*Sigh** The more things "change," the more things stay the same...

Goodbye to All That
Robin Morgan
Janary 1970

.... And that's what I wanted to write about - the friends, brothers, lovers in the counterfeit male-dominated Left. The good guys who think they know what "Women's Lib," as they so chummily call it, is all about - and who then proceed to degrade and destroy women by almost everything they say and do: The cover on the last issue of Rat (front and back). The token "pussy power" or "clit militancy" articles. The snide descriptions of women staffers on the masthead. The little jokes, the personal ads, the smile, the snarl. No more, brothers. No more well-meaning ignorance, no more co-optation, no more assuming that this thing we're all fighting for is the same; one revolution under *man,* with liberty and justice for all. No more.

Let's run it on down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It just could make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown and white *women* - with men relating to that the best they can. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titilating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalistic economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or "coin" as well). Goodbye to all that.

Run it all the way down.

Goodybe to the male-dominated peace movement, where sweet old Uncle Dave can say with impunity to a woman on the staff Liberation "The trouble with you is you're an aggressive women."

Goodbye to the "straight" male-dominated Left: to PL, who will allow that some workers are women, but won't see all women (say, housewives) as workers (blind as the System itself); to all the old Left-over parties who offer their "Women's Liberation caucuses" to us as if that were not a contradiction in terms; to the individual anti-leadership leaders who hand-pick certain women to be leaders and then relate only to them, either in the male Left or in Women's Liberation, bringing their hang-up about power dominance and manipulation to everything they touch.

Goodbye to the Weather Vain, with the Stanley Kowalski image and theory of free sexuality but practice the sex on demand for males. "Left Out!" - not Right On - to the Weather Sisters who (and they know better - they *know*) reject their own radical feminism for that last desperate grab at male approval that we all know so well, for claiming that *machismo* style and the gratuitous violence is their own style by "free choice" and for believing that this is the way for a woman to make her revolution ... all the while, oh my sister, not meeting my eyes because Weathermen chose Manson as theirs - and your - hero. (honest, at least, since Manson is only the logical extreme of the normal American male's fantasy (whether he is Dick Nixon or Mark Rudd): master of a harem, women to do all the shitwork, from raising babies and cooking and hustling to killing people on order.) Good to all that shit that sets women apart from women; shit that covers the face of any Weatherwoman which is the face of any Manson Slave which is the face of Sharon Tate which is the face of Mary Jo Kopechne which is the face of Beulah Saunders which is the face of Pat Nixon which is the face of Pat Swinton. In the dark we are all the same - and you better believe it: we're in the dark, baby. (Remember the old joke: Know what they call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger. Variation: Know what they call a Weatherwoman? A heavy cunt. Know what they call a hip revolutionary woman? A groovy cunt. Know what they call a radical militant feminist? A crazy cunt. Amerika is a land of free choice - take your pick of titles.) Left Out, my sister - don't you see? Goodbye to the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your oppressors; goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea.

Goodbye to RYM II, as well, and all the other RYMs - not that the sisters there didn't pull a cool number by seizing control, but because they let the men back after only a day or so of self-criticism on male chauvinism. (And goodbye to the inaccurate blanket use of that phase, for that matter: male chauvinism is an attitude - male supremacy is the objective reality, the fact.) Goodbye to the Conspiracy, who when lunching with fellow sexist bastards Norman Mailer and Terry Southern in a Bunny-type club in Chicago found Judge Hoffman at the neighboring table - no surprise: in the light they are all the same.

Goodbye to Hip Culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women's freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves - reinstituted oppression by another name. Goodbye to the assumption that Hugh Romney is safe in his "cultural revolution," safe enough to refer to "our women, who make all our clothes" without somebody not forgiving that. Goodbye to the arrogance of power indeed that let Czar Stan Freeman of the Electric Circus sleep without fear at night, or permits Tom Ungerer to walk unafraid in the street after executing the drawings for the Circus advertising campaign against women. Goodbye to the idea that Hugh Hefner is groovy 'cause he lets Conspirators come to parties at the Mansion - goodbye to Hefner's dream of a ripe old age. Goodbye to Tuli and the Fugs and all the boys in the front room - who always knew they hated the women they loved. Goodbye to the notion that good ol' Abbie is any different from any other up-and-coming movie star who ditches the first wife and kids, good enough for the old days but awkward once you're Making It. Goodbye to his hypocritical double standard that reeks through the tattered charm. Goodbye to lovely pro-Women's Liberation, Paul Krassner, with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor "on this issue" and don't laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them; farewell the the memory of his "Instant Pussy" aerosol-can poster, to his column for Cavalier, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators' wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughters he sees as often as any proper divorced Scarsdale middle-aged (38) father; goodbye forever to the notion that he is my brother, who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the Women's Movement he has fucked, reels off names in best locker-room tradition - as proof that he's no sexist oppressor.

Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, frustrated, crazy, Solanasesque, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuituive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the women that men have warned us about.

And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism - the lie that there can be such a thing as "men's liberation groups." Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a "threatening" characteristic shared by the latter group - skin color, sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed fucked-up by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not oppressed. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism; the oppressed have no alternatives - for they have no power - but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men - but in the short run it's going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is *not* the fault of women - kill your fathers, not your mothers.

Run it down. Goodbye to a beautiful ecology movement that could fight to save us all if it would stop tripping off women as earth-mother types or fontier chicks, if it would right now cede leadership to those who have not polluted the planet because that action implies power and women haven't had any power in about 5,000 years, cede leadership to those whose brains are as tough and clear as any man's but whose bodies are also unavoidably aware of the locked-in relationship between humans and their biosphere - the earth, the tides, the atmosphere, the moon. Ecology is no big shtick if you're a woman - it's always been there.

Goodbye to the complicity inherent in the Berkeley Tribesmen being part bublishers of Trashman Comics; goodbye, for that matter, to the reasoning that finds whoremaster Trashman a fitting model, however comic-strip far out, for a revolutionary man - somehow related to the same Super-male reasoning that permits the first statement on Women's Liberation and male chauvinism that came out of the Black Panther Party to be made by a man, talkin' a whole lot 'bout how the sisters should speak up for themselves. Such ignorance and arrogance ill befits a revolutionary.

We know how racism is worked deep into the unconscious by our System - the same way sexism is, as it appears in the very name of The Young Lords. What are you if you're a "macho woman" - a female Lord? Or god forbid, a Young Lady? Change it, change it to the Young Gentry if you must, or never assume that the name itself is innocent of oppression.

Theory and practice - and the light-years between them. "Do it!" says Jerry Rubin in Rat's last issue - but he doesn't or every Rat reader would have known the pictured face next to his article as well as they know his own much-photographed face: it was Nancy Kurshan, the power behind the clown.

Goodbye to the New Nation and Earth People's Park for that matter, conceived by men, announced by men, led by men - doomed before its birth by the rotting seeds of male supremacy which are to be transplanted in fresh soil. Was it my brother who listed human beings among the *objects* wich would be easily available after the Revolution: "Free grass, free food, free women, free acid, free clothes, etc."? Was it my brother who wrote "Fuck your women till they can't stand up" and said that groupies were liberated chicks 'cause they dug a tit-shake instead of a handshake? The epitome of female exclusionism - "men will make the Revolution - and make their chicks." Not my brother, no. Not my Revolution. Not one breath of my support for the new counter-culture Christ - John Sinclair. Just one less to worry about for ten years. I do not choose my enemy for my brother.

Goodbye, goodbye. The hell with the simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women - or nonwhite people - will come about ZAP! with the advent of a socialist revolution. Bullshit. Two evils pre-date capitalism and have been clearly able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism. Women were the first property when the Primary Contradiction occurred: when one-half of the human species decided to subjugate the other half, because it was "different," alien, the Other. From there it was an easy enough step to extend the Other to someone of dfferent skin shade, different height or weight or language - or strength to resist. Goodybe to those simple-minded optimistic dreams of socialist equality all our good socialist brothers want us to believe. How liberal a politics is that! How much further we will have to go to create those profound changes that would give birth to a genderless society. Profound, Sister. Beyond what is male or female. Beyond standards we all adhere to now without daring to examine them as male-created, male-dominated, male-fucked-up, and in male self-interest. Beyond all known standards, especially those easily articulated revolutionary ones we all rhetorically invoke. Beyond, to a species with a new name, that would not dare define itself as Man.

I once said, "I'm a revolutionary, not just a woman," and knew my own lie even as I said the words. The pity of that statement's eagerness to be acceptable to those whose revolutionary zeal no one would question, i.e., any male supremacist in the counterLeft. But to become a true revolutionary one must first become one of the oppressed (not organize or educate or manipulate them, but become one of them) - or realize that you are one already. No woman wants that. Because that realization is humiliating, it hurts. It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn't want to be raped. It hurts to learn that the sisters still in male-Left captivity are putting down the crazy feminists to make themselves look okay and unthreatening to our mutual oppressor. It hurts to be pawns in those games. It hurts to try and change *each day of your life right now* - not in talk, not "in your head," and not only conveniently "out there" in the Third World (half of which are women) or the black and brown communities (half of which are women) but in your own home, kitchen, bed. No getting away, no matter how else you are oppressed, from the primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world. It hurts to hear that the sisters in the Gay Liberation Front, too, have to struggle continually against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers. It hurts that Jane Alpert was cheered when rapping about imperialism, racism, the Third World, and All Those Safe Topics but hissed and booed by a Movement crowd of men who wanted none of it when she began to talk about Women's Liberation. The backlash is upon us.

They tell us the alternative is to hang in there and "struggle," to confront male domination in the counterleft, to fight beside or behind or beneath our brothers - to show 'em we're just as tough, just as revolushunerry, just as what-image-they-now-want-of-us-as-once-they-wanted-us-to-be-feminine-and-keep-the-home-fire-burning. They will bestow titular leadership on our grateful shoulders, whether it's being a token woman on the Movement Speakers Bureau Advisory Board, or being a Conspiracy groupie or one of the "respectable" chain-swinging Motor City Nine. Sisters all, with only one real alternative: to seize our own power into our own hands, all women, separate and together, and make the Revolution the way it must be made - no priorities this time, no suffering group told to wait until after.

It is the job of revolutionary feminists to build an ever stronger independent Women's Liberation Movement, so that the sisters in conterleft captivity will have somewhere to turn, to use their power and rage and beauty and coolness in their own behalf for once, on their own terms, on their own issues, in their own style - whatever that may be. Not for us in Women's Liberation to hassle them and confront them the way their men do, nor blame them - or ourselves - for what any of us are: an oppressed people, but a people raising our consciousness toward something that is the other side of anger, something bright and smooth and cool, like action unlike anything yet contemplated or carried out. It is for us to survive (something the white male radical has the luxury of never really worrying about, what with all his options), to talk, to plan, to be patient, to welcome new fugitives from the counterfeit Left with no arrogance but only humility and delight, to push - to strike.

There is something every woman wears around her neck on a thin chain of fear - an amulet of madness. For each of us, there exists womewhere a moment of insult so intense that she will rach up and rip the amulet off, even if the chain tears at the flesh of her neck. And the last protection from seeing the truth will be gone. Do you think, tugging furtively every day at the chain and going nicely insane as I am, that I can be concerned with the puerile squabbles of a counterfeit Left that laughs at my pain? Do you think such a concern is noticeable when set alongside the suffering of more than half the human species for the past 5,000 years (I have learned since that has actually been 10 to 12,000 years since the rise of patriarchy) - due to a whim of the other half? No, no, no, goodbye to all that.

Women are Something Else. This time, we're going to kick out all the jams, and the boys will just have to hustle to keep up, or else drop out and openly join the power structure of which they are already the illegitimate sons. Any man who claims he is serious about wanting to divest himself of cock privilege should trip on this: all male leadership out of the Left is the only way; and it's going to happen, whether through men stepping down or through women seizing the helm. It's up to the "brothers" - after all, sexism is their concern, not ours; we're too busy getting ourselves together to have to deal with their bigotry. So they'll have to make up their own minds whether they will be divested of just cock privilege or - what the hell, why not say it, say it! - divested of cocks. How deep the fear of that loss must be, that it can be suppressed only by the building of empires and wagin of genocidal wars!

Goodbye, goodbye forever, conterfeit Left, male-dominated cracked-glass-mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare. Women are the real Left. We are rising, powerful in our unclean bodies, bright glowing mad in our inferior brains; wild hair flying, wild eyes staring, wild voice keening; undaunted by blood we who hemorrhage every 28 days; laughing at our own beauty we who have lost our sense of humor, mourning for all each precious one of us might have in this one living time-place had she not been born a woman; stuffing fingers into our mouths to stop the screams of fear and hate and pity for men we have loved and love still; tears in our eyes and bitterness in our mouths for children we couldn't have, or couldn't not have, or didn't want, or didn't want yet, or wanted and had in this place and this time of horror. We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history, and this time we will be free or no one will survive. Power to all the people or power to none. All the way down, this time.

--------------------

Heart

Feminism is a revolution, not a public relations campaign. -- Margaret Sloan-Hunter

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind. -- Andrea Dworkin

Benefit for Aura Bogado
Written by ernesto
Wednesday, 01 December 2004

Radio activist Aura Bogado sends the following: "On May 26, 2004, Marcelo Bogado was brutally beaten, handcuffed, made to kneel on the sidewalk and shot in the head by police in the Barrio Mitre section of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Marcelo, only 20 years old, left behind a partner and 6-month-old son. He was my brother. For political reasons, I could not return to Argentina right away to be with my family during this difficult time. The situation has grown somewhat safer, and I plan to travel there next month to be with my loved ones, as well as work on a story about the continuing political repression of young people in Argentina.

"I think a lot about community and coming together to help each other. Today, I ask for your help. Flights are expensive; I’m looking at paying about $1500 just to get there. My friends and family at the collective bookstore that I work with have been gracious enough to host a fundraiser for my trip. My friend B will be spinning tunes, putting a smile on everyone’s face. I am creating a print in honor of my brother that will be available for $10 the night of the benefit. All proceeds will go to fund my trip. Even if you cannot contribute to my fund, I ask that you please attend in good spirits anyway and wish me safe travels. This all takes place on Saturday, December 4, 2004 at 7 PM at 33 1/3 Books Collective, 1200 N Alvarado (@ Sunset), Echo Park, CA 90026. Phone is 213.483.3500."

Please get there to support, and give love from APOC.

***

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Heart

Feminism is a revolution, not a public relations campaign. -- Margaret Sloan-Hunter

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind. -- Andrea Dworkin

To begin with, you show absolutely no concern for what has been done to Aura Bogado, for the way she has been made to be pornography for daring to stand against people like Larry Flynt, someone you allowed to interview you with the lame defense that he did something good with your work once. Sort of like the fact that you went on that radio station in high school is supposed to somehow be some sort of defense of indefensible actions, words and behaviors. Does it even occur to you that some of us might be upset over having been made to be pornography against our will because we've resisted male power? *Look* at what has been done to this woman. Just *look* at it. Here is a woman from Argentina, a war-torn country, in many ways, a poor country, she is a woman of color, her brother was shot in the head by police a year ago. She comes to this country interested in speaking her truth to power and pornography is made of her for that. And all you can do -- as a self-identified feminist -- is whine and flail over her absolutely *gracious* and generous, far beyond what you deserve, response to your indefensible interview with Hustler?

Maybe I'll write a careful response to what you've had to say there, but I doubt it. It's not really worth my time. I'll just repeat what I said up there a ways. This is a new low, even for you.

Heart

Feminism is a revolution, not a public relations campaign. -- Margaret Sloan-Hunter

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind. -- Andrea Dworkin

http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/06/unavoidable.html

Susie Bright says, "Pardon me for butting in about your larger discussion of Daily Kos, but I wanted to mention that I believe I've been misrepresented-- to say the least-- by both Flynt Publications AND Aura Bogado, whic chaps my hide... my joyless, manhating feminist hide, of course. I just wrote a reply to Bogado's article and sent it to ZNet; I hope they publish it. If not, I'll put it up on my blog, but I'll wait a couple days and see. In any case, I didn't want your readers to just assume the whole picture has been revealed. Again, sorry for interrupting your main thread."

To which 'feminist' Amanda replies, "No worries, Susie, and thanks for the comment. Something Bogado said in there made me think that Hustler might have misrepresented you, which I was curious about.

AAAAAGH!

So a woman of color gets pornographic hate speech made of her WITH SUSIE'S PAID-FOR WORDS FURTHERING THE SMEAR JOB and that doesn't warrant a word from Amanda, but there's lots of sympathy for poor, poor, misinterpreted Susie despite what said woman of color has reported?

It makes me sick to think Aura's cogent accusations about Susie being a willing, paid tool of the patriachy in their attempts to keep women their whores is automatically considered somehow wrong by a feminist. No explanation, no indication of exactly where Amanda thinks Aura has lied or exaggerated Susie's complicity in the attack on Aura, just a nebulous "gut feeling" of the colored woman's wrongness and the most famous prostitution industry's female apologist rightness.

Unbelievable is right, Heart.

Judge for yourselves. And you know, this is why it is abject FOOLISHNESS to shill for the pornography industry or for the Left. Absolute foolishness. They will turn on you faster than you can BLINK. They don't give one good goddamn about you if and when you are no longer of use to them. Same damn thing for the RIGHT. Women HAVE no country. We HAVE no party. We HAVE no one, but feminism and feminists, speaking on our behalf.

***

Susie Bright Interview

HUSTLER Responds: Raw, Unedited Susie Bright Transcript

In response to Susie Bright's assertion that we played unfair in our editing of her interview (which ran in the Feb. 2005 issue of HUSTLER), we are posting the entire raw, unedited transcript of the interview on LarryFlynt.com.

Details here: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8043

TAPE NUMBER: 1
MARK CROMER
Can you give us your early history.
SUSIE BRIGHT
Sure. I was kind of a, a nerdy, book wormy little kid. But who was always attracted to the under dog when I was a kid. I used to, you know, make crayon fliers, begging people to vote against Ronald Reagan, when he was the Governor of California, because, you know, I was really offended by his views on, on the war and the environment.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And I thought he was very condescending and patronizing to women. And this was in the '60s. And then as I got closer to high school, I really, really fell in love with The Women's Liberation Movement and The Sexual Liberation Movement, which were a full tilt revolutionary flavor at that point. And it perfectly coincided with the fact that I was coming of age.
SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)

You know, people ask me, oh, you know, when did you lose your virginity? I lost my virginity the same week I went to my first meeting of Radical. And everything happened to be really fast. And I always assumed that women's liberation and sexual liberation had some more goals, in the sense that women should be able to determine their own path in life.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
That it wasn't about being barefoot and pregnant and not having a clue. This was also the years when books like The Hyde Report (SP?) were coming out. And it was The Number One Best Seller on The New York Times list, saying, you know, women have this thing called a clitoris, and it's, it's just, it's analogous to the penis, and this is what female orgasm is all about.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And wait for me, buddy. And it was all about women discovering both hey, you know, let's, you know, pull down your pants and find out what this is all about. You know, like don't be in the dark. Don't be ashamed. Don't think that this is icky or disgusting or sinful. This is your body, and it's your right to have a wonderful, sexual future. And, and to have a, a stake in it. That you have your own self interest.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And it isn't about just trying to put on a fake fashion show to try and catch someone and have a marriage, or to be unbearably lonely, unsatisfied and not know why. There really is something in sex for women that's precious, just like there is for every human being.

MARK CROMER
You're referring to Cher Hyde? SUSIE BRIGHT
Yes, and she wrote a book saying...

MARK CROMER
And who was she? Was she a stripper?

SUSIE BRIGHT
No, she was just sort of a literary sociologist. And she started doing interviews with women, saying how do you cum? And she was also very interested in Masters And Johnson's work and Kissey's work. And she popularized the idea. She kind of got it out of the science world, into the main stream. The notion that women have this thing called the clitoris. And that it, it, men have a penis, women have a clitoris.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
It's like, it's our cock, it's their clit. It goes backwards and forwards. And that the reason so many women were not having orgasms was because they thought that simple, vaginal penetration would be able to get them off. And some women really enjoy fucking. And, but it's because they're getting some kind of clitoral stimulation. It's not because they're not. I mean, if women came simply from having the inside of their vagina touched or probed, I mean, you couldn't have child birth. I mean, it would just be too painful. (LAUGH) You couldn't go through it.

BRUCE DAVID
What do you mean by vaginal orgasm?

SUSIE BRIGHT
The vagina, by its nature, has to have pretty low key nerve endings or we would all die.

MARK CROMER
We were coming out of an age of sexual ignorance?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Ignorance and superstition, yes. And, and women, a lot of people just assumed that women weren't interested in sexual satisfaction. That all they cared about was romance, you know, and, and, and being the perfect wife and the doting mother. And that sex, if you were a woman with a sexual self interest, you were a pervert. You were a whore. And I mean that in, you know, people who said that, they're saying it in a majority way, they didn't meant it in a nice way.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But something was wrong with you. You know, that you had basically given up your virtue to be a slut. And that women who were interested in sexual satisfaction were deviants. So here comes women's liberation, and all the sexual liberation that was happening at the time, and saying no, of course not, it's perfectly natural. Of course you should be interested in your sexual satisfaction, and you need to speak up and express yourself.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Say what you like. And there was all this, you know, rah-rah-rah boom de-yay about it. And it was very refreshing, and it was very exciting for me to be a teenager in that milieu. Because I got, you know, so many supportive messages and it was, it was wonderful to come out sexually in that atmosphere.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And I, but for me, it was also really very political. I, I mean, it's hard for people to imagine this now, but at the time, it really did seem like maybe The United (UNINTELLIGIBLE) was gonna topple, it really, the counter culture was so extreme and so powerful. And there was such an enormous generation gap, that, you know, you felt like anything could happen.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And I was one of the people caught up in that. And just to give you some examples of things that happened at that time. I was involved in an underground newspaper in Los Angeles that made a lot of headlines. We were constantly getting suspended and expelled, and having our newspaper seized.

BRUCE DAVID
What was the name of it?

SUSIE BRIGHT
It was called The Red Tide. And we regularly ran stories about sex. I mean, we were quite, very earnest. Like I wrote a story about how using lubricant really made sex more comfortable. And at the very least, you should try saliva, if you couldn't, you know, if you were poor and you couldn't afford anything else. It was all about lubrication being a key to great sex. And of course, I was suspended for this article. (LAUGH) You think about it now, it was just me being so earnest, you know. It was, it wasn't even sexy. It was just, you know, like...

MARK CROMER
The underground editors suspended you for writing it?

SUSIE BRIGHT
I'm sorry. No, no, no. The principle of the high school.

BRUCE DAVID
This was a high school paper?

SUSIE BRIGHT
No, it's not, the high school didn't produce it. We were a bunch of kids...

MARK CROMER
So you put it out after high school?

SUSIE BRIGHT
No. We, we put it out at our homes, and then we sold it at the high school. We'd get up and we'd take our newspaper. We made the newspaper ourselves.

MARK CROMER
What high school was this?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Uni High, University High. But we distributed it all over The LA School District. It was a huge deal at the time, and we led a lot of demonstrations and instructions that happened at the high school. Another time, you know, you might remember this, Bruce, do you remember George Putnam, from KTLA? He was the channel five news caster, he was sort of the Rush Limbaugh of the time?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
He was a real right wing maniac. And one time he, he had hated The Red Tide. Of course, you can tell by the title, we were Commies. We were anarchists. We were feminists. We were perverts, etc, etc. One time, he hated our sex education stories, because we, we just regularly wrote them. We were like okay, here's how to get birth control pills without your parents getting in your way. Okay, here's how you can find a place to get a, an abortion if you don't have money and your parents would die if they knew you were pregnant.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
We did regular information to high school students about how to take control of their own sex lives. Which, nowadays, I mean, that's, like considered heresy. But this is what we were doing at the time. And this was in the mid '70s. And I remember the time George Putnam came on the evening news, he was the most popular evening broadcaster at the time, on channel five.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And he held up a copy of, of our paper, and he said I am looking at a picture of the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life. It is a picture of a woman's private parts. (LAUGH) Of course, what he was referring to was that we had one of those anatomical, you know, diagrams of a woman's vagina, the vulva, you know, whatever we were trying to explain how an IUD goes in or something boring like that.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But he, he was just appalled, that high school students were doing this. In fact, a lot of those, those folks couldn't believe that it was a bunch of teenagers doing it all by themselves. But it was. We, we did it all on our own. And there was no adult pulling the strings behind us.

BRUCE DAVID
I remember that time. Men didn't know what female genitalia looked like.

SUSIE BRIGHT
And neither did women. I mean, men have this advantage, physically, that it's very easy for them to see what they look like. They can take off their pants and see their cock really easily. But women can't. I mean...

MARK CROMER
It depends on how much you weigh.

SUSIE BRIGHT
(LAUGH) Well young men, shall we say, young men in their prime. But with women, no matter what size we are, there's, in order to really see what our clit's look like, there's no substitute for getting, lying down, getting a mirror, and spreading your legs. And, you know, that takes some activity. That takes some initiative.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
You're not gonna just do that accidentally. You have to intend to do it. And, so I think, you know, that plus the, the conditioning that women shouldn't be interested in sex, that you should be shy and demure, and if you weren't, you're a bad girl, and just all that kind of, you know, the notion of, of a woman is just there to have babies and not have any personal interest in sex was very popular at that time. And it got broken.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
It just got shattered like a glass bowl. And it was exciting to be part of the shattering. It also meant that in my own, my own sexual life, even though there was part of me that was shy and self conscious, I mean, you know, every teenager is. And, you know, there was part of me that was, I remember being really scared to masturbate or touch myself in front of my first lovers.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I thought on, my God, if they see me do that, they will just walk out of the room. They will be so mad. They, you know, I'm supposed to let them do everything. They're supposed to just know. I'm supposed to give them meaningful looks and they'll figure it out. But the intellectual part of me knew that was stupid. (LAUGH) And, I mean, I'm glad I had that part of me. I'm glad I like read the books, got the propaganda. I knew that there was another way.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And then when I began to take more risks with my first lovers and let them know how I felt, and what I liked, and expressed myself more, well of course, the I discovered the really important part, which is that it turns your lover on when you are open. And when you show yourself. And when you're vulnerable, sexually. It's an extremely moving and poignant and a turn on.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And, you know, I feel that way when a lover reveals themselves to me. And they feel it when I reveal themselves to them. And I sort of didn't understand that until I did it. And then it made all the sense it the world. You know, like oh, yes, not only will I get off, but I'm gonna feel a lot closer. There's gonna be a much more intense, exciting encounter, because we weren't playing games, and just trying to make, you know, appearances with each other. Because who wants to have poser sex.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I mean, I guess a lot of people do. Because the culture today is all about acting, you know, a lot more emphasis on posing and status and not nearly as much on being real. And letting your genuine lust and exuberance and fantasies out of the bag, you know. Like really let them, you know, (UNINTELLIGIBLE) or try to make them look like something that's being sold in a magazine.

MARK CROMER
Back to 1968, you were participating in...

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) Remember, 1968 I'm ten. I was involved in the stuff I'm talking to you about now in the mid '70s. I'm 46. I was born in '58.

MARK CROMER
'68 was the arrival of the counter culture and the explosion of pornography. Discuss that.

BRUCE DAVID
Even in the '20s there was some erotica. I'm not sure what happened.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well, it was censored. I mean, Miller was writing Tropic Of Cancer in the '20s and it wasn't legally distributed in this country until the late '50s. I mean, the real breakthrough in terms of sexual expression in the arts, happened in the late '50s and the early '60s. And then we had those landmark legal cases, that let the cat out of the bag.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And all of a sudden ladies had (UNINTELLIGIBLE) lover came in, and, and Henry Miller's work came in. And you had (SOUNDS LIKE) The Story Of Earl was suddenly legal. And then the movies followed suit and the ratings board created a new rating. The X rating that originally was supposed to include any kind of movie with serious sexual content and that's when you had Last Tango In Paris, and Midnight Cowboy got those kind of ratings

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
At that time, you know, when I think about my perspective, and a lot of it is thinking about the perspective of, of a kid, you know, of course I was really titillated by that sort of thing. I remember seeing, I think this was the first, like (WORD?) interest I ever had in a, in a photograph. I saw an ad in The LA Times, for (WORD?) Vixen by Russ Meyer, which was one of these, you know, titty movies. You know, soft core but really racy movies that Russ Meyer did so well.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And I remember just being staggered by the cleavage of the women in this picture. (LAUGH) And knowing that oh, you know, I could, would never be allowed to see this, and oh, I wanted to see it secretly so much, but I didn't quite know why. You know, I'm really young at this time. But just that kind of like what's, what's in the air, what's going on?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Later, as a, as a high school student and getting involved in politics, I had what I think is very common to a lot of people, kind of a mixed view. On one hand, I believed in free love. I believed in fucking whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I believed in a lot of experimentation and, and I, I was completely conscious of my rebelliousness.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
On the other hand, I thought of a lot of pornography as being just this really square stuff for dirty old men. Like, it didn't have anything to do with me. It wasn't, it wasn't like part of being a hippie. (LAUGH) Part of being a renegade. Although now I look back on it, and I, and I think about my friendships with people like The Mitchell Brothers and so on.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And they were very much renegades when they started making these kind of movies. But, because the way people looked in those films, and the kind of, the kind of marketing that they had, it was such a, you know, an adult books only. It was so, it very much was like this is for.

MARK CROMER
(UNINTELLIGIBLE)

SUSIE BRIGHT
It was, it was seedy, but it was also kind of square. It was like, I'd look at that stuff and I'd think, oh, this is what Richard Nixon looks at when he can't get an erection. You know. Like I, I just couldn't imagine, I was young. You know. I was (LAUGH) I was with, I was having all these first experiences with other young men and women.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And it never occurred to us, I guess we sometimes we would talk about like some of the sexy books that were around. But it would never have occurred to us to look at an X rated movie. Honestly. It just never came up.

MARK CROMER
How did you (UNINTELLIGIBLE) with a lot of the hippies that came into female and male? (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

SUSIE BRIGHT
I know. I forget, it must have been like these different, these, these different nieces. Because you're right, I'm thinking about, I mean, when I think about my favorite old school porn stars, and we talk about their roots, you know, they were all part of the counter culture. And, you know, they were...

MARK CROMER
Jamie Hamilton.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well everybody was. It was sort of like we were in just slightly different grooves. I think the fact that I fell in with the pinko's meant that although I didn't realize it, there was a slightly, puritanical edge about that kind of thing. I wasn't so aware of it, because I was having the time of my life. You know. It, it was like I hadn't, I was having so much fun playing with my friends and doing all of our activities, it just didn't, it just didn't occur to me.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I do remember, we would take like pictures of each other. You know, just for our own, our own fun and our own reasons. I mean, but now when I look back on it, I'd say oh, we were sort of making our own porn. We, you know, you would like, oh, you look so hot, I want to take a picture of you. And we would, it would just be between lovers. It wasn't commercial.

MARK CROMER
Who?

SUSIE BRIGHT
I think perhaps it was just a sense of oh, it's, that is so commercial. That is, pornography is just another part of capitalism, and it's, and it's such a drag. And we're not gonna be part of that.

MARK CROMER
Are you surprised when you look back at some of the rhetoric, that male taking pictures of female is in itself enslaving, when it's supposed to be a liberation movement.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Oh, you're, you're right to perceive the irony in some of this history. I mean, on one hand, you had women who were drawing and taking pictures of each other's cunts and saying, using the word cunt, you know, kind of reviving that word as a word to be reclaimed. And, and, and be rejoiced in. You had a lot of emphasis on kind of new erotic art, and being avant garde, and being Bohemian and being out there.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Some of those same people really looked down on commercial pornography. And would look at this sort of, technically the same picture, like let's say we have another picture of a woman's cunt, you know. Only it's, in this magazine, it's being called a beaver, and, you know, it has a different context, but it's actually the same picture. And it would get a completely different reaction.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
That it was oppressive, that it was degrading, that it was objectifying (UNINTELLIGIBLE) And I, I both have felt like battered by that debate, because when in the '80s, when feminists like me began to put out our own pornography, our own books that we called erotica, that we called, you know, that we were very explicit and that we, you know, just looked, embracing all of it, we were attacked by these same people that you're describing.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And, you know, being told that we were contributing to women's genocide. And it was, it's, it's really painful when it comes from one of your own. You feel incredibly misunderstood. (LAUGH) You feel like hey, wait a minute. Don't strip me of my badge. You're (UNINTELLIGIBLE) you're no feminist, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), you know, tear your medal off, kind of thing. (LAUGH) If you feel like hey, wait a minute, you're stereotyping me, and you're not even looking at what we're really doing. You're not even paying attention. You're not giving this a chance.

BRUCE DAVID
At what point does it change from being misunderstood?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well, I have, I have a couple of thoughts about this. I think that The Feminist Movement felt, felt pretty unified, as long as thing stuck to anatomy and physiology. Like no one criticized The Hyde Report when that came out. No one thought that was bad. No one thought it was bad that everyone should know where their clit was and how to have an orgasm. Everyone was on the same page. Where things started to get dicey, was when we started talking about the life of the mind.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And about sexual fantasy. And about being turned on. What makes you turn on. And at that point, there became a real disconnect from people who take a, an interest in psychology and the unconscious, and in art, and in art history and in looking at art. Like that crowd tends to be a pro sex crowd and be sympathetic to sexual representation, whatever it's called.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And then there was this other group that, that was working, and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) would fall in, who would say there is no context except our context. We are not interested in psychology. We are not interested in the unconscious. We are not interested in art. A, a picture is always, means the same thing, no matter where you show it. Well any artist would disagree with them, (LAUGH), you know. Anybody who studies the human mind would disagree with them.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But there was, they had this sense of no, this picture always means the same thing, no matter what you do, it always means something dangerous, it means something bad. And until we have a complete revolution and society has transformed as we know it, we will not even be able to talk about sex.

BRUCE DAVID
Have you had a chance to go to Larry Flint.com and look at all the e-mails?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Yeah, yeah. I read all that. Well, I mean, Mark just asked me that question. You're asking me when does it get to be too much? Well it just sort of depends on the moment.

BRUCE DAVID
I'm asking, are we getting into the turf of what you want to map out for this article?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Oh, it just depends on what you do with this interview material. I can go back and make it more autobiographical, if you want.

BRUCE DAVID
How did you make the transition from high school to college and that erotica community?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well, the other part of what was going on at the time, I was, this high school period that I talk about, is that I came out of bi-sexual. From the very beginning. I remember, in fact, my first, my first published story I ever wrote was for Hustler, and it was about how I came into my sexual life with a man and a woman at the same time. I've never met anybody else who's had that particular thing.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I never, I went from not kissing anybody, to going all the way with, with a girl and a boy at the same time. And I always felt, I felt like it was an omen. I'm bisexual. I feel passionately about men and women.

MARK CROMER
Do you remember what year?

SUSIE BRIGHT
What year was this? (LAUGH) Why, do you know someone else who did this?

MARK CROMER
That's framework for the archives now.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Oh, I still have the copy here. It's got this really lurid headline on the cover. Diary of a teenage lesbian, or something really hilarious.

MARK CROMER
Do you remember the year?

SUSIE BRIGHT
I would have to get it down. I can e-mail it.

BRUCE DAVID
Was I running the magazine at the time?

SUSIE BRIGHT
No, you weren't, because somebody named Lonnie assigned it to me? Monte?

BRUCE DAVID
(UNINTELLIGIBLE)

SUSIE BRIGHT
Yes, right, yeah, it was when he was around. Anyway, so I was also really interested in anything to do with lesbians, gay liberation, all of that. And in the late '70s, the very end of the '70s I moved to Northern California, because it was a much more friendly place then Los Angeles, to be an artist and to be a sex radical.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And I got, once I came to San Francisco, wow, as far as I was concerned, that was like coming out all over again. I had, because I was so young when I got involved, I was never a part of bar life. I just went to meetings all the time. (LAUGH) And, so I hadn't seen that side of gay life. I hadn't been to clubs. I wasn't old enough to get in, and I didn't look old enough to fake it.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And when I came up to San Francisco, I remember I got taken to The Haight Ashbury Street Fair, and my best girl friend, at the time, invited two friends of hers, who were drag queens. And they got dressed in, one guy got dressed in a pink ball gown, and the other one got dressed in a leopard skin suit. And I was just staggered by how gorgeous they were, and how fun it was gonna be.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And here I was in my blue work shirt and jeans, looking like a follower of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) or something. And I said my God, if you can wear a dress, why can't I? Like, I hadn't worn a dress in years. But I had wanted to. I loved glamour, I loved theatrical feminity. And I just adored that kind of thing.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And I kind of put that away in the '70s because it was so, you know, it was just not done in the circles that I hung out with. And that's what I always called my second coming out. I came out as a fem. And as, I'm using that in the gay vernacular, you know, as a, a woman who really identified with feminine flamboyance in my appearance.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And in my case, someone who was really attracted to rich women. And this was also considered heresy among the politically correct wad of the politico's I hung out with. And we had terrible fights about it. Awful fights. And this was the time when lesbians started discussing things like kinky sex, and sado masochism, and dominance and submission and could you have a, a sexual relationship with integrity and dignity why you were doing kinky things?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
While you were turning power roles up side down? A lot of people said no way. You can't. (LAUGH) And that was the years that I started a magazine with a couple of friends, that was called On Our Backs, and the, the title was really important to us, because partly we were making fun of, of the feminist newspaper of many years, called Off Of Backs. That was very much against the sex radicals, and very disparaging towards women making their own sexual outspokenness in magazines and movies and so on.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And so we were partly making fun of them, because they were such stick in the muds. But we were also trying to get across the idea that sex is this remarkable experience in life, because being on your back, in sex, is one of the few times you do get to call the shots. Sex is topsy turvy. And what appears to be submissive can actually be very assertive.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And what appears to be dominant can be a complete surrender. It's not what it seems on the surface. And, so when we named our magazine, we, we had this in mind, and we didn't realize it at the time. We thought we were just, we, we were just being rude. We were just like, we're gonna make this magazine just to piss off all of those tight women.

MARK CROMER
Where were publishing this?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Francisco. And we started work on it in 1983 and it came out in '84.

MARK CROMER
Was it nationally distributed, or just locally?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well it was, as well, when you say was it distributed, I have to tell you, we called up everyone we thought might carry it. Well, the gay men's bookstores said yes, thank God. The Anarchists book store said yes. It was interesting. The Communists, The Anarchist, and the gay men, they picked up our magazine. But the politically correct style, feminist book stores run by women were like no, this is, you know, barbarianism. It's awful. It's disgusting. You're a Nazi.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
You must leave. They just, they were just awful. And then the other people who thought we were completely ridiculous but for different reasons, were the mainstream adult business. You know, we would, we would go to all the dirty bookstores that we could get a phone number for. We'd walk into them and we'd say hi, we're dikes and we've got this new magazine called On Our Backs, and it's really cool, and it's what real lesbians do in bed, and you're just gonna love it.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And they would look at us and just laugh. We completely didn't understand the rules. I mean, the first movie we made, was of two women who, what they happened to do in bed with each other was fist fucking, that's how they got off. And that was the climax of their sexual activity. They were also very much in love. And this was just them. It just happened to be what they did.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And we could hardly find anybody who would let themselves be photographed in a lesbian sex film. So we were thrilled to find, you know, volunteers in the first place. And women who looked like we looked. You know, that kind of had our punk rock aesthetic. And to our amazement, when we put out that movie, the people in the, the adult business looked at us like are you crazy? This is a bustable offense. You can't show these things.

BRUCE DAVID
Gotta keep the thumbs showing, right?

SUSIE BRIGHT
And we were like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? Where, where is the rule book? It's like nobody sent us the memo. What are you talking, we didn't know what they were talking about. We were like this is how women make love. This is how they do it. What is wrong with this? What is, you know, we didn't understand. Plus we were distributing our movie at mainstream bookstores, gay bookstores across the country, and they weren't getting busted.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
They weren't even, you know, the police didn't even think of going in there and finding something like what we were doing. So it was interesting. A few years later, I mean, as time went on, we started to build some bridges with some of the old school pornographers, and, you know, start to have deals and alliances with them about things. And the first time that one of the, the old timers really confided in me, about how the business worked, I mean, it was true, he'd had a couple of drinks.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But still, at one point I interrupted him and I said why are you telling me all this? This is really confidential. This is, you're really, and what I'm implying to him is, you're taking a risk just confiding the kind of things you are to me about how the business worked. And he just looked at me and he goes, why am I telling you? You made a fist fucking movie. (LAUGH) And I was like oh. I didn't realize we, we paid our dues and we didn't even know we were doing it. (LAUGH) (TECHNICAL)

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
It's a surprisingly negative sex play. Even though it has such a great title. You'd think it would be fabulous. But actually...

BRUCE DAVID
Why is it negative?

SUSIE BRIGHT
I had to walk out. Because it repeats the same crap trap about, on one hand it says, your vagina is wonderful. Don't you want to touch your vagina, which is great. And on the other hand, it's like, pornography is killing women every where. Women are being raped and mutilated every where for no reason at all, other then pornography. I mean, I, I'd have to get the script out to give you the exact lines.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But there's all these like old (WORD?) about how men are this bestial force that can barely be contained by keeping them in a cage. And women are in charge of that. And what comes out of unrepressed male libido is violence and nullifying rage.

BRUCE DAVID
Can you address that?

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) I'm not the only one. Poor, you know, all the women, all my colleagues, you know, who have been involved in this from the very beginning, we all feel this way, but it just kind of gets, oh, shit, I'm gonna go into a whine. Never mind, ask me another question.

MARK CROMER
You all feel what way? There's a clear divide between the two groups of feminists.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well you can't, because some of them change their minds. I mean, I can't tell you how many tearful letters, and people showing up at my doorstep, who have said, I totally condemned you X number of years ago, and now I've got my own dungeon. And, you know, and I'm in a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) relationship, or, you know, or I, you know, I had a kid who turned out to be queer in a different way then I was queer.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Or I've discovered that I really liked a certain kind of erotica that I probably would have condemned ten years ago. People change, but they seem to change not because of arguments and meetings, but because of deeply personal experiences.

MARK CROMER
Can you take us...

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) But at the same time, let me say, I think there's a reason why women can go down the path of feeling really threatened and angry about porn, which is that, not because of naked pictures of people fucking and fucking per say, but because sometimes the way people get introduced to it has a really, has an aspect of betrayal or shame or secrecy to it.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I mean, how many women do I know who have said, well, I know you're so big on erotica, but I will never, ever forgive what happened when I discovered, you know, that my husband or my boyfriend had this secret stash, and he was getting off on all this stuff, and never told me. And I've been completely shut out. And in the mean time, he was saying that I was too horny and wanting to have sex all the time, and he didn't want to have sex with me, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. You can just imagine. It's like a Dear Ann Landers letter, only X rated.,

MARK CROMER
Well let me...

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) They have come to feel like this thing, this thing called porn has been used against them in this sneaky way. And that therefore it has nothing to do with them. It could never be part of their sex life. It could never be something that, that belonged to them. Or that came from them. They think of it as being this thing that somebody did to trick them, or to lie to them.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And if you can pull apart, I mean, when I, when I try and make an earnest attempt with people to pull apart things, I say let's take apart the lies and the (BACKGROUND NOISE) betrayals, which are genuine. It's terrible when you find out that someone you thought you knew has a double life. And that they didn't trust you to know about it.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
That is a cause for grievance. But to take that part out of the fact that here's a bunch of, of movies, people fucking and sucking, which could be, you know, they're almost beside the point. But that's, that's hard for some people to do. Some women have never self consciously realized that they were turned on by reading or looking at something. Once a woman realizes that she has those feelings, too, it's a lot harder to get on your high horse and be so self righteous.

BRUCE DAVID
It seems the dynamic has changed.

SUSIE BRIGHT
I feel of them. I mean, in a way I feel bad, sorry for them at this point. They're in a very small minority, and they, and it's...

BRUCE DAVID
They seem to scream the loudest.

SUSIE BRIGHT
But, well, I don't know. You know, for me, I don't, maybe they are articulate with a certain kind of rhetoric that stings me, and so I always hear it. But I'm much more concerned today about the fact that college age kids know less about sex then they have in decades. They are more clueless. They have less actual sex. They are more fearful about being labeled as a slut. And, and then they, and they deny that they have sex. They have to have binge drinking before they think it's okay to screw somebody.

MARK CROMER
That's interesting.

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) ...sober and have sex with someone. They put more emphasis on materialism and appearances then they do on actual sexual connection. And for me, this is actually a much bigger problem. (UNINTELLIGIBLE) they don't even know those names any more.

MARK CROMER
Talk about that.

SUSIE BRIGHT
They can't have a happiness in life because they don't have the right kind of tits. That, that makes me want to die.

BRUCE DAVID
What does that say about (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Do you have research information we're not aware of?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Oh, sure. Of course I do. I'm gonna have to send you that.

BRUCE DAVID
Tell me about kids being more sexually ignorant. Where does it come from?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well the most persuasive material that I use is that I started, you know, I speak at, at colleges every year. And in the late '80s, I began doing a survey of every college I went to. And the first few years, one of the questions, I asked the kids just a few anonymous questions, and one of the first questions I would ask them, you know, are you male or female? How old are you?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And then I'd say have you ever experienced orgasm? Do you have orgasm, yes or no? And it was, because reaction is always interesting, because the boys laughed. It's sort of like asking them, does a bear shit in the woods. But for the girls, you look at their faces, and you can see the ones who are like, yes, I do. You know, they really regard it as an accomplishment.

MARK CROMER
But this actually wasn't...

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) And then you have the ones who are like I don't know, and no. Both of which mean no. Now the first two years I did this, the, the figures remained remarkably static. It was about 18% of the young women had not experienced orgasm. But then, after the AIDS epidemic hit, and all that, all the abstinence education and all the kind of fear of sex, fear of sex, you started seeing, by 1990, that started creeping up.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And by the mid '90s, now I'm getting reliably, 25% and more of young women saying I've never experienced orgasm. Also, the age of when young people start to have sex with each other has gone up. That you can see in other surveys besides mine, because it's more closely monitored by different government agencies.

MARK CROMER
That seems in contrast with the assertion that the culture is more sexualized.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well she's a really good example. Wouldn't we just love to get Britney Spears on the couch and find out if she's ever had an orgasm before. There's an appearance of sexuality, the appearance of sexual titillation. Titillation in advertising is at hyper sonic speeds today. It's remarkable. It's an empowering achievement. And the notion is of leading people with sex, to buy things, with the notion if they buy one more thing, they will finally achieve...

BRUCE DAVID
Orgasm.

SUSIE BRIGHT
...a sexual epiphany. And yet once they buy one thing, they're told, oh, I'm sorry, there's just one more thing you need to buy. But while I call this hyper sex, hyper sex is, is predominant. But actual sex is less. We have less people actually having sex. They do it later in life. They stop doing it earlier in life. They have difficulties with fertility.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
They have more, you know, and don't get me started on Viagra. I mean, that was something I thought was so neat when it first came out. But now I use, I just hate the way it's used to intimidate young men, and how young men feel like they have to use it as dating insurance. Like wow, you know, you don't want to like have your penis not be right. You better take this pill. Because you can't possibly be okay the way you are. And you're supposed to have this, this robot type reaction, you know, for every date and every situation.

BRUCE DAVID
Do you still identify yourself as bisexual or a lesbian?

SUSIE BRIGHT
I'm, I'm bisexual. And, and I've been with a primary male partner for some years now. For a long time. And I had a kid, getting back to my autobiography. I got her in 1990. I remember when I first got pregnant, I went to a Christmas party, and everyone was very curious about me and what I was up to. And this woman came up to me and said did you inseminate or party?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And I laughed so hard. And she said that means you partied. (LAUGH) And now, you know, nowadays, so many people are just so desperate to get pregnant, and it's getting so difficult to get pregnant these days, for, for older women who want to, that's how I was, but I wasn't old at that time. But I was sort of at the beginning of this baby boom happening with single women.

MARK CROMER
Are you familiar with the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) sperm count?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well, oh, God, you'll get me started on that. No I, I don't have any proof of anything. I'm just really, like, you know, it's like looking at...

MARK CROMER
There is a drop in the sperm count.

SUSIE BRIGHT
There absolutely is. And I'm not blaming it on marijuana. (LAUGH) I'm more interested in what it has to do with similar rises we see in cancers. With what's happened to our food supply. With what's happened...

MARK CROMER
Bruce says the do (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

BRUCE DAVID
Estrogen mimicking chemicals are expected to be the problem in the drop of sperm count.

SUSIE BRIGHT
How do you get these chemicals?

BRUCE DAVID
It's in everything.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Oh, oh, I see what you mean. Well this is (STAMMERS) this is, you know, the same thing that people are talking about in general, about what's happening to the scope of world health. Pollution is doing us in. And, you know, meanwhile, you know, George Bush still things Global Warming's a joke. So yeah, that's, that's another can.

MARK CROMER
Any comments of how men are portrayed by feminists today?

SUSIE BRIGHT
I would say, of course when I talk about this, it's hard to discuss men as just one big blob. Because not all men are going through the same changes as, as the next one. But, here's some general things I can say. For one, the gender liberation,, sexual liberation, women's liberation, all those movements, a lot of people thought oh, yeah, they're like that because they got laid more, you know.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
The pill was so great because, I mean, now you can fuck with abandon or whatever. But, aside, I always felt like that was a cheap shot. Yeah, I mean, the pill was great, for what it was. But what's really been lasting, in terms of men sexual lives, was this sense that you didn't have to be this solid, stoic brick with these kind of cartoonish, waspy expectations of what your sexuality is supposed to look like.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I don't know if you remember Robert (WORD?) he used to have this great character called White Man. White Man's Worry Today. And it was this guy who was kind of built like a brick, you know, and he was so uptight. He was like ready to keel over. In the sense that the counter culture and sexual liberation said hey, you know what, you don't have to be like that.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
You can be openly lusty. You can have an androgynous side. You can like to get fucked, as well as fuck. You can be playful, you can be silly, you can be brazen. You can have, you, you know, you don't have to fit a stereotype of, of the, the stoic, puritanical patriarch with his, with his secret, sinful desires.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
You don't have to do that any more. The territory is wide open. And, in that sense, I, I think there's been a lot of, of changes in men's lives. But it's also made it difficult, too. Like men get mixed messages. On the one hand, you, you get a lot of support, and this comes from, and when you guys say feminists, for you, so often, the feminist is, is this harridan, this enemy that's giving you all this shit.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But since I think of myself as a feminist, and all my friends are feminists, I don't see it that way. (LAUGH) I see it as more complicated. And from my point of view, feminism in, in these of like not, of, of gender roles don't have to be baked in cement. That's been great for everybody. That's been great all the way down the line.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Now, with what men are facing today that is difficult, I would say in America, the number one thing that gets my goat, as far as men are concerned, is when books come out like The (UNINTELLIGIBLE) And that whole notion that hey, guys, you are never going to get laid, and you are never going to have women dig you, unless you make a lot of money.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And you prove yourself to be this sort of major player, based on how much cash you have. To me, that is one of the like unsexiest things you could ever, (LAUGH) you could ever put on someone. It's such a drag. It means that your individuality or expression, who you are, it's meaningless. All we want to know is how much money you have, and you're never gonna get laid unless you pony it up.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And that the way you should treat women is by treating them like pets who need gifts, you know. And if your woman starts to get sad, you just sort of throw another diamond ring at her, and then that'll pep her up and she'll give you a blow job. Oh, my God, that's a nightmare to me. That is, you know, that kind of notion of like, that women are teases and bitches and the only way they'll relent, and the only way they'll ever give you anything is for money, just, well it tortures my Comi soul to its very core. (LAUGH)

MARK CROMER
I would guess most feminists would agree with you. Our concern is that some feminists perceive men as rapists.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well the voices that you're describing, you have to remember how small they are at this point.

BRUCE DAVID
But what...

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well let, let me finish, okay. Because most people don't even give it that much thought one way or another. There is a (STAMMERS), you know, there are, I think there's a sense that you get from reading popular cartoons like The Loghorns, where, you know, the husband always says she's such a bitch and a nag, and she's like, he's such a pig and a jerk. There is this, you know, continuing battle of the sexes, where women often accuse men of being insensitive, and not being in touch with their feelings.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Not paying attention to how, you know, being arrogant, being conceited. That's something that doesn't come from feminism, so much as it does from continuing, you know, social battle between man and women and, and the roles they play. But when you talk about, you know, the kinds of descriptions, I mean, when was the last time that Andrea Dworkin (SP?) published anything? I mean, the woman's had a nervous breakdown and retreated from public life a few years ago. And, and McKennon (SP?) what happened to her? These people have disappeared off the public land..
.
BRUCE DAVID
(UNINTELLIGIBLE)

SUSIE BRIGHT
Nadie Stroff (SP?) she's from The ACLU. And she defends free speech for people who do sex.

BRUCE DAVID
McKennon's still out there.

SUSIE BRIGHT
I just don't, I haven't, you know, I usually get her (UNINTELLIGIBLE) in my mailbox, and I haven't seen them for awhile. So I look at, it was sort of when I was talking to democracy now, kind of look in some ways, this discussion has been petrified in some people's minds, and it's time to, to move on. I, you know, I know there's still women out there who are uneasy about men. Uneasy about how men expect their sexuality.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But for most of them, it isn't this big, worked out theory. It's because of either frightening, personal experiences they had, or just this sense that sex is big and bad and dangerous, and that they must secure themselves against it. But treated with some, some sympathy and support, and kind of leading them to water, you know, leading them to something that appeals to them sexually, I find that more conducive then assuming that they've been locked in a room, reading Katherine McKennon and have this big, worked out philosophy about it. 99% of them don't.

MARK CROMER
What influences the women's studies in universities now?

SUSIE BRIGHT
(LAUGH) Well, you know, they have all, they've been through the ringer. When I first would go to speak at universities, I was never invited by the women's studies department. And at the universities that I went to, I received assassination attempts. And the, you know, the, the hall would be closed. We'd all be trucked over in the snow, to the police department. And the police would be staring at me, going what the hell did you do that someone phoned in a bomb threat?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I would say I don't know. I'm not Martin Luther King. This is kind of crazy. But that was how things were, you know, ten years ago. Nowadays, I'm just as likely to be invited by a Women's Studies department as any place else. It's much more mixed. And even people who still are, have anxiety and, and criticisms about pornography in general, they go out of their way to say that I do like sex, I do have an appreciation for erotica. (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

MARK CROMER
Right now people are saying sex is positive, and I think that's happy horse shit.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well it's because the, the discussion has changed. And it's taken a long time. It used to be, the notion was that pornography offended God, right? That was the conservative position. And then it got tweaked slightly. Oh, well, it might not offend God, but it offends women. (LAUGH) And both of those, and then, now finally that notion has been changed. People are like no, you know, it really depends.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And we've now got a much more liberal arena, where people will offer quite a bit of tolerance for different kinds of sexual expression. But they tend to get uptight about the more extreme bits.

BRUCE DAVID
Does that mean max hard core?

SUSIE BRIGHT
That means anything to do with dominance and submission. Anything to do with SM. Certain kids of fetishes. Like people, at first glance, find hard to understand, or make them feel ambivalent.

BRUCE DAVID
What do they need?

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) What, what do they need, my response, you're starting to get the idea what I'm like. I'm, I mean, I try to convince people, I try to persuade. I try to help them find what their sexual self interest is in this. I'm not like Camille Pollia (SP?) who would just as soon bonk you over the head with a hammer. You know, she's much more of like, she's not interested in persuading you, she's interested in arguing with you. I don't get very far. It's just the nature of my personality.

BRUCE DAVID
I admire that, but...

SUSIE BRIGHT
You guys have given up. (LAUGH)

BRUCE DAVID
We were attacked by feminists saying how aggressive men are. I don't think (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) Oh, I know. Well here's the deal. You know, like, can I, I mean, this really isn't helpful as far as your interview, but if I was in your shoes, and I got that kind of letter, you know, I saw that kind of response, I would think to myself, okay, this woman hasn't probably ever seen a Hustler magazine in years. She probably saw a picture from some wave pan slide show 20 years ago, and that's all she knows. Okay? For one.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Number two, um, it was really insensitive the way she reacted to Larry's letter about the rape shield laws. Because he wrote a very sensitive letter. I mean, it, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't bullying. It wasn't having no feelings towards victims of rape. He was, it was quite emotional and personal and poignant, and, you know, it, the way she jumped on that and kind of apparently turned it around, I could see how that could feel very hurtful.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
On the other hand, in terms of what her letter was about, like I won't be in an anti war coalition with, with so and so, I'm like, well you aren't gonna be left along in a room all by yourself. I mean, if you really knew what everyone was else in your anti war coalition, you wouldn't have grown up with any of them. I mean, do you have any idea the strange (UNINTELLIGIBLE) that are involved in trying to get Bush out of office? Or trying to get this war stopped? I mean, it's kind of a, a peculiar, naiveté on her part.

BRUCE DAVID
30 lefties in one room, you're gonna get 30 different ideas.

SUSIE BRIGHT
I mean, you know, it's a laugh that I'm voting for Kerry, because I can't tell you how far to the left I am of him. But I'm doing it. I'm doing it with lots of people who have very different perspectives then me. Especially about hot button issues like pornography. So when I, but what I wouldn't do, which, you know, I mean, I know this is part of your, your, the Hustler vocabulary, but I would never use (UNINTELLIGIBLE) some back by saying, no matter what they called me, you know, no matter what kind of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) attacks they made towards me, I would not say oh, you're a man hater. Because it's just like calling someone a dirty little trick. It's just like a nay-nay-nay kind of name. And it's so personal and it gets things off on the wrong foot.

MARK CROMER
I know you're referring to the letter I wrote.

SUSIE BRIGHT
It's not just the letter you wrote. I mean, that, that kind of vocabulary gets used a lot by some of the old school porn people. And I'm like hey, first of all, these women that you're talking about, very often they have men in their lives that are their most beloved family members. They have husbands, friends and fathers who they care about very deeply. And they get so upset when you call them a man hater. They just flip out. And...

MARK CROMER
Listen, I want to clarify something.

SUSIE BRIGHT
(OVERLAPPING) Like saying, it's like saying nigger. It just sets the wrong tone.

(UNINTELLIGIBLE)
MARK CROMER
They set the tone when they call Larry a pig and say we endorse rapists. They are racists and anti male.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well in the kind of interviews or stuff that you do with me in Hustler Magazine, I hope you'll make it clear that we have some respectful disagreements about these kinds of...

MARK CROMER
I promise.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Believe me. I, I understand how angry you must feel, because I've felt the same way when these people have said things to me. I mean, just to tell you one of the more humorous ones, one of those assassination attempts that happened, and I was pregnant, and this woman like tried to knife me in the bathroom, I mean, we're talking about mental illness here.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And her group had passed out fliers before my show that said it was, it was at, in Minneapolis at The University and it said first there was slavery in The Roman Empire. Then The Holocaust. And now, Susie Bright comes to The University Of Minnesota. I mean, if that doesn't make you just go, like, oh, my god, who are these people? It's crazy.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I know that it's crazy. And it's been frightening to me. And it's been enraging to me. But, and, but I find that sectarian squabbling with them doesn't help me much. And so I try to, you know, work my way with people who aren't quite all the way there yet. And, I, you know, I do feel differently about some of those, those things that you describe.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I just, I just don't find those tactics work, and I, and I know. And, but it's some, in some cases I'm not really trying to change their minds. I'm trying to speak to other people who might be listening to them.

BRUCE DAVID
We will protect your position. You're a unique voice. Most people aren't that way.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well it's because they don't treat you like a human being who there is a possibility of rapport with. Or that there could be any scale of, of respect or dialogue with. And that's very frustrating. Well my thing is, you have to kind of rise above it and be the bigger person, and say something that maybe they will have to deal with intellectually.

MARK CROMER
I'm a liberal with conservative friends. The feminists aren't interested in dialogue with us.

BRUCE DAVID
Equating all men as being rapists, and that football should be banned, it becomes a personal issue with me.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well, you know, KTFK is certainly been swept off its feet by various secretarian trends at times. And it's gone up and down. Sometimes you wonder if they're still gonna be on the air. This is also the channel that, you know, brought The FCC down on every public radio's head when they broadcast, um, that play, The Jerk, after midnight. Do you remember this?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
They, they did this, um, they broadcast a play reading, late at night, after prime time, that included a lot of stuff about ass fucking. (LAUGH) And, uh, uh, the FCC went ballistic and tried to close down their station. Went to all the Pacifica stations. In fact, the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) extended up to Berkeley, where I was doing a show on KBFK, that was completely (WORD?) traffic time radio.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And we were given this list of songs we couldn't play any more. You know, no sexual or erotic innuendos whatsoever. I mean, it was absurd. The whole programming just went crazy, because they thought they were losing it all. They were gonna lose all their band width immediately.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
It was a really picky thing that The FCC did. But sometimes these stations have been on the cutting edge of sex, and other times, they've really been pulling out the, you know, the rear guard, you know, on this very dower, very puritanical, kind of laced with, you know, Stalinist moralism, about, about what sex should be like.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And that's, it's not, that's an unfortunate part of lefty politics. But it's, it's, it's idiosyncratic. It isn't the same for all of them, all of the time. It's also, if I might say something, I, I don't know why people aren't more outspoken about this, like I always think that Larry Flint is gonna say something more direct about it in his autobiographies. Maybe he has and I've just missed it.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But a great feel of the venom reserved for Hustler and Beaver Hunt and Hustler's sense of humor and of sexuality, has to do that it always had this working class, Southern flavor. And there was this sense of it, because it, it was trailer trash, it's disgusting, it's icky. If only it was sort of, high class, then nobody would say anything.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And everybody would accept you. But because you were deliberately proateriac (SP?) It's funny, because of course not all the people who work at Hustler come from working class backgrounds. But that was the feeling of the magazine. And, and a lot of people, and this happens with sex stuff all the time, that sex will be embraced if it seems tony and high class enough.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And, and people will put, you know, how many books or films have you see that somebody gave them a French title. They had nothing to do with French, but somebody thought it sounded, you know, like it was arty or high class. And so, and that they could get away with it that way. Well Hustler never did that. And a lot of the condemnation has come from saying you're just a bunch of, of good old boys. It's the Hee Haw Show, X rated. And you should be ashamed of yourself for being, for not epitomizing some sort of ivy league ideal.

BRUCE DAVID
I agree. The issue isn't being crude and vulgar.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Very often that needs to be pointed out, because so much of the condemnation that happens about sexual expression has to do with craft.

BRUCE DAVID
I think we have more in common with National Lampoon.

SUSIE BRIGHT
I, you know, I'm just trying to typify what the, the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Hee Haw was actually very wholesome. Sorry. (LAUGH)

MARK CROMER
What's the philosophy of (UNINTELLIGIBLE)

SUSIE BRIGHT
People make a toast. And they often say bottom's up, you know, when you hold up your glass of champagne or whatever, and say ching-ching. Well, you know, I was just at some party one night, and somebody said, or maybe it was, I don't even know how it happened. Somebody just said
(UNINTELLIGIBLE) and we all laughed, it was so cute and funny.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And, um, and I just started writing it on my, my books when people would ask me to autograph it, and make people smile and, and feel. It's just fun. Sometimes I'll get a guy who'll like say, well I don't have a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Like, Like getting a little too serious about it. And I'm like, but you do have a really, really big (UNINTELLIGIBLE) I hope you love it very much.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I mean, I don't mind somebody says, I would be the of person who would say, yeah, I have a cock. It's my clit. You have a cock, it's your clit. I mean, I, I take a pretty, um, uh, playful attitude towards these things.

MARK CROMER
You're not very optimistic about the younger women?

SUSIE BRIGHT
We've been in an reactionary era, since the abstinence movement, and the, and the kind of psychological fear, coming about from AIDS, and the whole Republican Administration's attitude towards sex. We're in a really bad place.

MARK CROMER
Where's it gonna end up?

SUSIE BRIGHT
Oh, God, you know, wouldn't I love to know. I mean, I'm just, you know, thinking every minute. I, you know, I do have to become an ex patriot. I'm confidently, you know, people dome to me a lot and ask about hey, you've got kids, are you trying to raise your kid not to feel damaged of fearful of sex the way that, you know, that the, the public education is set up to do right now.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And it really is tough. I mean it's, my daughter is going into high school right now, and I just see how the kids go in there and they feel like they have to be so cynical about everything. Not just sex, but everything. Like you can't show any joy about anything. Because everything's out to con you.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And it's all a big bore, and it's all a big trap. And life sucks. It's just this incredible depression, for their generation, that makes me, when I was my daughter's age, I was like, I was absolutely certain there was gonna be a revolution in this country. And that I would be, you know, walking through The White House, and it'll becoming this czar of pornography in a few days. I mean, I had so much hope.

MARK CROMER
I took drugs to open my mind. Today they take drugs to shut their mind.

SUSIE BRIGHT
Well they're, that's a real, another great parallel. And the drugs they do use, I mean, you know, I come from the, a hallucinogenic days. Now it's like can you get so drunk that you drown in two inches of water? Oh, well then you're a big success. I mean, there's not, you know, it's just, uh, it's such a tough world. And I, I feel myself being this protective mommy in these sort of strange ways.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
Like I think of my view of sexuality as being very wholesome. (LAUGH) And I think of the abstinence of proponents as being preferred. And (WORD?) And so, you know, the, not that, and, and people misunderstand me. See I'm even explaining this to you. Some people say, well what do you mean? You mean you think young people should be forced to have every day whether they like it or not?

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
I'm like no, of course not. At what point is it not trying to control people. And this authoritarian voices, it's to, and it's also to emphasize to people that sex starts inside yourself. It's a feeling you have about yourself and what excited you and what makes you light up and what revels you about life and touching and what makes you feel alive. It begins there and, and whether it's your cock or your clit, you're gonna start to feel things that make you want to connect with other people and connect with like in a sexual way.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
And that's a good thing. (LAUGH) Not a bad thing. So I'm, you know, I find myself very concerned about like I said, I think Britney Spears has done a lot more damage to the younger generation then Angela Dworkin has recently. Because it's so fake. It's total fake. And its not, and I (UNINTELLIGIBLE) with Britney personally. I mean, I feel sorry for her.

SUSIE BRIGHT (CONTINUED)
But that, that kind of image of what sexual success is, is so, is so misleading, and it's just as stupid as those romance novels that I was, you know, shown as a kid, about, you know, oh, you're gonna meet Mr. Right, you know. And he'll touch your hands and look in your eyes and everything will be perfect. And you'll be happy forever and ever. That was so ridiculous.

MARK CROMER
Thank you Susie. Can you send us that article?
(NON-INTERVIEW DIALOGUE)
MARK CROMER (CONTINUED)

Give me your address.

SUSIE BRIGHT

Heart

Feminism is a revolution, not a public relations campaign. -- Margaret Sloan-Hunter

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind. -- Andrea Dworkin

Susie Bright is not only a self-serving liar, but she's a bad lair too if she can't keep the story of her emergence as a leading misogynist apologist straight for a few months at a time. Of course, the people who read her blog are different from the people who read Hustler so different lies serving different purposes for different audiences I suppose.

Deleted for now.

Here is an apology from NION published elsewhere. "Jeff" from Not in Our Name registered to the Margins several days ago. I approved his registration, even though he's a man, figuring he'd post the same apology here, but so far he hasn't, possibly because he *is* a man.

Anyway, here is the apology, posted to the thread I started on the Michfest boards about this same incident.

***

notinourname
Member posted 06-16-2005 01:46 PM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"To Aura, an overdue apology"

Not in Our Name Steering Committee

notinourname.net/archive/apology-16jun05.htm

June 16, 2005

Recently, Aura Bogado published an article on Znet detailing her traumatic experience with Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt and, to a lesser degree, the part that the Not in Our Name project played in all of this ("Hustling the Left", 6/5/05). Ms. Bogado didn’t focus primarily on her interaction with Not in Our Name as much as she raised important questions around the relationship between pornography, sexism and the left, and we appreciate this. Upon reading her account, many of us, who were not aware that Hustler was waging a very personal and graphic attack on Ms. Bogado, were brought to tears with anger and frustration, for Ms. Bogado especially, and for the fact that we had anything to do with this experience.

Let us say first that we are sorry. We are fairly confident that there is little that could, at this point, ease any of the horrendous experience that Ms. Bogado has been through. Nevertheless, we feel it’s necessary to issue a sincere public apology for our part in this to Ms. Bogado, and to all of those who support Not in Our Name. If we are to do justice to the great work that many people have carried out under the banner of Not in Our Name over the last three years, we must publicly take responsibility for our role in all of this.

Aura Bogado's general description of the interactions between herself and Not in Our Name Los Angeles, as described in the first paragraph of her article, are regrettably factual.

In the midst of a national mobilization to get "More than a million into the streets" to protest the Republican National Convention in NYC last year, Not in Our Name activists were encouraged to reach beyond the "the choir" in our efforts to "Say NO to the Bush Agenda."

An unpaid volunteer who has worked with the Los Angeles chapter of Not in Our Name, on his own initiative, approached LarryFlynt.com for their support of this campaign. As a result, LarryFlynt.com published information on Not in Our Name's RNC protest efforts with a link to our RNC protest page.

Without collective input from any other Not in Our Name activist, he broadcast an email message to the Not in Our Name Los Angeles list, which included Aura Bogado, highlighting LarryFlynt.com’s political support for the RNC protest efforts. This broadcast email was the first time most Not in Our Name activists became aware of any connection with LarryFlynt.com.

The majority of Not in Our Name activists, both in Los Angeles and nationally, had decidedly mixed feelings about this development -- although it did fit generally within our campaign efforts to broaden outreach. LarryFlynt.com does host progressive news, however it is safe to say that most who knew about his connection to Hustler were uncomfortable with the endorsement.

We reached the overall consensus that because Not in Our Name had not discussed this development collectively ahead of time, LarryFlynt.com’s support for the Republican National Convention protests absolutely did not merit a dedicated email broadcast. It was simply wrong to highlight and showcase LarryFlynt.com above and beyond all of the other organizing efforts underway. The Not in Our Name internal debate over this included many of the political arguments that Aura Bogado makes in her article.

After reading the Not in Our Name Los Angeles broadcast email highlighting LarryFlynt.com's political support of the RNC protest efforts, Aura Bogado replied to Not in Our Name Los Angeles in order to register her opposition to Larry Flynt, Hustler, and the left having any dealings with them. Regardless of whether we agreed or disagreed with Ms. Bogado’s reasons for asking to be taken off the list, this was a private request that should have been honored, and if there was debate that was to ensue, it should have remained between Ms. Bogado and Not in Our Name organizers.

However, regrettably that is not what happened.

As Aura Bogado correctly describes in her article, what ensued was this volunteer’s "opening up" of his personal debate (which was taking place under the guise of Not in Our Name Los Angeles) to other parties.

This raises political questions for the movement, regarding how listservs and other information are handled. In the same way that it is nobody’s business who checks out what books from public libraries, it is also not anyone’s business who is on what email or mailing list, outside of the subscriber and list manager. Furthermore, it underscores the need for volunteer-run organizations to maintain a political orientation and standard towards carrying out what are often times viewed solely as administrative tasks.

It would also be wrong for us, as a collective, to place all of the blame on one individual who made a mistake. We are neither interested in defending his individual actions nor scapegoating him for something that should have been handled and promptly addressed by the collective at every step of the way. The difficulty in guiding a national grouping without policing or asserting hierarchy is no stranger to the left, but it is not enough to say "It’s very hard to do." In times like this, when we are all feeling the urgency to change the direction that our government is taking the world, we must strive in earnest to learn lessons rapidly, and do better.

Not in Our Name has apologized for this incident to Aura Bogado, and we do so here again publicly. This volunteer no longer has access to the Not in Our Name Los Angeles email broadcast list and email account.

While Not in Our Name regrets that this debate has come into being under such unfortunate circumstances on ZNet -- as this episode is certainly something we are not proud of -- what we find most appalling is the attack Hustler has waged against Ms. Bogado, giving her no choice but to respond publicly. We also feel very strongly that the questions she raised in her article should be debated and discussed more often throughout society, not just the left.

Our failure to respond quickly and appropriately has had direct painful and personal consequences for Aura. It raises issues for all groups in the movement who attempt to broaden reach beyond the safe boundaries of progressive organizations we have created. While we can generally count on Znet to host a respectful debate on the boundaries of issues such as sexual freedom and exploitation, when we venture beyond the safe spaces we have helped to create we have a responsibility to protect individuals from such exploitative dynamics.

Finally, Not in Our Name wants to address Aura Bogado's declaration of

". . . The profound connections between Not in Our Name and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). While Not in Our Name does not force their members to affiliate themselves in any way to the RCP, Not in Our Name was founded by C. Clark Kissinger, of the RCP, therefore many of Not in Our Name's organizers are members of the RCP."

Not in Our Name was not founded by C. Clark Kissinger, nor was it founded by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). However, RCP activists, along with many others, were part of the process that brought into being the Not in Our Name project. For clarification, C. Clark Kissinger has been an important contributor to the Not in Our Name Statement of Conscience since its beginning, as have others. The Not in Our Name Statement of Conscience has been organized as a separate organizational entity from the Not in Our Name project which has focused primarily on the wide publication of the Not in Our Name Statement of Conscience in major newspapers and periodicals across the country.

Not in Our Name does not ban supporters from being active in other organizations that fall outside of the Not in Our Name Mission Statement. We are a nonpartisan organization -- but the fact is that we do have more democrat, socialist, revolutionary, and anarchist supporters than republican and religious fundamentalists, due to the nature of our work. We welcome the continuing contribution of RCP supporters, and everyone else for that matter, to the Not in Our Name project based on our collective efforts outlined in the Not in Our Name Mission Statement.

Again, we offer our sincere apologies to Aura for our part in this situation. We hope that we can open dialogue and use this as an opportunity in the movement to help model conflict resolution. Even if we don’t agree, we absolutely must actively listen and support others against unprincipled attack. As the Bush administration sharpens its sword, there is an ever-growing need for the movement to embrace vast numbers of people and raise their consciousness. We can be sure that if we are to move forward, there will likely be mistakes made from many different groups and political bents. The lessons we learn from these mistakes are a critical part in the process of changing a grim reality to a hopeful future. May we all learn quickly how to do this together, and choose our alliances thoughtfully.

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Feminism is a revolution, not a public relations campaign. -- Margaret Sloan-Hunter

I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind. -- Andrea Dworkin