Macho Sluts (4 page)

What I
am
saying is that there's nothing morally superior about
any
of the many groups that make up the diverse spectrum of human gender affinity, forms of intimate bonding, or preferences for erotic pleasure. The people who get kicked around, the ones who are treated the worst, are more likely to develop a political consciousness about why they get treated so terribly. But the simple consciousness of being a minority doesn't make you a good person or even an activist. Being morally superior (or let's just say, committed to an ethical way of life) is a wholly separate process that requires clarifying one's values, developing some kind of discipline or commitment to a certain way of treating oneself and other people, and the courage to oppose cruelty, greed, and inequity. Being different, and even being persecuted, is not the same thing as being a better person than anybody else.

Transmen have the same potential to be radical feminists as any dyke. They have the same opportunity to work for a more just society. And they don't necessarily have the protective blanket of heterosexual privilege or male privilege to keep them warm while they are out in the cold, cold world of trying to bring about radical social change. People who claim this have no inside knowledge about how the lives of transpeople really work.

First of all, many of us never fully transition, and couldn't even if we wanted to. There are abundant numbers of transgendered people who do not identify as male or female. Some of these folks call themselves genderqueer; others employ different terms like androgyne, psychic hermaphrodite, ungendered, gender resister, two-spirited, etc. Many of us who do identify as men or women, and would like to live full-time in those genders, can't. The fact that we have gone through the wrong sort of puberty has given us bodies that can't be altered enough by medical technology to pass. Or the socialization we had in the wrong gender has given us habits, mannerisms, ways of speaking or moving, that set off cisgendered people. Even if an MTF (male-to-female or transwoman) or FTM takes hormones, gets surgery, and legally changes her or his current identity, a paper trail leads back to the past. If you try to go stealth (start a new life in which you hide or deny your transsexual experience), you are vulnerable to being blackmailed or outed. We never know, if we make a friend or take a lover, whether we are letting somebody get too close and trusting the wrong person. Does that sound like any kind of “privilege” to you?

Being out of the closet gives you peace of mind when it comes to being manipulated by a guilty secret, but cisgendered people just love to remind you that they would have known you were trans even if you kept your mouth shut. I don't know why this is so important to y'all. God forbid a tranny get an hour or two to think about something else, like doing the dishes or reading the newspaper. An exlover of mine who worked as a bartender at a popular club for bears bitterly called this his “daily reminder.” It may be that trans liberation is motivated by much the same thing that led to the Stonewall Riots—the simple desire to be left the fuck alone.

If I sound a bit raw, it's because I am. I find this whole topic unbearably painful. I came out as a lesbian at age seventeen. By then, I had pushed my little boy so far down that I had almost forgotten the childhood arguments and ridicule that took place every time I told adults that I was not a little girl. Feminism, I thought, would cure me. I believed I only felt that way because a sexist society had taught me to hate being a woman. If I became a very strong and liberated woman, one who could do anything that men took for granted, and in fact beat men at their own game, I wouldn't want to be a man any more. This repression was certainly aided by the fact that when I looked at the way most men lived, I was repulsed. Until I encountered the men's leather community, I never saw men who might be role models or idols for me.

So how am I, and how are you, to understand the three decades that I spent loving dykes, living in the lesbian community, and writing about the world from a queer woman's point of view? I know that for many people, the political stances that I took were radical only as long as they were taken by a woman. It's commonly believed that there's nothing radical about a man defending pornography, for example. I'm sure Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, John Rechy, John Preston, Edmund White, Alan Dershowitz, and a bunch of ACLU attorneys would agree. Anti-porn feminists are rejoicing that my gender transition invalidates the critique of their movement that I pioneered—even if no cisgendered man would take part in that debate using the language and concepts that I used. Anti-S/M feminists have frequently said that my defense of this sexuality just proves that it's male violence—male violence that polluted the lesbian community at my instigation, as a sort of double agent of the patriarchy. This sets aside hundreds of thousands of women-born-women who make up the modern lesbian leather community. Thank goodness, whether you like what I've done with my life or not, you can still benefit from the work of authors like Carol Queen, Tristan Taormino, and their compatriots. The explosion of well-written, sexually explicit fiction that followed the Feminist Sex Wars is still taking place, and everybody with an open mind and some open pages is better off for it.

I knew that this would happen when I decided to transition. It made the whole process many times harder than it would otherwise have been. I felt as if I were pouring gasoline on a lifetime of work and lighting it on fire. But after spending decades urging others to come out about their sexuality, to be honest about their desires, and to bring their fantasies into reality, how could I live a lie myself, just to preserve that legacy? It was a double-bind that continues to torture me. I wish I could say that I never have second thoughts, but of course I do. Any major life change requires you to pick something you'll gain—and give up other things. I have grieved the loss of my dyke identity more bitterly than any of my readers or friends.

All I can tell you is that I never intended to deceive anybody. I had no hidden agenda around seducing lesbians to accept sexual values that were secretly contaminated with maleness. I think the political debates I've entered and won stand on their own merits, regardless of the gender of the speaker. At every phase of my life, I've been as honest as I could about who I was, what motivated me, and what I intended or wanted for the important people in my life.

But feminism is no cure for transsexuality. In my late forties, I realized that I just couldn't do it any more. Thanks to the gender-fuck ethos of BDSM, I had kept a portion of my maleness alive in sexual role-playing, but I was tired of being male only in the bedroom. I wanted an identity that was a better fit. And the conviction of my childhood about who I was kept haunting me. If anything, it got stronger, the older I became. The thought that I might die without ever knowing what it was like to live as a man broke my heart. For a long time, the limitations of medical technology held me back. I didn't want to be a man with a body that was partly female. I loved women's bodies, and I didn't want to live in one any more. But I realized that if I was a woman, the fact that I couldn't have a penis wouldn't matter that much to me. It only mattered because my psyche was imprinted with the expectation that I have a male body.

Coming out as gay in 1971 was a lot like coming out as trans in the twenty-first century. Being gay then was seen as a shameful mental illness and a loathsome sin. It was disgusting and ridiculous. People both hated you and laughed at you. It took a major effort of self-transformation for gay men and lesbians to see themselves as a politically oppressed minority that deserved better treatment. Gay pride was a long time coming, and we fought hard for every inch of self-esteem we won. I had no idea why I was gay. I was frightened to be gay. But the thought of being straight made me feel nauseous. I don't know that I had a choice about becoming radicalized. It felt like basic self-defense at the time.

Coming out as gay is no longer such a universal walk through fire. It's still very difficult, but we have made a lot of progress. More and more young people have families who support them and are able to join gay/straight alliances in their schools. They take it for granted that their futures can only look brighter. I hope that's true, but if it is, it will only be through continued vigilance and action. We can't trust the benevolence of the majority or some natural, progressive trend in history to take care of us. Neither of these things exists. I just wish that gay men and lesbians would be more willing to admit that they are now in a privileged position, relative to the trans community, and stop trampling on our heads. Do you really want to be on the same side of this issue as the Republican Party?

So. Even if you buy what I have to say about the politics of this whole mess, do you want to take a chance on a book that may or may not accurately represent lesbian experience? First you probably ought to know that not all of the stories in this book are about woman-to-woman S/M. (And not all of my readers are dykes. Thank you for your letters, email, and easy care instructions.) There's only one way to find out—that's the same way that you had to find out what it would feel like to squeeze your hand between your thighs, or apply a dab of that lubricant, or switch on the vibrator. The same way you had to find out if spanking could really feel good or if being tied up was too scary to enjoy. You have to actually try it.

Not every erotic experiment ends well. Crisco, for example, was a bad idea. Sheets that still smell like fried chicken. Yeast infections. Holes in gloves and condoms. Yuck. But I think most of us suffer from a
lack
of opportunity rather than too many temptations. Even the tricks who shouldn't have spent the entire night in your bed or the dildo that broke were worthwhile attempts to have more fun, be daring, and enjoy your far-from-infinite span of days on this amazing planet. You can't make an omelet without going down a few dead end streets. So you learn, perhaps, to stay home while you are ovulating and never go cruising in the Castro again.

Are you more afraid that you won't have any fun—or that you'll be thrilled to pieces? Which is it? Be bold. Put yourself in my proverbial hands. I promise I won't drop you. I've been a top for nearly three decades, and I still know my way around a bent psyche and a wet pussy. There's no threat to your real life. It's all just fiction, fantasy, flat black ink on a white page. But it could lead to touching— touching yourself, asking someone else to touch you, reaching for someone else's skin and heart and mind. Whether you are a lesbian transgressing enough to listen to a transman with an extensive dyke history, or a gay man enjoying the guilty pleasure of lesbian lustmaking, or a straight person who doesn't know which end is up, there's something here for you.

And if it is a good time—if you, perhaps, might be a Macho Slut yourself—you might even find yourself begging for more. Don't worry. There is more. There's always more.

Introduction

W
ENDY
C
HAPKIS

Picking up
Macho Sluts
again has been a little frightening; maybe because I'm still suffering from a bit of post-traumatic stress disorder after the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s in which Patrick Califia's work figured so prominently. The last time I had the honor of introducing Califia was almost twenty years ago before a talk s/he gave in California; the next day, I found graffiti scrawled on the bathroom wall of my favorite café that read “Wendy Chapkis promotes violence against women.”

But my anxiety isn't entirely about ghosts from the past. It would be daunting in any situation to be asked to write something about Patrick Califia's work. Califia is one of the most important writers on sexual politics of my generation. Over the past thirty years, I have read and re-read his essays, taught a number of them in college seminars, and referenced them in my own writing. Califia has had a profound effect on my identity, too, on what it means to me to be queer and on how I think of myself as a woman (even as he transitioned out of that shared identity). Califia is also an iconic top who knows exactly how to take down those foolish enough to talk back.

But there was an even more basic challenge for me in writing this essay. Despite my constant engagement with his nonfiction work, when I dug out my old copy of
Macho Sluts
, I was surprised to realize that I hadn't picked it up in years. As I began re-reading it, I remembered why: Califia's fiction makes me uncomfortable. It took a couple of stories for me to remember that the discomfort is intentional. In a 1979 essay, “The Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality,” Califia wrote: “If someone wants to know about my sexuality, she can deal with me on my own terms. I don't particularly care to make it easy. S/M is scary. That's at least half its significance … S/M is a deliberate, premeditated, erotic blasphemy. It is a form of sexual extremism and sexual dissent.”
¹
In the 1980s, when I first read that essay and was introduced to lesbian S/M, Califia's provocation was nothing less than electrifying. Like many feminists and queer nationals of the time, I was unwilling to see women's liberation and gay liberation reduced to a polite equal rights campaign—especially if equality was modeled on the lives of those who were straight, male, or conventionally gendered.

Feminism and queer politics were compelling to me precisely because they were dangerous, or at least could be. In my twenties and early thirties, I read Califia in order to be confronted as well as aroused, and never came away disappointed. Even—or perhaps especially—at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and while deeply engaged in struggles against sexual violence in women's lives, I knew it wasn't simply sex but, in the words of the ACT UP slogan, silence that equaled death. As fellow porn writer and essayist Carol Queen observed,
Macho Sluts
“blew a hole in the dam of female erotic silence.”
²