbathing Association and the Naturist Society to file an amicus brief in hope of overturning the Massachusetts child pornography law . . . in defence of free speech, of course.

Feminist Nikki Craft was involved in a naturist test case at the time, filing suit against the Cape Cod National Seashore for prohibiting nude sunbathing. She and fellow female plaintiffs in Craft vs Hodel withdrew from the case after the ASA committed $15,000 to Oakes' defence (Letter to the ASA Bulletin , signed by Nikki Craft, Steve Paskey, Jon McCreight). Their lengthy statement concluded that The naturist movement can no longer have it both ways. It cannot support and shelter pornographers (both child pornographers and those who exploit adult women) and expect the support of feminists. It cannot merchandise women in its publications, nor can it discount, attack, ridicule, snub . . . and oust women who express valid feminist concerns. (Nikki Craft, personal correspondence 1991-2)

I have ventured into so much detail here because the incident is remarkably illustrative of everything I have said so far and have yet to say. Nudism, commonly associated with liberalism and libertarianism, enjoys a progressive or positive aura. Certainly it is ridiculed and opposed by the Right. Yet, in a case where a man deceived a woman and exploited her daughter, the ASA was willing to commit thousands of dollars (an amount hardly available to the average woman or women's political group) to defend him.

And the ACLU, which at one time was the champion of the underdog, supported and encouraged his defence. The child's right to privacy, her mother's right to know what her husband is up to with her teenage daughter, the violation of these rights was of no interest to this pro-freedom association. The man's freedom of speech€his right to enjoy and possibly to market to other men (this kind of amateur pornography finds its way into the commercial mainstream in large quantity) the photographs he had taken by means of deception and the exploitation of his power as a man and an adult€those rights were worthy of the ACLU's high principles and purposes.

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...it

Colin Watson does this argument justice, in his excellent book Snobbery with Violence , when he contends that exposure to a literature of violence does not lead to instant emulation: During long and lively discussion of the influence of 'undesirable' literature upon behaviour, there has come to light not a single case in which a formerly normal person has been induced by his reading to commit a violent crime.

But being an honest writer, he goes on to make the very relevant point that The influence of books is of a more subtle and involved nature. The most lasting, and therefore the most serious, harm they can do is to confirm - to lend authority to, as it were - an existing prejudice or misconception. Lies fully grown have been sent as strangers into the world of books, but these have seldom survived for long. The prospect is much better for the lies already present in embryo in the mind - the 'feeling' that this or that is so - the 'fact' that 'everybody knows to be right' . . .

Watson's primary concerns are racism and classism; like most authors regularly published in the leftist press, he does not care to tackle the Woman Question, save perhaps in a token chapter or paragraph. What we need to consider, though, is that large numbers of men, probably a clear majority, do harbour pre-existing hostility to and prejudice against women, and fall into his category of readers who may well be influenced and confirmed in their undesirable beliefs by literature which reinforces them.

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...them

Ironically, that same Nation, journal of the literate Left, which has published many a pointed and cogent criticism of racism and anti-Semitism in the arts and media, maintains its ``testostophrenia'' enough to crawl into bed woth the Playboy Foundation. The two of them sponsored a major conference recently on the threat to ``Commecial Free Speech.'' Nothing could illustrate more aptly the degeneration of the ``free speech'' ideal, from the defence of individuals risking unemployment and violence to assert their support of labour or critique of militarism, to the self-righteous protection of profits for the entertainment mega-businesses. The Left has somehow ended up hand in hand (or prick in hand?) with the big capitalists. It ought to be ashamed of itself.

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...is?

It strikes me that what we have here is a basic tenet of the American mythology: violence and exploitation done by the State (particularly against men) is Bad and Evil, but violence and exploitation done by individuals (particularly men against women and kids) is all right, even Good - at least not on the same level of Badness. I have a serious problem with this. If one pimp, some hired muscle, and a couple of dealers can control the lives of twenty or a hundred people in a neighbourhood somewhere in a city near you, then how can you feel you live in freedom? When large numbers of fathers feel they have a right to impress their children into sexual service, how can we pretend that slavery is dead?

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...former

Yes, I am all too aware that this is not a likely choice, and that the authoritarian and censorious government in the real world will be just as hypocritical as all those which went before; so exploitation and repression will in fact inevitably coexist. But if it were a real choice . . .

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...women

and in advocating forced sterilisation for poor women, especially poor women of colour.

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...[sic].

Earl Jackson, Jr., ``The Politics of Ecstasy,'' Lavender Reader (June 1991), p. 31

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...that

Even when the media report the incidence of AIDS among women, the emphasis is often on the potential risk to men: ``Japanese men are returning with the virus after visits to the brotherls of Bangkok and other Asian cities . . . and many of the tens of thousands of prostitutes from Thailand and the Philippines working in Japan carry the virus.'' ( The Sidney Australian, cited in World Press Review (June 1992), p. 6) Note that the reporter does not say that hundreds of thousands of women impressed into sexual service will die of AIDS in SE Asia, but that Japanese men are catching it there; not that poor foreign prostitutes will die of AIDS in Japan, but that they are carrying it - potentially to infect men. For a thorough treatment of the position of women in the AIDS epidemic see Gena Corea's The Invisible Epidemic: The Story of WOmen and AIDS (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

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...audience

Ebert, p. 744, ``Movies are not an appropriate medium for political or intellectual messages. The written word is best for those. Movies make you feel.''

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...faculties

When a woman reporter filed a story on the official practice of showing pilots pornographic films before their runs (during the Persian Gulf war), the US military made a half-hearted effort to suppress the story. She and other journalists made some noise about the censorship of various pieces of their Gulf war reporting; the story made a local paper and caught my attention. The first thing which struck me was that the military knows very well how male aggression is heightened by exposure to pornographic stimulus, and that they employ it intelligently (just like advertisers) to short-circuit sensible emotions like fear, doubt, or guilt - which might impair the performance of fighter pilots, or of bombardiers as they destroy the human lives below them.

The military doesn't want its fighting men in a state of happy, mellow loving-kindness as they go into action. They want their troops alert, aggressive, self-absorbed and devoid of compassion, as manly as can be. They would not be stupid enough to treat them to entertainments which made them kinder, gentler, more civilised people. There is, and will be as long as patriarchy endures, this inseparable tangle of masculinity, militarism, violence, pornography, and commercialised sex.

[This matter was covered in the Washington Post during January 1991, and then cited in the Fall 1991 Media and Values Quarterly (#56). Pilots aboard the USS John F. Kennedy watched pornographic films before flying their missions.]

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...menstream

I believe Sonia Johnson to be the inventor of this ingenious word.

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...fantasies.

Note, however, that pornographers have often tried to hide behind the label of ``educational'' materials, much as the Penthouse Forum pretended to be an open exchange of sexual truths rather than a ghost-written grab bag of titillations. There is a strong parallel with the half -hearted attempts of the Nazis to redefine torture as ``valuable medical research.'' And with the Whittle empire's introduction of mandatory ``Channel One'' advertising into classrooms as ``educational TV.''

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...facts

This is rather different from the appropriate place of sexual description or plot device in literature; whenever a writer includes sexual material in the course of telling the story, she takes the calculated risk that small minds will skim the book looking for ``the dirty bits'' - transforming her attempt at communication into manipulation, in fact.

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...literate.)

Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, pp 199-202; Keuls, chapter 6 and 7.

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...kind

I detect a terrible reversal in the accusations of ``body-negativism'' which get casually tossed at women who objet to porn. Surely anyone who truly loves and cherishes the physical human body should be appalled at the idea of buying and selling, imprisoning, humiliating, hurting, disfiguring, or destroying human bodies - all things which pornographers would have us accept as entertaining and titillating. Where is a deeper hostility being expressed than in this endless outpouring of sadistic imagery, directed primarily at the female body?

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...objectification.

Nikki Craft, on working with postal inspectors to intercept child porn: ``The police always make, like, a frame with their hand, they look at the crotch, and they say, this we can prosecute, or no we can't. But to me, I look at the eyes, at the woman's face or at the child's face. It's in the expression, the pose, whether this person is being presented as just a sexually available thing.'' [private conversation, July 1992]

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...entertainment

It is possible that some readers will not remember this: at Buchenwald concentration camp, lampshades were made from the skins of prisoners.

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...ourselves

It's been pointed out to me (R. Harwood, private conversation) that young people do turn to pornopgrahy for information about sex, which is withheld from them in other contexts. Particularly, gay teenagers may have no confirmation at all of the existence of other gays except through the distorted offerings of pornographers. The tragedy is that youngsters, whether straight or gay, are therby limited to learning from one consistent, capitalistic, abusive and misogynist tradition. We are often told they would be worse off with no sexual information at all. This seems debatable.

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...sexist.

Wendy Chapkis, panel discussion at Kresge College, UCSC, Spring 1991.

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...compulsory.

T. H. White, The Book of Merlin (New York: Berkley Medallion, 1978), p. 66: ``Over the entrance to each tunnel there was a notice which said EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY BY NEW ORDER.'' He was writing about a nest of ants, which he used as a heavy-handed satire on Fascism. The reference to the New Order (Hitler's Neue Ordnung ) is deliberate.

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...dishonesty

One reader of the first draft of this paper commented, ``Yes, but are they as good at recognising porn-porn?''

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...everything

I sometimes wonder, in my more desolate and paranoid moments, whether the accelerating pace of ecological destruction, the strip-mining and paving of the planet, is after all not merely a byproduct of stupidity and buccaneering, but right in line with someone's agenda. Is it entirely ridiculous to suppose that it might be in certain parties' interest to destroy and despoil every last shred of natural beauty in this world, so that there was no longer any pleasure at all available for free ? So that we would have nothing real left to amuse or please us, nothing byt the fantasies they offer for sale?

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...men

A real cynic might perceive recent trends in the lesbian community - close alliances with pornographers, romanticisation of motherhood and increasing incidence of lesbian motherhood, increasing bisexuality, astonishing heroics in the cause of AIDS research and education and a turning away from basic women's rights issues - as unconscious propitiatory gestures to a threatening world. In other words: we are useful, we're not all that different, we serve you too in our own way, we won't challenge your privileges, please don't kill us, we could be the mothers of your sons?

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...ones

Weiss, p. 163

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...siÉecle

``The end of the century,'' or by implication the end of an era or of a world.

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