dualism o f good and evil, virgin and whore, lily and
rose, spirit and nature is inherent in Christianity and
finds its logical expression in the rituals o f sadomasochism. The Christian emphasis on pain and suffering as the path to transcendence and salvation is the very
meat o f most sadomasochistic pornography, just as the
Christian definition o f woman is its justification. Lenny
Bruce expressed it very simply when he said this:
I understand that intellectually — that a woman
who sleeps with a different guy every week is a better
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Christian than the virgin. Because she has the capacity
to kiss and hug fifty guys a year. And that's what that
act is —kissing and hugging. You can’t do it to anyone
you’re mad at. If you’re just a bit bugged with them,
you can’t make it.
So that chick who's got that much love for all her
fellowmen that she can make it with fifty guys a year—
that’s intellectually; but emotionally, I don’t want to
be the fifty-first guy. Cause I learned my lesson early,
man. The people told me, “This is the way it is, Virgin
is Good, Virgin is Good. ” Yeah, that’s really weird. 13
As the most obvious male Christ figure of our time, he
should know.
C H A P T E R 5
Woman as Victim:
Suck
We move from the straight literary pornography o f our
forebears, represented by Story of O and The Image, into
another realm, that o f the sex newspaper, born o f the
hip culture (or, as we like to think, counter-culture),
post sex revolution (Freudian, Reichian, Mailerian,
Brucean, Ginsbergian), post pot, post acid, post pilclass="underline"
post Them and into the world o f Us. We move into the
realm o f here and now, our own turned-on, liberated
time and space, into the social world for which we are
responsible. Since we seek in that world freedom as
women, defined in radical terms, achieved through a
concretely lived lifestyle, newspapers like Suck, Oz, and
Screw are important. Playboy is Them —no doubt Kissinger and Sinatra sleep with it tucked under the pillow.
But the counter-culture sex papers are created by
people who inhabit our world (freaks, drug users, radicals, longhairs, whatever the appropriate term might be), people who share our values, our concerns — people
who talk o f liberation. The counter-culture sex papers
would be a part o f our community and so we are
obliged, if we are a community, to approach them critically and seriously, to ask what they bring to us and what they take from us.
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“Us” —who are we? Jerry Rubin says that we are the
Children of Amerika. Eldridge Cleaver calls us the
Children of BLOOD. It is our parents, Amerika,
BLOOD, who through their moral bankruptcy and
genocidal ways have forced us from the womb onto the
streets of the nation. It is our parents, Amerika,
BLOOD, whom we refuse to be, whose work we refuse
to do. We are the survivors of Flower Power, now adult,
with our own children. We are the tribes of Woodstock
Nation, now in Diaspora, roaming the whole earth. We
are the New Left, wounded, in disarray. We are not
yet extinct, and we are not nearly finished. Our past
is only prologue.
Generally we are between 24 and 35 years old; have
used acid, mescaline, psilocibin, etc., with some frequency; use grass and hashish often with no mystification; have probably used cocaine, amphetamines, or barbiturates at some time; have frequent sexual relations, many of which are absolutely casual; reject the nuclear family and seek forms of community antagonistic to it. We are the people who listened to Leary, Ginsberg, Bruce. Politically we are radicals. Some of
us seek to develop radical forms of community, to live
good, simple, natural lives. Some of us engage in explicitly political actions —opposing illegitimate wars, resisting the uses of illegitimate authority —we wonder
how to kill pigs without becoming pigs, we are immersed in the process of revolution, we learn the skills of revolution, we resist all forms of current authority
and we simultaneously seek to develop alternatives to
those forms. There are diminishing numbers of peace
freaks among us (totally committed to nonviolent revo-
Woman as Victim: Suck
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lution) and quite a few roaring anarchists. We are, at
least in our Amerikan manifestation, white, children
o f privilege, children o f liberals and reformists. We
were brought up in pretty, clean homes, had lots o f
privacy, friends, companionship from family and peers.
We are unbelievably well educated —we went to fine
suburban schools (mostly public) where we experienced
physical and intellectual regimentation which we found
unbearable; we went to the best colleges and universities (mostly private) where we studied anthropology, Freud, Marx, Norman O. Brown, and Marcuse too,
with the finest minds who, it turned out, were chicken
shit when it came to applying egalitarian principles in
the classroom or outside o f it. T h e universities where
we studied all o f these disembodied ideas continued
doing defense work for the Amerikan government. We
have had our share o f disaster and despair: the acid
tragedies, the Weatherman tragedies, the needle tragedies. Many o f us have known jail, and we have all seen friends die. We are older than we ever thought we
would be.
What it comes down to is this: through the use o f
drugs, through sexual living out, through radical political action, we broke through the bourgeois mental sets which were our inheritance but retained the humanism crucial to the liberalism o f our parents. O ur goals are simple enough to understand: we want to
humanize the planet, to break down the national structures which separate us as people, the corporate structures which separate us into distinct classes, the racist structures which separate us according to skin color;
to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create
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communities which are more than habitable—communities in which people are free, in which people have what they need, in which groups of people do not accumulate power, or money, or goods, through the exploitation of other people. So when we look at a sex newspaper, made by people like us, we demand that