Burning Desires Sex in America

Cat Fight! That's what the producers of Donahue were trying to stage, thought Erica Jong, when they booked her with Andrea Dworkin in the spring of 1987. Both were feminists, both were writers, but the parallels stopped there. Jong, author of the 1973 best seller Fear of Flying and other popular novels featuring frolicsome heroines, was one of the country's most widely recognized voices of sexual liberation. Her books spread the idea that women could emancipate themselves by adopting the same jaunty attitude toward sex long held by men. It was Jong who had coined that memorable phrase the zipless fuck.

Andrea Dworkin was a far different creature, a radical lesbian polemicist who viewed sex between men and women as a desecration of the female body. In her latest book, Intercourse, she had likened the erect penis to a weapon of war: "The thrusting is persistent invasion. [The Woman] is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied--physically, internally in her privacy."

Dworkin had made pornography her political passion. "The penis must embody the violence of the male in order for him to be male," she wrote, in her incantatory prose. "Violence is male; the male is the penis; violence is the penis or the sperm ejaculated from it." Sex, violence and death. This is "the male erotic trinity," according to Dworkin.

Yes, the fur was sure to fly on this one. Here, on one stage, under the white-hot TV lights, the opposite poles of American feminism were going to thrash away at each other. Phil Donahue, that symbol of male sensitivity and moderation, would have to jump in to restore order. Hose them down with a commercial break. Talk-show melodrama thrived on face-offs such as this.

But something unexpected happened that morning in the NBC studio in Rockefeller Center. Instead of greeting Dworkin's extraordinary sexual opinions with cries of derision and savage barbs, Jong offered her qualified praise. She rejected the notion that sexual intercourse was an inherently "invasive and pounding" act; in a "more feminized culture," sex between men and women could be something warm and cuddly. Still, she said, "[Andrea] has asked some very important questions and written a very brave and honest book."

Donahue seemed unsettled by this unlikely rapprochement. "Do you have any differences at all with Ms. Dworkin?" he pleaded with Jong. But the novelist would not be goaded into attack. His studio audience, however, was less deferential. It was made up of women who already knew what they felt about sexual intercourse. They regarded Dworkin with pity and scorn.

"I'm married and I would never give up my sexual intercourse," said one.

"What tragic thing happened in your life that made you feel this way?" asked another.

A third woman expressed her wonder at Jong's apparent turnabout: "You were the one who coined the term zipless--uh--encounter!" she marveled.

The following year, Jong and Dworkin renewed their sisterly pact by posing side by side on the pages of Ms. magazine. They made an odd couple: Jong, with her soft, bouncy mane and her sparkling black-and-silver designer outfit with matching high heels, flirting with the camera; and Dworkin, as fat and impressive as a Samoan queen, looking us dead in the eye, wearing her trademark blue-jean overalls, leather jacket and running shoes--a costume designed "to keep men and the world at bay," in Jong's words.

The press did not take notice of Jong's tribute to Dworkin. But it seemed to us a cultural marker of sorts, an event that suggested a deepening rancor in the world of feminism, a growing division between the sexes.

We seek out Jong, finding her in her New York brownstone off Park Avenue. We want to know how she has come to sip from the tart and brackish waters of Andrea Dworkin and call it a fount of wisdom.

Jong tells us she has come to feel soiled by her association with sex, because America has a dirty mind. A mind Dworkin understands all too well.

"I can't tell you how horrified I am," says Jong, "when I get these letters from men: 'I'm going to be in New York; can I come and fuck you?' Or 'Send me a pair of dirty underwear.' They've taken sex, which should be a feast of life, and put it in their meat grinder. When you get mail like that for fifteen years, you begin to get dismayed.

"We reduce sex to the gutter in this country. It's a vast Forty-second Street of the mind out there. 'The zipless fuck' was just Isadora's fantasy, not something I yearn for. My idea of sex is something sensual, beautiful, poetic, not indiscriminate. It's cuddling in bed, lying in a field of flowers, eating figs. My books are better understood in Europe.

"The sexual revolution was joyless, acquisitive, quantitative. It was an outgrowth of our materialistic, addictive (continued on page 102)Burning Desires(continued from page 98) culture. Americans believe the more they consume, the richer they'll become."

We are feeling an impolite urge to point out that no best-selling author has done more to trivialize sex than she. The men in Jong's novels are seldom more than ducks in a shooting gallery, knocked off in quick succession. But the conversation suddenly turns to erections. "Andrea Dworkin has a profound aversion to the penis," Jong observes. "I don't share that feeling, that fear of penetration. But I honor her as an intellectual."

Dworkin, she continues, is "on to" something deep, something buried in the American unconscious--the boot-in-the-face element of male-female relations. "The extreme reaction to Andrea Dworkin is like shooting the messenger. She says things people are afraid to say. Our society is in deep denial about the violence toward women."

The bonds between men and women seem more frayed than ever, Jong goes on. "Both sexes are running screaming from each other in panic and dread. Men don't feel they're getting the nurturing they need, and women feel they're getting trashed all the time, getting dumped after falling in love." She has crashed and burned more than once in recent years.

"The culture is not giving us any answers about love or sex or raising babies," Jong concludes, sounding at sea. "We've torn down the old social structures and haven't replaced them with anything new." But in the confusion of the Eighties, with men and women groping for new roles, sexual antagonism has more immediate appeal. It is easier to bash the opposite sex than to set up a new social order.

It has not always been so.

•

Young American men learned that there might be something erotic about women's liberation when they saw the May 7, 1971, issue of Life magazine. There she was on the cover, reclining on a bench in a park, laughing and pointing at something in the distance, too cool to notice the camera. She wore pink lipstick and red clogs and a paisley coat over a blue knit dress that nicely showed off her bosom. Silver gypsy jewelry dangled from her and her long chestnut hair was shagged like a British glam rocker's.

"Saucy Feminist that Even Men Like--Germaine Greer," trumpeted Life. She did seem special, a Seventies suffragist whose crusade was brightened with wit and flair and sexy Moll Flanders fun.

Greer was sharply aware of how men needed to change, but she also had a fine appreciation of men's assets. She knew all the troubles that came when the two sexes rubbed against each other, but she still liked the fit. And she was smart and cocky enough to tell off her sisters when their sexual doctrine grew tyrannically Sapphic. "It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis in her vagina: The orgasm is qualitatively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of vacancy," she wrote in The Female Eunuch, the best-selling book that established her reputation.

Instead of inveighing against the power of the phallus, as Dworkin would years later, Greer sang the praises of potent vaginas. She also availed herself of the pleasures of many beds in those years. She had an affair with the lead singer of the kick-ass, radical-prole Detroit band MC5, though years later, she would forget his name. "How awful," she would tell a reporter, "when you can't remember their names." She was the original bad girl of feminism.

"I believed there was no such thing as promiscuity," she tells us in her authoritative way, lying on a hotel bed in midtown Manhattan. "If you have chosen to be with the man you're with--even if he's the fifth man today--if you've chosen him, you are not promiscuous."

But this is the fall of 1987, and by now, Greer is a different woman. We have come to talk with her, one September afternoon, in her room at the Orleans Hotel, where she is staying during a visit to New York.

The woman who greets us is not the vibrant lady of Life. More than 16 years have passed since that photo was taken--Greer is now nearing 50--and time has not trod lightly for her.

The spark, we quickly discover, is in her speech. She is a dazzling conversationalist with a gift for the brassy assertion and the cutting remark. As the afternoon progresses, most of her wicked brilliance is directed against the sexual revolution and, more disconcertingly, sex itself.

"I don't think the sexual revolution ever happened," Greer says, settling into a straight-backed chair. She is wearing a sensible blue dress and blue stockings with runs in them.

"We didn't release the average person to a full understanding of his own eroticism. What we did do was tie him to a duty of genitality and sexual response. He wasn't allowed even to be bored. Holy shit!

"Look, it seems to me that the basic fact about human sexual conjunction is that it's banal, and the chief problem of the human race has been to render it interesting. In the past, it was made exciting and exotic and faraway, so that when you finally got into the woman's bodice, it was like going all the way to Turkey. But nowadays, instead of mystery and danger, we have a performance ethic about sex. You're supposed to keep your circuits unjammed, you're supposed to climb on regularly, you're supposed to have good orgasms of the right kind. We've now got a Protestant religion of sex. We have WASP sex. And it is deeply tedious."

Greer's pure, bright anger is invigorating. She sees with a burning clarity how badly sex has been used. But there is a great fatigue in her voice, as well. No sexual practice seems to hold interest for her anymore. Masturbation? "Basically dull. I think we can all agree to this. We have all masturbated and we all know that it is deeply dull. Doctors now prescribe it, certain proof that it's deeply dull." Oral sex? "It's like being attacked by a giant snail. I prefer conversation. 'Hey, what's-your-name, what are you doing down there? Do you mind if I smoke while you're eating?'"

Is Greer really as weary of the dance to Venus as she sounds?

She assures us that she is. "I have found sexual love extremely exhausting, riddled with tensions and hostilities and jealousies and insecurities. I spent most of the best years of my life trying to get it right, and I'm just delighted not to be worried about it anymore. I really couldn't care less.

"Believe me," she tells us, propping her head up with one elbow, "I would love to lose interest altogether in the penis. I don't know what's the matter with me that I still think it's so fascinating. It really makes me mad. But at least I prefer boys to men, so I'm not entirely lost."

The graying of Germaine Greer was part of the general fade-out of feminism in the Eighties. For more than a decade, feminism--along with gay liberation--had provided most of the intellectual energy in the great exploration of the country's erogenous zones. But by the mid-Eighties, the boiler had run out of steam. For the most part, feminist intellectuals seemed like ragged and lifeless (continued on page 168)Burning Desires(continued from page 102) survivors of the sex wars, with no heart left for engaging the enemy and no inspiration for how to reach an armistice.

With feminists of Greer's stature renouncing sex and even cheering on crazy-as-birds Andrea Dworkin, women's liberation came to rest on the shore opposite where it started, the shore opposite desire. The movement was born in the hothouse of love, and its first cry was for more human pleasure. But in the Eighties, feminism took its place alongside Christian fundamentalism, AIDS and money mania as one of the chief inhibitors of America's sex drive. The women's movement began to give a different message to American society: Sex is dangerous and degrading; desire must be strictly regulated. It was the song sung by Dworkin: "I'm a feminist, not the fun kind."

•

Fury has a way of immolating itself. How long could feminist culture make gargoyles out of men? How long could lust and romance be banished from the feminist cathedral?

The Eighties saw an explosion in erotic material produced by women. These books, magazines and films could be seen as explorations of the feminine unconscious or as masturbatory vehicles, or both, and they were met. with silent blushes by intellectuals. For once, and suddenly, women were fantasizing about naked bodies and unusual positions, aggressive behaviors and games of all sorts. Women producing pornography broke all the rules.

The feminist pornography of the Eighties began at a baby shower for Veronica Hart in the spring of 1983.

Hart was an innocently beautiful woman who sometimes shaved her pubic hair in the shape of a heart. She had once performed with the shower's hostess, Annie Sprinkle, in a film called Pandora's Mirror, in which the two women discover a magical antique mirror that allows them to watch everyone who has made love in front of it.

"While Annie Sprinkle may not be one of the top female erotic performers of all time," qualifies the Directory of Adult Film, perhaps unfairly, "one thing is true: She is certainly one of the kinkiest."

"We'd had sex together and made movies together," Sprinkle tells us in her soft, otherworldly voice, "but before Veronica's baby shower, we never got to know each other in a more intimate way, you know what I mean?"

The women giggle and scream like teenagers at a slumber party. This is the first time most of them have been together without cameras or men; men have been expressly forbidden at the shower in "the Sprinkle Salon," as everybody calls Annie's apartment.

Except for Roger T. Dodger, of course. Giant, silent Roger, the gorgeous bodybuilder who is a former Mr. New York, serves the hors d'oeuvres. "Annie made sure Roger was wearing a green apron and a black bikini bottom and little else," remembers Veronica Vera, Sprinkle's best friend and the Catholic performance artist who wrote the antiseminal essay "Cunt Envy."

"A deep connection came out of that baby shower," says Candida Royalle, who co-starred with Hart in Delicious. "We realized we were kindred souls."

So seven of the women, including Royalle, Sprinkle, Hart, Vera and Gloria Leonard, the pioneer of phone sex, would decide a few months later to form a consciousness-raising group. They would call it the Club 90, after Sprinkle's street address, and they would meet twice a month thereafter.

"We earned our living in a very intense way," says Royalle, "making love on camera for money. None of us really fits in anywhere else. The way people who don't understand or approve can treat you, it helps to have women around who love and trust you and who are doing the same crazy thing."

Royalle would go on to form Femme Productions, a response to the video revolution. Today, Femme has become a haven and creative home, a sort of United Artists, of what can only be called fem porn.

What could be more natural--and more unexpected--than a group of former porn stars coming together to produce videos for women and what the industry calls couples? It was a commercially compelling concept, because a survey of 1000 video stores in 1986 revealed that 63 percent of all X-rated videos were rented by women or by women and men together. Video pornography is a $600,000,000-a-year business. The VCR revolution of the Eighties put sex tapes in the bedroom, where women and a new generation of young couples felt comfortable watching them. But still--feminist pornography? It was an affront that would catch moralists of all persuasions with their pants down.

•

Tonight in Femme's soundproof editing room on the West Side of Manhattan, Sprinkle is rewinding the rough cut of her new video, In Search of the Ultimate Sexual Experience. She explains the difference between the old, male-dominated porn and Femme's new "hard erotica."

"In the old days, the sex was already over before they thought about the woman's orgasm. You'd be lying there on the bed. The guy would be toweling himself off and the director would shout, 'OK, take a face!' Then the camera would move onto your face for the close-up and you'd fake the orgasm, like, 'Ooh! Ahh! Moan! Groan!'"

She laughs.

Royalle smiles. "At Femme, we don't go in for overdubbing moans and groans. We fold the woman's orgasm into the music.

"I try to get real-life lovers as often as I can," she says. "You get the heat and love that way. It's wonderful. And if I use real lovers, I don't have to use safe sex. But I think it's important to educate viewers as to how they can eroticize the use of safe sex."

Femme Productions' videos range from the wacky, such as Sprinkle's In Search of the Ultimate Sexual Experience, to the sensual, such as Christine's Secrets and Three Daughters.

Femme women don't sleep with men until they want to, and if the guys do start things, they usually ask first. And politely. There's lots of kissing and fondling and foreplay. Afterward, the men rock the women in their arms. Royalle likes cuddling.

The men dress like models in Calvin Klein ads. The women are hardly the "Talk dirty to me" fuck-bunnies of older porn but rather normal, if horny, gals with good jobs and Dynasty clothes. The sets seem to be designed by Laura Ashley--flowered wallpaper, arranged silverware, antique oak beds, designer sheets and yards of expensive lingerie. The music is decorous, mostly Wyndam Hill-sounding stuff.

Violence is as forbidden as a male lead with a potbelly. OK, maybe a little giggly bondage with silk scarves looped around the pipes of the brass bed. But no "golden showers" of love--which is how, if you haven't already guessed, Sprinkle got her name--and definitely no nipple piercing. The ladies have gone mainstream!

"Women want a situation, a tenderness component," explains Royalle. "They want a relationship, more than a body and a sex organ. Of course, I'm filming erotica for men and women together, couples, and that's tricky. I don't want to lose the men to get the women, who have different fantasies. The big fantasy in many adult movies is to have lots of women throw themselves at a man, because that sort of thing almost never happens to men in real life; whereas for women, it's easy--too easy--to go out and have sex, so we like build-up and lead-in. But I'm convinced that the new men my age want a lot of the same things women do and that it will be the women who help the men explore."

After Christine's Secrets and Three Daughters were released to good reviews in major newspapers and thousands of women began to rent or buy the videos, Royalle found it odd that feminist organizations seemed reluctant, at best, to publicize what she thought was a revolutionary development. So she invited half a dozen women from the Media Reform Committee of the National Organization for Women's New York chapter to her house in Brooklyn to view Christine's Secrets. All of them seemed to enjoy the movie, and some seemed to like it a great deal.

In the discussion that followed, the women told Royalle that her film was, indeed, more sexually egalitarian. They found that it was sincere. Florence Rush, a founder of Women Against Pornography, agreed that Christine's Secrets was certainly much better than the old cock-in-the-face stuff, but she felt that the film showed little concern for the problem of unwanted pregnancies or sexual disease. "Can we be exploring women's fantasies now in such dangerous times?" she asked.

In a way, thought Royalle, it was as if NOW, unlike the women who were buying and renting her videos, actually preferred old garbage porn, because the old male-made porn was easy to understand and even easier to hate. It certainly raised no unsettling questions, the most obvious of which was, Weren't a lot of women just as turned on by the sight of men and women making love as men were?

While Candida is chatting in the hallway, an executive from another company has been trying to enter the editing room. He knocks first, slides the door halfway, sticks his head in, then stomps off. Candida stops talking to check out the scene. She opens the door.

"An-nie!"

Annie Sprinkle is on a gray leather couch beside the monitor, but a technician is underneath her. Her silk dress is bunched around her waist. The breasts that shocked the Directory of Adult Film swing free. Her hips are nonchalant, but they don't stop rocking.

"Ummm, sorry, Candida," whispers Annie as sweetly and tentatively as ever. "Ummm, I guess my video must be OK. At least it turned me on."

•

The raucous debate over pornography has divided the women's movement since the mid-Seventies, pitting those who want to eradicate pornography as an expression of male aggression against those who want to push the envelope of women's sexuality. It's "good girl" versus "bad girl," and the language has gotten pretty dirty. The most sweetly savage of the new bad girls is novelist Anne Rice. "No matter what bad-girl things my heroines do," she says with a smile, "they never get truly hurt, because at heart, they are still good girls."

Upstairs in Rice's study on the top floor of her San Francisco Victorian, it's all saints and computers. "I hope that I may be one of the most famous female pornographers in the United States," she says, her smile as tiny and sweet as one of the antique cloth dolls in her collection.

Rice is in her late 40s and is short--5'2", though she seems taller. Her bones are small and perfect, her eyes happy and, it seems, knowing; her hair is long and as black as a moonless night.

She touches a red-and-black whip nailed to the wall opposite her computer. It's a cat-o'-nine-tails with the softest of leather strands, given to her by a fan who thought her books should contain even more accounts of flagellation.

Has Mrs. Rice ever been whipped herself?

"Let's build up a mystique," she says with a perfect china-doll smile. "Let's not tell everybody how dull I am."

Rice is the author of The Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat and Interview with the Vampire, the classic horror novel that may be to our sexually ambiguous time what Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein was to the early 19th Century. Under the mildly lusty pseudonym Anne Rampling, Rice also writes best-selling contemporary novels of exotic sex and romance. And under the French nom de plume A. N. Roquelaure (which means "cloak"), she publishes fairy-tale pornography, hard-core variations on the Sleeping Beauty theme.

The writing in the Vampire books is sensual, but the sex is veiled. Not so in the hard-core Roquelaure books, Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment and Beauty's Release, all novels of "discipline, love and surrender."

In a chapter from Beauty's Punishment titled "Soldiers' Night at the Inn," Beauty is a captured slave. She is naked as she serves food and ale to the golden-haired captain and his men.

At once, the captain's strong right hand clamped on her wrists and he rose from the bench, lifting her off the floor and up so she dangled above him....

"To my good soldiers, who have served the queen well," the captain said, and at once, there was loud stomping and clapping. "Who will be the first?" the captain demanded.

Beauty felt her pubic lips growing thickly together, a spurt of moisture squeezing through the seam, but a silent burst of terror in her soul paralyzed her. What will happen to me? she thought, as the dark bodies closed in around her. The hulking figure of a burly man rose in front of her....

The smell of the stables rose from the man, the smell of ale and the rich, delicious scent of sun-browned skin and rawhide. His black eyes quivered and closed for an instant as his cock plunged into Beauty, widening the distended lips, as Beauty's hips thudded against the wall in a franticrhythm.... Yes. Now. Yes. The fear was dissolved in some greater unnamable emotion.

The cock discharged its hot, swimming fluid inside her and her orgasm radiated through her, blinding her, her mouth open, the cries jerked out of her. Red-faced and naked, she rode out her pleasure right in the midst of this common tavern.

Rice touches her wedding band as she talks, seated at the desk. America's most famous female pornographer has been married to her high school sweetheart, poet Stan Rice, for 24 years. From time to time, Lucky, her giant bull mastiff, barks deeply from the back yard. A deer's head with comic dentures wedged in its mouth stares down from the wall.

"When I'm before that computer writing," she says, "I'm fairly sexually aroused. Very frankly, I'm creating a one-handed read. I pace the scenes with my natural feelings. If you don't, then it's only hack work, which, to me, is pornography, written by people who don't really share the fantasy, to use the cliché, but are only trying to second-guess the market."

But what about the sexual violence of, say, "Soldiers' Night at the Inn"?

To Rice, the scene at the inn is not violent at all, because it is consensual. "The whole point in my Roquelaure books is that the sexual experimenter doesn't get truly hurt, no matter what bad-girl things she does, because she is a good girl."

In fact, one of the things that made Rice begin her pornographic series was her hatred of Pauline Reage's classic Story of O. She found it grim, pessimistic and sinister, because O goes mad, is branded and disintegrates. She set out to create a fairy-tale world in which the heroine could enjoy all manner of fun and games without being slashed or killed.

What Rice does is give good girls permission to dream bad-girl dreams. "There are thousands upon thousands, if not millions, of women in the United States who would like nothing better than to be dominated in a safe context by some man who they know is not going to kill them," she says. "They would love it. They buy tons of romances in which women are dominated by pirates and Yankee soldiers and God knows what."

Why?

"The heart of the matter," stresses Rice, "Is that people want the permission to enjoy. They want to be carried away in the whirlwind and receive all that wonderful attention--then emerge unharmed. That's the sadomasochistic fantasy, and it appeals," she insists, "to men and women both."

Rice believes that any culture that emphasizes sin and repression will create people who want to be punished before they can enjoy. She points out that Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming may be viewed as writers of male S/M, since they subject Philip Marlowe and James Bond to continuous, appalling, excruciating tortures, a good many of them sexual in tone. Rice laughs her rich laugh: "And didn't Woody Allen say that he wanted to die smothered in the flesh of Italian actresses?"

But in the end, she prefers to beg off. "I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an anthropologist," she says crisply. "I am a writer and I write only what turns me on."

What bothers Rice more than the possibly dark implications of her fantasies is any attempt to rein her in.

"Women as sexual beings haven't been out of the closet for more than about twenty years. What I see now is the closet door being slammed back in our face by an alliance of feminists, Moral Majority conservatives and old-guard liberals, who seek more to protect women as victims of male sexuality than to argue for their equal rights to express themselves sexually. To me, this is very frightening. I want to know what other women feel. I wish they would write more erotica. It's a big mystery what women want. It's a big mystery what turns them on. We've spent two thousand years telling women what they should and shouldn't feel. It's time now to find out what they really do feel."

Rice is matter-of-fact about this. "I largely see feminists as my enemy, though I see myself almost as a radical feminist. At this point in history, there are many vocal, reactionary, repressive feminists who are trying to get pornography banned and trying to interfere with the expression of sexual desire in art."

Rice believes that antiporn crusaders such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon are "idiots" and "fools." She thinks that "they have been indulged. If the kind of antipornography legislation that they advocate were pushed by two fundamentalist Baptist ministers from the Bible Belt, it would be laughed out of the public arena overnight. But because Dworkin and MacKinnon are women and are supposed to be feminists, they have confused well-meaning liberals everywhere. People have bent over backward to understand their position, when they don't deserve any leeway, because Dworkin and MacKinnon have no respect for free speech, for the Constitution of the United States or for rights that have mattered to the rest of us for hundreds of years, rights that have evolved out of English common law.

"Americans don't really want censorship from their Government. They don't want Linda Lovelace to be hurt, either, but they do want to be able to go to the video store and rent Deep Throat and find out what it's about. Middle-class Americans are renting these tapes by the millions. To me, that shows that the sexual revolution is still going on, to a large extent, and I think that's healthy and wholesome. The Meese commission made noise but had little impact."

"Oral sex? 'It's like being attacked by a giant snail. I prefer conversation.'"