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What Do Women Want?
We Want To Be Big Slutty Fags, Among Other Things
© 2001 Carol Queen
Some years ago I was invited to make a presentation to a women artists'
conference. On a panel with several other creative women who use sex
centrally in their work, I got to talk about my creative process and
concerns when I write fiction as a woman. Since I've never been a man
(except, perhaps, on paper), these issues did not seem difficult to
pinpoint: As a matter of fact, I think my gender is fundamentally central
in my fiction and erotic memoir, so that teasing out what I would write if
I weren't a woman seems like an impossible exercise. It might be useful,
don't get me wrong -- I just don't think I could do it. Back when "gender studies" just meant "women's studies," not "How many
genders are there?", I experienced my femaleness as self-evident,
immutable, and yet problematic. It wasn't problematic because my sense of
my own gender was in question, but in that women's studies kind of way:
Mars, Venus, 72 cents on the dollar, Take Back the Night, etc. I read
feminist theory, criticized sexist social construction and lionized
androgyny (ironic, though, that so many women's studies types were so
deeply suspicious of true androgyny, especially if it came packaged in a
transsexual person). I read Freud and feminist critiques of Freud, and I
got extremely cranky when he asked the $64,000 question: What Do Women Want?
What the fuck do you mean, Sigmund? Women want equality, you pig! We
want you to stop analyzing our goddamned dreams like a cocaine-snorting
voyeur! That's what we want, you bastard, and we don't fantasize about our
fathers, either, you dirty-minded old fuck. That was my response, and except for those crazy French feminists who were
in the process of rehabilitating Freud by dressing him up in
post-structuralist drag, it seemed like everyone else's response too.
(Anyway, we hadn't quite discovered New French Feminisms. It was still
okay to talk, and write, as though you were trying to communicate with an
ordinary person; that would soon change.) Along with this theoretical immersion in feminism, I immersed myself in
women's sexuality: my own, my lovers' and that of the entire lesbian
community. I shouldn't, perhaps, have to spell out, but I will, that in
those days I actually thought I could know and understand the entire
lesbian community -- even though my experience was severely limited and in
fact I was talking out my ass. But I was hardly alone in this. We wanted so
deeply to create an alternate reality for lesbians that we pretended a
single, comprehensible and comprehensive lesbian community existed. Anyway,
I explored hidden desires and new erotic adventures with my girlfriends,
learned as best I could how to pleasure them, and was very certain my
erotic world differed greatly from that of men. Like almost all of us, I
believed that women's sexuality was know-able, and that we were mostly
alike, except for the obvious differences rooted in our sexual orientation. Parallel to this immersion in womanity, though, I still got turned on to
men; for a decade that part of my sexuality mostly popped wheelies in a
cul-de-sac, all fired up but noplace to go as I lived my life in Lesbian
Nation. As I've written elsewhere ("Beyond the Valley of the Fag Hags," in
PoMoSexuals), the way I accommodated these desires was to direct them
towards gay men. I was a politically correct dyke (more or less) with a
dirty secret: fag fantasies -- but even they were more PC than the other
alternative, my response to which I studiously repressed: bikers who looked
like a cross between Jesus Christ and Satan. (I've always had such a soft
spot for those guys.) This should have shaken my firmly-held notions about female sexuality, but
for a long time I resisted any insight about my own erotic complexity: it
would have been too threatening in 1979 to think that I would never be a
real lesbian (whatever that was). Bisexuality was pretty much off the map.
But my own complexity remained, and not only that, my lovers were complex
too -- differently! I never did figure out how to make one of them come;
of course I never simply asked her what she wanted, how she did it herself,
if she did it herself, what she fantasized about. And that wasn't even
all. Lesbian Nation was "...engaged in a long civil war, testing whether
that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, c[ould] long
endure." Yeah, that's Abraham Lincoln talking, not Gayle Rubin, but the
feminist sex wars pitted sister against sister as surely, and often as
viciously, as the rhetoric of North and South. We screamed at each other
about S/M, porn, sex work, and pretty much everything "male-oriented,"
whatever that was -- for a while I uncritically accepted that appellation,
until I noticed that I actually wanted to do some of those "male" things,
or had been doing them all along. Uh-oh. And it seemed many other women
wanted to do them too, hence the fuss. Sigmund -- I apologize. What the fuck do women want? I think the answer would confound old Siggy at least as much as the
question. Women want to love; explore; seek pleasure; throw off the chains
of gender oppression, and that means the ones on our clits as well as the
ones on our paychecks and psyches; then some of us want to attach real
chains to our clits, for fun. Women want to make love while bungee-jumping,
sneak into a bathhouse and fuck all the men up the butt, recapitulate the
Story of O playing all the roles, masturbate while we shoot up the New
York Stock exchange with a really handsome semiautomatic weapon. Oh, the
list goes on. And some women, it seems, want to spend lots of time
scrutinizing what other people want and then get very, very worked up
condemning it: which is to say that some women are shameless voyeurs and
bluenoses to boot. Roll over, Sigmund: it's way too complicated for a 19th
century guy like you. I can barely keep track, and I'm a trained
professional.
So when I sit down to write, the creative world I access includes not just
my experience and fantasies -- from which I draw very liberally -- but also
the entire social discussion about female sexuality. (I also draw from my
male friends' experience, my experience of them, and much social theory
about male sexuality, especially in the queer world, since I still tend to
like my men queer. I think I draw very believable men, but I do not grapple
with and invest in those characters in the same way I do writing women.)
Since I have felt personally shamed by (lesbian and) feminist ideas about
correct female sexuality, which is the late-20th-century version of
"proper" behavior, I explore an erotic realm in which women mostly do not
have the constraints of correctness and propriety, in which the "you own
your own body" ideal of feminism is a done deal, and women mostly are free
to do things that nice girls don't do. For one thing, this is a crucial
cultural function of erotic literature: it always serves as a kind of
protest literature exploring (and exploding) taboo, gender roles, and
socially-imposed notions of appropriate sexuality. So says the erotologist,
the academic analyst of erotica, in me: but more than that, it is crucial
to me personally as I try to carve a space for myself in the world that
acknowledges the true possibility of an alternative female sexuality which
is exploratory, voracious, curious, pansexual, open to multiple sources of
pleasure. I suppose I could be setting these explorations on another planet, but to
me the erotic stories I write work best as literature when they exist in
and even grapple with existing taboos. That way the tension lives within
the story and I don't have to make my characters get into arguments, commit
adultery and feel guilty about it, or shoot up the Stock Exchange. I think
the overarching tension shaping my work is the notion that women aren't
supposed to want, or be able to experience, these things, whether or not we
dress as boys to prowl our back alleys. Clearly, "nice girls don't" is one
taboo I have no use for; I'm not much happier with "feminist women don't,"
so I am always engaged in a dialogue with feminism, even when the rhetoric
usually associated with that kind of discussion is absent. (It does
appear, often, in my essays.) But that's only part of the way my work grapples with issues of
femaleness. It's all very interesting to change gender on another planet
(although those characters really lose my interest when they do it just to
reproduce), but I am interested in genderplay, masquerade, and change on
this planet. Characters in The Leather Daddy and the Femme (from which
"After the Light Changed" is excerpted) almost all have some problematic
and interesting relationship to gender, sometimes in the context of their
own transsexuality (Ariel and Jacy), other times in relation to "correctly-
gendered" desire in the queer community. This is where my many years loving
fags and sneaking off to read fag porn transmogrify into my characters'
real lives: Randy/Miranda cross-dresses to lure leather daddies, Jack
decides to transgress the bounds of fagdom and play with her anyway, even
though she's "no ordinary boy"; later in the novel we meet Peaches, who was
born to cross-dress, the John who only likes women with big cocks, and
Demetrius, who comes into his erotic attraction for men through being
fucked by a bigendered, biracial domme. Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, partly because we have
different erotic energies and personae with which we can play when we step
outside our own gendered reality, and also because there is a great and
largely unexplored/unarticulated space between boy and girl -- this is
where many queer folk, in fact, live, and it radiates possibility. That I
might be growing up into a world where gender would, for the first time on
a substantial scale, be contested territory, its spies and double agents
exposed, was not clear to me as a pained, trying-to-be-politically-correct
babydyke, but now I find it the most extraordinary and compelling aspect of
the queer world we have made. I can't express how glad I am to have grown
up to live in (and try to sketch) it. Still, I do not think this brave new world takes me out of my own
femaleness; it just casts my gender (sometimes) in a new light. I still
can't go to the baths and dive into the orgy room (usually), and I am still
fascinated by the visible but still separate sexual culture of gay men. So
in "After the Light Changed" (and the stories which follow, especially
"Ganged") I let my protagonist Miranda inhabit a seemingly gay male
identity long enough to enter a world of sexual adventure that's mostly
closed to me because I'm a woman (and, well, because I'm a woman). I know
enough about this world to appropriate some of its signals, certainly to be
suffused with (and convey on paper) its eroticism. It is a deeply
significant part of my own sexual orientation: not the alley-crawling, but
the erotic appreciation of fags and fag space. Yeah, I know the fags went
to play in the treehouse together and pulled the ladder up; I don't care.
If only because my (subconscious) strategy for nurturing my own bisexuality
in a strict lesbian world was eroticizing fags, it's always part of my
sexual point of view. Yet, also like Randy, I don't want playing a boy to
remove me from my femaleness. Really what I desire is a pansexual world in
queer community clothing, a world in which "male" and "female" are more
shape-shifting sources of possibility than Great Walls of gender role and
restriction. I write to make it so, or at least to give myself (and those
with similar issues and desires) a place to retreat for a while: a San
Francisco very like our own, but with fewer dot-coms, lots more time to
fuck, and where nobody throws anybody else out of bed, not even for eating
crackers.
I write to explore the issues and eroticism that most compels me, and in a
real sense I write to create more role models for myself. (The person who
showed me this was worth doing is Pat Califia, whose Macho Sluts blew a
hole in the dam of female erotic silence that washed me right out of my
backwater of shame.) It turns out that other women often respond strongly
to my work, especially women who, like me, have felt limited around not
only propriety but also the constraints of a community we hoped would free
us from those of the larger society. Who knew we would be exchanging one
set of rules for another? When I write erotic memoir I am specifically
speaking to an audience (even more that when I write fiction, when I often
speak primarily to myself -- then I share it with readers, whom I hope will
be as aroused, amused, or provoked as I was when writing it). Since I still
do not believe the cultural space for women's erotic expression and
exploration is large enough, when I breach its walls I want to advise that
it can be done. I also want to leave a document that describes a journey I
was not supposed to be able to take. In stories like "Sweating Profusely in
Merida," "The Best Whore in Hillsboro," "Social Skills," "Like a Virgin,"
and "Knife," for instance, I wrote about scenes I lived that surprised even
me: something about those experiences was supposed to be impossible, and
yet there I was. It's one thing to do the erotically taboo or improbable in
fiction -- and I think it's useful -- but there's something about true or
mostly-true stories that serves a different function. Memoir maps a real
country, not an erotic Middle-earth which, no matter compellingly it's
drawn, may not be accessible from here. Still, I like my fiction best when it feels plausible, even as it crosses
boundaries strong enough to render it improbable -- when the characters
don't step entirely out of reality even when the scenario in which they
live is rather far from my own day-to-day reality. I think this is because
I do have an activist motivation when I write: I want to uncircumscribe
sex and see what happens to us, and to it, when we slip the bonds, are free
of certain constraints. The more improbable the scenario, I think, the less
we are invited to learn from the characters' journeys. For all this talk of taboo-breaking, I've occasionally been criticized for
being a sort of Pollyanna of sex writing, Rebecca of Sunnyfuck Farm -- so
sex-positive that there's not enough for critics who like that cutting-edge
style which wallows in taboo and shame, nouveau de Sade. All I can say is,
I don't find that stuff especially compelling, or relevant to my own life.
I want my characters to get up and fuck another day, and any critic who
thinks it's normal for real-life sex stories to have happy endings hasn't
gone outside in the last twenty years. They can write those stories, and
I'll write mine... in fact, that gives me an idea: Little Rebecca goes out
to the bunkhouse on Sunnyfuck Farm, sees Hank the farmhand masturbating the
horse while Big Jim the overseer fucks his hungry ass, and Rebecca creeps
up the ladder to the loft so she can watch. But the farm dog has followed
her in!... What do women want? A really good view from that loft. A ladder sturdy
enough to scramble down and join the action. © 2001 Carol Queen |
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