I’ve been reading Susie Bright since she published a kinky lesbian porn mag, back in the pre-internet era when “computer porn” meant dialing up to a BBS and watching a dirty picture appear on your screen line by weary line at (if you were rich and lucky) 14400 baud.

When I first encountered her On Our Backs magazine, I was newly arrived in San Francisco and I was just looking for porn. San Francisco: “Porn, we haz it.” But why was I reading Susie Bright’s lesbian porn mag?

Because then, as now, she was a voice for sexual freedom. It didn’t matter if her subject matter (lesbian stuff) didn’t have much (any) intersection with my life. And that “not mattering” is one of those things that never change. Here’s Susie, writing about a new movie I hadn’t heard about, about a band I never heard of, and a cultural scene I never knew existed, but making the whole thing worthwhile anyway because she’s (still) really writing about sexual freedom:

Let me make something clear that the movie only hints at: The Runaways band would not have happened, could not have been conceived, without the Underground Dyke Punk Groupie Slut culture that stretched from the San Fernando Valley to the bowels of Orange County.

What is wrong with saying that? Do dykes never get to claim anything? Is the historical lens going to stay coated with Vaseline and excuses FOREVER?

I’ll tell you why dyke rock’n’roll legacy is important. Because in order to stand up to the shitheads who tried to keep young women out of EVERYTHING, you had to NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THEIR SEXUAL APPROVAL.

You had to NOT want to get married and have babies with a nice boy. You had to be FINISHED with “virtue.”

We did not care if the guys called us “sluts” and accused us of “wishing you had a dick.” We were beyond wishing; we did whatever we wanted.

A lesbian in the ’70s was thought of as someone involved in mainstream feminist politics or the folky Back-to-the-Land milieu. Most girls I knew in the punk scene couldn’t relate to that, or thought of it as their mother’s trip. We were urban, we were not into politics as usual. Everyone called themselves “bi,” although that was really code for: don’t tell me what to do.

My favorite lines in the piece, though, are these:

The Democratic Party lesbians took one look at my lipstick and leather and flipped out. “You are a slut! You are an operative of pimps and pornographers! The S/M white slavers are controlling you!”

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This is fun: Susie Bright interviews Chelsea Girl and publishes part of the transcript on 10 Zen Monkeys. (Alas, the complete interview has apparently not been transcribed, and is available only in that brutally slow and notoriously linear 20th century format, audio.)

SB: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to talk about your oral sex discussion.

CG: The “deep throat” post.

SB: I learned so much from that. There are all these people writing “deep throat this” and “deep throat that.” And there’s even porn how-to films. But it never gets beyond the sort of Linda Lovelace fanfare of deep throat. Until you, no one talked about how you really get things…

CG: Down.

SB: How the nature of your saliva changes once you get in the right… You call it the viscous stuff.

CG: Yeah, the viscous, porn star-y spit.

SB: How did you learn how to give spectacular deep throat sex? Who taught you?

CG: My pediatrician.

SB: Oh, come on! No, stop!

CG: I had strep throat a lot as a kid. And I hated tongue depressors. And every winter I would have my throat swabbed over and over again. And so I learned how to control my gag reflex so that I didn’t have to have a tongue depressor in my mouth when they swabbed my throat. That’s essentially the same technique I use when I deep throat. I had no idea it would come in handy. But seriously, the first time I gave head, it just went down.

SB: Well, did you realize that the nature of one’s saliva and mucus would change and that you’d get more lubrication?

CG: Oh, that came from Jenna Jameson – I was reading Jenna Jameson’s book, which was ghostwritten by Neil Strauss, of course. Anyway, Jenna sort of articulated how, once you start, your gag reflex is your friend. And once you start to have the gagging happen, that’s when you get that nice thick viscous spit.

I know I’ve been quoting Susie Bright a lot recently, but then, Susie always has been a woman with a lot to say. Her latest big essay grabs firmly ahold of the seeming paradox of women and their rape fantasies:

I didn’t acknowledge having perilous fantasies until I was in my twenties. In a women’s studies college course, our teacher asked us if we had experienced arousing “rape fantasies”?

One girl tearfully raised her hand and said this was true for her. My heart beat so fast it was all I could do to stay put. I was just as ashamed as she of these fantasies, but I would never have admitted them. Our professor was quite kind to her, if misinformed.

Our professor comforted the girl by saying that, as women, we had been brainwashed by the patriarchy to eroticize our subordination to men. She said these fantasies were very common, which is true, and that we could “overcome” them by exposing our fantasies to feminist analysis and by our increasing self-esteem.

She was wrong on that count. In fact, I knew she was wrong later that same night. Despite my assertive self-confidence, rock-hard feminist analysis, and weekly shift at the rape crisis hotline, I could still crawl into bed and successfully masturbate to the same disturbing fantasies that had aroused me since I was a child.

Feminism and self-esteem had no more effect on my erotic hot spots than the communion wafers I used to take every Sunday, hoping they would wash away the devil’s seed inside of me. Clearly, religion and linear politics were useless in explaining the unconscious and subversive quality of eroticism.

…

It’s normal, it’s common, to fantasize about the bizarre– the things that in real-life circumstances would trouble us, frighten us, or maybe just make us laugh. Erotic fantasies take the unbearable issues in life and turn them into orgasmic gunpowder.

…

In our fantasies, no matter how much we struggle to deny it, we control every frame. Whether we stand tall in thigh-high boots or kneel breathless on the ground, it’s a matter of our well-lubricated chosen position. We run the fuck in our minds, the exact amount of ambivalence, the perfect timing of climax. When did that ever happen in a real sexual assault?

These are just the tiniest of highlights; there’s much much more. Complete with bonus analysis of Nancy Friday’s “My Secret Garden”!

Hey, folks, if you like to read Susie Bright’s blog (and why wouldn’t you?) you’ll know she publishes interviews with various people (mostly writers) from time to time. I’m proud to say (since I’ve been a big fan of Susie’s for a long time) that she recently interviewed me, and put the interview up today:

The Buccaneer of Bacchanalia

Highlights include how I choose which dirty pictures to publish, a bit of the politics I don’t usually mention here, my youthful sexual influences, and why porn sites on the internet are better than they used to be.

The last time the subject of female ejaculation came up on this blog, I had to take firm measures with the delete button to prevent the comments from deteriorating into what I called “sexual ignorance and doubt”. So I’m delighted to present Susie Bright’s findings, from when she was asked by AVN to provide her expert opinion:

Holy Hellcat! Yes, this is real. It is also extraordinary. These women are on a mission, and they keep themselves pumped up, pulsating their clits and masturbating with “no fake about it” intensity, coming again and again and again and again. And again.

…

Their clits are so engorged that their whole pelvic area swells up with definition. The room is soaked. They roar like lions and shoot like geysers. Camille Paglia with her “arc of transcendence” notion about male pissing contests really needs to see this.

There’s much, much more.

Susie Bright has a wide-ranging essay up about marriage and weddings, straight and gay (yay, California!). Impossible to summarize but worth your time. A couple of random excerpts:

This time, even Arnold Schwarzenegger, our improbable governor, cannot put on the pretense that he gives a shit about the Haters. (This is a guy who gave Oui Magazine an interview in 1977, his weightlifting prime, boasting that American men were too uptight about getting their dicks sucked by other guys; that it’s not such a big deal in Austria… really!)

And:

Weddings make your long-lost friends come out of the woodwork. There are people in my life, miles away, who I miss terribly, and yet the only time they travel to California is when some high school pal is getting married. I could fucking give birth to a chicken and it wouldn’t inspire them to budge an inch. Only weddings get their ass on the tarmac.

I first became aware of the idea of audio porn when Susie Bright released a CD called Cybergasm back in 1993. A follow-up disc got mentioned by my co-blogger Dr. Faustus here on ErosBlog in 2009. But there weren’t many other modern examples. In history, we had a few precedents: old vinyl party albums of dirty jokes and songs, or 45 singles of bawdy songs from the African-American folk or blues traditions. But that was about it. We went a long time after Susie Bright’s pioneering experiments in audio porn without anybody much following them up.

This is a digression, but I do have to admit that during those years we did see the rise of e-books and audio books, in rough but not precise parallel. I am tempted to claim (without sufficient evidence) that the rise of both has been a sharply-gendered experience. Every man I know who admits to reading or listening to a lot of ebooks and/or audiobooks talks about self-help books, popular non-fiction, and “big” commercial fiction titles. Women mostly don’t talk to me about their ebooks or audiobooks at all. But I know a secret most men do not. Women — lots of them — enjoy romance books in all formats, and the word “romance” is code — again, often but by no means always — for smut. Dirty, filthy, raunchy, wonderful, porn. Women have porn on their e-readers and nowadays it’s as often as not being read aloud to them by professional voice actors over their bluetooth headphones while they drive, exercise, and go about their daily business. Far more often, in fact, than most men realize or imagine.

So, yes, in that sense, audio porn has taken over the world. But otherwise, I haven’t seen much porn that’s written and produced to be consumed as an erotic audio experience. And here’s where my blogging friend Girl On The Net comes in. Her audio porn project is Patreon-supported, and she’s been at it for years, with more than 500 audio-adapted sexy blogs from her and a whole team of amazing writers and contributors who work with her, all for your listening pleasure.

Here’s a sample:

A word of caution: GoTN is based in the UK, which requires adult verification before allowing access to pornography to visitors from within the UK. As she explains here, that means UK-based visitors are blocked from hearing her audio porn, although text is fine. You see, her project doesn’t make enough money to pay the costs of age-verifying visitors. But using any VPN will get you around that block. (If you live in one of the US states with age verification laws and are having to age-verify to use PornHub and similar, you can do the same thing for the same reason.)

Image credit: Artwork is by Stuart F Taylor.

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