The Dog Collar Murders (4 page)

“I think it
is
important what messages women take in,” Mona argued. “And I see the reduction of the complexity of looking to the causal anti-porn theory that ‘porn leads to violence and so it equals violence against women’ as simplistic and ultimately harmful.”

Mona stopped and looked at the clock, “We’ve run over, I’m sorry.”

But someone had one more question: “So would you advocate censorship of any material?”

“Censorship of the kind Dworkin and MacKinnon advocate arbitrarily divides imagery into ‘bad’ and ‘not so bad’ material. Their call for censorship doesn’t deal with important questions of how imagery is produced and for what reason. It doesn’t come close to analyzing how the female body is used in this culture. All they’re saying is that certain kinds of portrayals of sex and violence shouldn’t be allowed.”

I left the room enlightened, but still somewhat disturbed. Why did everybody have to talk about rape all the time?

It was lunch time and I went looking for Hadley. Outside one of the rooms in the corridor there was a knot of women, half in, half out of the door, and the noise of raised voices inside. I stopped to ask what was going on.

“It’s Miko’s workshop,” someone said. “It started out with Miko talking about the historical repression of sexuality and the danger of the puritanical wing of the feminist movement trying to stop women from exploring what their sexuality really was. Then she showed two short videos—the first one something from your typical peepshow, with two lesbians making love sort of as a preliminary to the man coming in and giving them what they really wanted. Then Miko showed one of her own videos, which was a lot of revolting-looking close-ups of women’s genitals and their hairy legs. And she asked what the difference was.

“Some women shouted that there was no difference, that both were products of the pornographic imagination, which essentially objectifies women and separates their sexuality from their personalities. And other women thought there was a difference—that Miko was showing women the way they really were and not all prettied up for the camera. They thought that Miko’s video would actually turn off most male viewers. It turned off a lot of women anyway.”

“Is that what they’re still arguing about?” I asked.

“No, it’s taken a new turn. It started when Miko was talking about being an
erotic dissident
and this contingent of women took over and said Miko wasn’t really, that she still was representing established notions of sex, that it was just the same old vanilla sex as always. That they were the real sexual outlaws, because they were pushing the boundaries back.”

“They’re the S/Mers,” someone else said. “One of them’s even wearing a dog collar with a leash attached.”

“This I have to see,” I said, and squeezed into the room.

Nicky Kay, the woman I’d seen at the Espressomat the other day, was standing up in front of the roomful of women and talking. I hardly recognized her. Gone were the Oxford shirt, jeans and glasses. She was wearing a silky sort of see-through dress with black lacey underwear and a garter belt holding up sheer black stockings. Her eyes were heavily made-up and she had a hectic flush to her cheeks, and around her neck was a dog collar, black leather studded with silver spikes, the leash dangling over one shoulder. Next to her stood Oak, in black leather pants and a leather vest with no shirt underneath, wearing heavy black boots. On her wrists were wide leather bracelets with studs.

“Most of you know nothing about S/M and yet you condemn it,” Nicky was saying. “What is it you’re so afraid of? The lesbians here talk about being a minority sexual community and yet they refuse to allow us to have a forum to speak. Christians Against Pornography is invited to speak on a panel—not even about sexuality, but about pornography—but we’re not invited. Why are we so threatening? I’ll bet most of you haven’t even thought about it. You take your cues from the rest of society, which is repressive and puritanical. You take your cues from the wave of the feminist movement that says sex is something that men do to us, that women don’t like. Even the lesbians here are ashamed of female desire—or their lack of it. A lot of lesbians became lesbians for political reasons, not because of being attracted to women. It’s that wing of the feminist movement that doesn’t want us to speak our desires, that wants to silence us!”

“S/M isn’t about sexuality, that’s why!” someone shouted back at Nicky. “It’s about degradation and patriarchal power and woman-hating!”

I saw Hadley over in a corner of the room and tried to move in her direction.

“S/M is about power, that’s true, but it’s about the flow of power. Power in heterosexual relations is frozen and static, with one side always dominant and one side always submissive. S/M is about movement and the exchange of energy.”

Oak took up her line smoothly. “Unlike in the so-called real world, nothing in S/M is ever done without the consent of both people. That makes things a lot clearer and cleaner. There’s a lot less of the emotional bullshit and power games between S/M dykes than between vanilla dykes.”

“Sex between most lesbians isn’t mutual,” affirmed Nicky. “It’s just a trade-off, first me, then you. But in S/M the possibility exists of opening all the way up, breaking limits you thought you had, satisfying yourself and your partner with incredible erotic intensity.”

In spite of myself I was listening hard. That part sounded great. But…

“Why don’t you talk about the pain and humiliation, Nicky?” A woman said. “About women with scars from razor blades all over their breasts, about women who’ve had internal hemorrhaging from being fist-fucked. About women who have to eat shit and drink urine. Don’t just talk about power and trust; talk about broken arms and whip marks and burns from hot wax.”

“S/M is about safety,” Nicky said, two hot stains of red in her cheeks. “And you ought to know—you did it for years!”

Shock and scandal. The speaker was a well-known lesbian therapist.

I was still trying to get to Hadley. Over in the corner of the room I could see her familiar silver-blond head and straight nose.

“That’s why I know about S/M from the inside,” said the therapist bravely. “I know what a lie it is, and how it perpetuates the idea that degradation is acceptable and even good. Some women who’ve been sexually abused get into it as a way of trying to work through old feelings and to conquer them. I know, I was one. But it doesn’t work, it’s never going to work.”

The room was buzzing. It was strange that Miko seemed to have retreated and was letting Nicky just take over like this. Maybe she was filming it from somewhere.

“Oh Christ, let’s not be so melodramatic and hypocritical,” said Nicky. “I bet three-quarters of you in this room have had rape fantasies, or fantasies of being tied up or forcing someone against her will. Let’s be honest for once, okay, and not put it all on us. We’re simply the most outspoken, but I bet most of you here have turned yourself on to some kind of S/M fantasies at one time or another.”

Did she want a show of hands? She wasn’t going to get it in this charged atmosphere. Instead, people seemed to be giving credence to Nicky’s charge of hypocrisy and to be avoiding each other’s eyes and trying to sneak out the door.

I moved to the back of the room through the gaps, and finally got close to where Hadley was. And Miko. Now it was obvious why Miko hadn’t been participating in the discussion. She was whispering in Hadley’s ear, and her hand was on Hadley’s thigh.

W
ELL, MAYBE NOT ACTUALLY
her
thigh.
In fact, afterwards I realized Miko was only tapping Hadley’s leg slightly above the kneecap in order to make a point. But at the time—and in that sexually-charged atmosphere—I found any contact at all between them extremely upsetting, and I bolted from the room without listening to the end of the discussion. Something I also realized in retrospect was that, if I’d stayed, I might have made some connections I couldn’t make until much later.

I decided to skip lunch, but as I was wandering forlornly around the campus I ran into Elizabeth Ketteridge, who offered me some trail mix. There was something unusual about her I thought; then I abruptly noticed she was pregnant. The weight had settled low on her, so that, with her smallish head and big eyes, she looked a little like a Russian doll.

“Isn’t this an amazing conference, Pam?” she said as I took another handful of nuts and raisins. “I’m so glad it’s happening. I think it’s a real boost for the movement to have Loie Marsh here talking. After you’ve been in the movement so long you tend to get a little jaded.” She paused a moment and added, “Not at
individuals
’ stories, of course, but at the frequency and predictability of violence as a whole.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure that’s true.” I didn’t have to ask, what movement? Elizabeth belonged to a small but determined core of women in Seattle who had started the rape crisis center and who had managed to stick with it year after year.

“Is this your first?” I changed the subject.

“Oh no, my third,” she said. “And my lover’s been pregnant twice too. This will be our fifth.”

“That’s a lot of kids,” I said weakly.

“We both come from big families—we love them.” She smiled and patted my arm. “Good to see you, Pam,” she said, and moved off.

I didn’t understand it, this maternal urge. I was having trouble just being an aunt.

In the afternoon I decided to go to Loie Marsh’s second workshop to see what all the fuss was about. Over the years I’d heard so many things—that she was charismatic, fanatic, misunderstood, paranoid, brilliant and obsessive. One thing she wasn’t though, and that was boring.

The classroom was full, though not as full as Miko’s had been. Maybe thirty women. Unlike some of the workshop leaders, who’d carefully arranged the chairs in a circle and taken their places among us, Loie left the chairs dutifully facing the blackboard and stood up in front of us like the commander of an insurgent army.

She managed to do it partly because she was a big woman, the kind whose ancestors had probably plowed the land in Norway and in North Dakota when they immigrated. Her shoulders were broad underneath the bright blue tunic she wore; her hands capacious. I noticed again that strangely bare, convex face, and the way not a strand of her short, curly blond hair touched her cheeks or forehead. Her eyes were a little small, but they missed nothing as we filed into the room, singly and in groups. She was setting the tone already; she was the teacher, we the schoolgirls.

“Some of you,” she began, when we were all assembled and were quiet, “may have gone, before lunch, to the workshop on lesbian pornography. Did anyone here go?”

Some women looked down at their feet. A couple of women raised their hands. Others stared at them.

“That workshop,” said Loie, “and the discussion I’ve heard that came after it, is a perfect example of what I’m here to talk about today. The history of the anti-porn movement and the rise of the pro-dominance and submission element which threatens the very existence of feminism.”

When Loie first began to speak, I was skeptical. People had said she was rhetorical. She was very rhetorical. Her speech patterns were those of a seasoned orator. Her words thundered, they whispered. She repeated herself; she arranged ideas in triads or in groups of triads, so they formed a rhythmic chant; she started out loud and then sank almost to silence; she started out soft and built to crescendos. She asked questions, she supplied answers.

What did she say? Afterwards I hardly remembered. All I know is at the time I was terribly moved by her sincerity, her dignity, her absolute compassion for any women who’d ever been used, abused or hurt by pornography. I was fully convinced that there was a conspiracy of sex-crazed lesbian deviants determined to endanger the serious efforts that women like Loie had spent years making on the behalf of women who had been victimized. Why did this conspiracy exist? So that these deviants could satisfy their male-identified lust. And further, because they thought that freedom meant having the same opportunity to objectify and degrade women, just as men had done for all recorded time.

At the very end there was a brief question and answer period. Most women wanted to know what they could do against the creeping threat of sexual liberalism in their community, but one woman timidly spoke up about something that obviously disturbed her deeply.

“Ummm. The thing is,” she said. “I mean, the sexual liberals, they ah, well… What I’m wondering is, if you have fantasies… I mean, if you can’t
help
having fantasies sometimes… I mean, what do you do with them?”

Loie gave her a piercing, yet kindly look. “I used to have fantasies,” she said. “I regularly had fantasies of being raped, degraded and humiliated. That didn’t mean I
wanted
any of those things to happen—in fact, when I
was
humiliated and degraded in real life, I
hated
it, and fought against it. What those fantasies meant, was that I had
internalized
male hatred. And once I realized that and didn’t think those fantasies had anything to do with
me
, but with what Sheila Jeffreys has called the ‘erotization of subordination’ that is almost impossible to avoid in this country, if you’re a woman, then those fantasies left me.
I stopped having fantasies.
I stopped having fantasies.”

“Oh,” said the woman. “Oh.”

There was a fifteen-minute break between Loie’s workshop and the next one I was planning to attend. I walked down the corridor and into the bathroom. I looked at myself rather grimly in the mirror. “It’s good for you to be here,” I said aloud. “Who cares about Miko anyway?”

When I came out of the bathroom I heard raised voices down the corridor, apparently coming from the room I’d just left. I tiptoed towards them. One of the voices was clearly Loie’s: “I have a right to speak, nobody is going to stop me. I’ll put it in my book, I’ll tell whoever I want to. Don’t you see, it will
help
the movement.”

The other woman’s voice was lower, almost threatening, and I strained to hear. Was it familiar? “Well, if you do, you’d better be prepared for…” She broke off. Had she heard my footsteps? The door to the room closed quietly.