1. If you have cuts or abrasions on your hands, use a rubber or latex glove to keep your partner's blood and vaginal fluids out of your bloodstream. Be aware that the kind of manicure that you should give yourself before fisting or heavy fucking will inevitably create breaks in the skin around your fingernails and cuticles. If you are in doubt, use the gloves. Use only water-based lubricants (like KY Jelly) with them, since oil-based lubricants like Crisco or Vaseline may weaken rubber or latex. When you buy a lubricant, read the label. If it says it is “water-soluble,” but the ingredients include petroleum, shortening, vegetable oil, or any kind of grease, this is not a water-based lubricant, and it is not safe to use with latex barriers. Some lubricants (like Foreplay) contain nonoxynol-9, a spermicide that kills HIV. Generally, this is a plus; however, some women have an allergic reaction to this chemical. When you are done having sex, take off the gloves by turning them inside out, and throw them away. Then go wash your hands. From the time that you touch your partner until after washing your hands, keep your fingers out of your mouth.
2. During oral sex (especially during the woman's period) or rimming (putting your mouth on her asshole), use latex dental dams. They can be ordered (whether you are a doctor or not) from dental surgical supply houses. You can increase the sensation by putting a dab of lubricant on the side of the dam that touches your partner's body. If you take a break, throw the dam away. Do not reuse it, since there is a chance that you will lick the wrong side.
3. Sex toys that have been in somebody's ass should not go into the vagina without first being thoroughly cleaned. Ideally, sex toys should not be shared by two or more people. If this is not possible, de-germ them before you play. You can keep your dildoes and assplugs cleaner if you put a condom on them, then remove it and clean the toy after use. Leather dildoes cannot be cleaned; they should always be used with a condom, and never shared. HIV can be killed by several sterilizing solutions. Your options include rubbing alcohol in seventy percent solution, hydrogen peroxide, Betadine, a solution of one part household bleach in ten parts of water, or boiling water. Bedding and trick towels can be laundered in hot water with Hexol, a detergent that kills hepatitis and other viruses, and probably kills HIV as well.
4. Needles that are used for tattooing, piercing, or acupuncture can spread disease as easily as needles used for doing recreational drugs, and should not be shared. If you want to keep a set of works exclusively for your own use, you'd better conceal them to prevent anyone from borrowing them. Always clean your rig with boiling water or a solution of one part household bleach in ten parts water before you use it. Draw the solution into the syringe several times. Take it apart and let it soak for fifteen minutes. If you've used bleach, when you put it back together, rinse it with water you've boiled and allowed to cool. Draw the water into the syringe and squirt it out several times. You don't want to inject bleach!
5. Women who have a high risk of having been exposed to HIV should consider taking a test for the antibody to the virus before becoming pregnant, since AIDS can be passed on to the fetus. Be sure to get the test at a place where you do not have to give your name. A positive test result that is not kept anonymous could cause you to lose health insurance, make it difficult for you to travel abroad, or suffer other kinds of discrimination. Other women should probably not take the test. It was invented to screen donated blood to make sure it is safe to use for transfusions. A positive test does not mean anything other than the fact that you have been exposed to HIV, and your body is making antibodies to it. There is no way to tell if you will eventually develop AIDS or an AIDS-related condition (ARC). However, most people with a positive test have a very hard time dealing with it, and need some counseling to cope. Some people have committed suicide after getting a positive test. Remember that a negative test result could be wrong, or you might have been tested too soon after being exposed to HIV for your immune system to have started making antibodies that the test can detect. You can still be exposed to the virus any time you have unsafe sex or share needles.
6. Women who work in the sex industry or who have male partners for other reasons should always use condoms and either spermicide that is at least ten percent nonoxynol-9, a contraceptive sponge, or a lubricant containing this chemical. If a man cannot see what you are doing with his cock, he often will not be able to tell if a rubber is being used, especially if you put a dab of water-based lubricant in the tip of the condom before rolling it on. Remember to leave room in the condom for ejaculation by pinching the air out of the tip when you put it on. This leaves an empty flap of rubber. Condoms can be applied with your mouth. If you work with a group of other women, and everyone agrees to make their clients use condoms, you can develop a clientele that will not hassle you about them. A friend of mine who is a sex worker told me that her business dropped off because of fear of AIDS, but many of her clients returned when she publicized the fact that she would only do safer sex.
If you are in a situation (for example, rape) where you cannot make a man use a condom, you should know that Betadine kills HIV, and douching with a Betadine-and-water solution may prevent infection. However, douching will also remove evidence that the police will need to prosecute a rape.
AIDS is a new disease. There is a lot that we don't know about it. It's likely that portions of this brief summary will be rendered inaccurate by further developments. So make sure you supplement this information by keeping up with new medical research and safer sex recommendations.
This book isn't a sex manual. It can't be used as a guideline for how to have safer sex. It can't be used as a manual for how to do safe S/M either. Some of the things that go on in these stories are in fact risky to do. Unfortunately, there isn't much “how-to” information about S/M in print. There are articles about lesbian S/M in my book
Sapphistry
(Naiad Press, revised edition, 1983) and Samois'
Coming to
Power
(Alyson Publications, third edition, 1987). And there is a lesbian S/M magazine,
Outrageous Women
, Box 23, Somerville, MA 02143 ($13 for 4 issues). You can also glean a lot of useful information from
DungeonMaster,
a gay men's S/M newsletter put out by Desmodus Publications, Box 11314, San Francisco, CA 94101-1314 ($15 for 4 issues, sample $4).
Review of
Macho Sluts
from
On Our Backs
, Fall 1988 issue
Maryhope Tobin and Sue O'Sullivan
Power is the main ingredient of
Macho Sluts
, the new collection of stories Pat Califia's fans have been eagerly awaiting. As a founding member of Samois, the first lesbian s/m support group, a columnist for the
Advocate
, and probably the best known sado-masochist in the world, Califia is known for being on the leading edge of lesbian erotica, and this book lives up to her reputation as a sex pioneer.
Macho Sluts
will undoubtably shock some and mesmerize others. As Califia says in her introduction, “When you are dealing with an area as permeated with ignorance and superstition as sexuality, it is more important to be honest than it is to be correct.”
The eight stories in the book date from “Jessie,” 1977, to the newest, “The Spoiler,” from 1985. The latter is one of two stories which introduce male sexual actors. Califia argues well that lesbians should be able to write about and use men, gay or straight, in their erotic writing.
“Jessie,” the notorious first chapter, has been a dyke j/o favorite since it first appeared in
Coming to Power
. The story is as hot as ever, and only adds to the unpredictability of the book as a whole.
Aficionados of classic, old-fashioned B&D will swoon over “Finishing School,” an elegant tale of training, torture, and reward. The ending is a shocker: the first, but not the last, point in
Macho Sluts
where the reader gasps, “Oh my god, I can't get turned on by this!”
“The Calyx of Isis,” the book's only major disappointment, is a dense story of tag-team s/m set in a mythical San Francisco women's bathhouse. The story trots the reader through a varied s/m repertoire which leaves one exhausted rather than aroused by the end. Perhaps in smaller doses, divided into chapters, one for each set of the story's dominatrices, “Calyx” would be a little easier to swallow. However, there is something for just about everyone: whipping, fisting, (genital and anal), piercing, heavy bondage, dyke cocksucking, and lots of sensimilla, sushi, and sake.
Throughout
Macho Sluts
, Califia challenges dykes who write pornography, dykes who hate pornography, and everyone in between. “The Hustler” is a profoundly cynical but funny tale of a woman-dominated future in which expressions of sex are piously regulated. The outlawed individual (the Hustler) is oppressed by the “cud-chewing” (boring) majority. This is Califia's revenge on the Dworkinite forces in the women's movement. “The Hustler” will definitely piss off a lot of radical feminists, but then, they probably wouldn't have gotten this far in the book anyhow.
If any radical feminist were to read this far, she'd run screaming for the nearest copy of
Gyn/Ecology
by the time she got two pages into “The Surprise Party.” Califia lets fly with a right-on-target challenge to the idea that lesbian sexual fantasies should only have women characters. This story is not easy to read, and whatever a reader feels at the end, she will not be bored. Disgusted, maybe, turned-on, maybeâor fascinated, horrified, angry, or amused. Read this story. Push yourself. Read all the way to the end and before your mind tells you how you should feel, slip a finger between your labia and let your cunt tell you how you
do
feel.
Finally, “A Dash of Vanilla” underscores Califia's introductory remarks that power is not exclusive to s/m. The story is vanilla, but Califia makes obvious something we've all experienced at some point in our sexual lives. Where there is an orgasm, or the promise of one, or the lack of one, there is power, and it comes from all sides, whether top or bottom or right or left. This story didn't so much pass a wet test as made my jaws ache, but that's just as much a part of lesbian sex as getting off.
“Macho Sluts and Little Sister's: The Court Case”
Joseph Arvay
The case of
Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium v. Canada Customs
â otherwise billed as Little Sister's v. Big Brotherâmight never have come about but for
Macho Sluts
by Pat (now Patrick) Califia.
Macho Sluts
had historically been treated as “public enemy number one” by Canada Customs, having been detained at the border and prohibited from entering the country a number of times. It represented a genre of booksâsado-masochistic or S/Mâthat Customs, and for that matter the Courts, had determined was per se obscene and beyond any possibility of having any redeeming value.
That said, it is unlikely that anyone at Customs had ever actually read the book. The evidence in the trial revealed that very few, if any, of the prohibited books had been read cover to cover by Customs officials. The normal practice was simply to scan a few pages, and any sentences that appeared to involve sex with bondage (or other taboos such as “sex with pain” or “sex with degradation”) were sufficient to condemn the entire book. I suspect that, with
Macho Sluts
, it was the title alone that doomed it to the burning bin.
But, of course, for Little Sister's,
Macho Sluts
was an extremely important book and one that had acquired iconic status in the gay and especially the lesbian community. It was also, for Little Sister's, the last straw. According to Jim Deva (one of the store's owners), the book was akin, in terms of its importance to their community, to what the Bible was to the religious community. Canada Customs had simply gone too far, and it was time to fight back.
And fight we did.
We decided early on in our preparation for the trial that we would adopt an approach that was singularly different than the standard civil libertarian take, which would amount to a concession of sorts that the material in question was indeed inferior but, “holding our noses,” we would “defend to the death” the right of the author to produce or publish the work in question. Rather, it was our position that the court should be persuaded that the material that Customs was banning from Canada had real importance and value. In other words, we wanted the Court to conclude that sexual expression and imageryâwe didn't shy away from calling it pornographyâfar from being a base form of expression, was every bit as important as political expression and was therefore entitled to the highest protection in law.
I had decided that one of the best ways to defend
Macho Sluts
was to call its author as a witness to explain to the Court why she had written it. Pat was a wonderful witness. I knew she would be, as I had spent quite a bit of time talking to her before the trial and met her in person for the first time the night before. But I have to admit I was a bit worried about how she would present in court as she did appear as a “macho slut”âbutch hairstyle, many tattoos and piercings, and decked out in leather. When I called her as my “next witness,” I couldn't believe my eyes. She was wearing a dressâa long-sleeved one, so there were no tattoos showingâand she had also taken out her piercings and had a completely different hairstyle. When I asked her about it later, she said she went and got the dress especially for the occasionâit may had been the only one she had ever wornâand that she wanted to look like a librarian, which she did. Some may consider this a bit of a cop-out, but Pat understood the rules of the game. She was appearing in a conservative forum before a very conservative judge; the stakes were high, and she knew that presentation mattered.