Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia Page A

protect themselves. They are poor because they give everything away. But it’s the john who has to give something away to the whore. He must tell her his secret desire if he is to get his money’s worth. The whore in turn gives nothing away, laughs at him while she keeps her secrets and pockets his cash.
    In this country, machismo is a survival mechanism by which minority men try to preserve their self-esteem and their culture. In the best sense of the word, it describes a person who is outnumbered, misunderstood, and outlawed who nevertheless strives to preserve a sense of pride and honor. Someone who has machismo insists on his right to dignity, and defends himself and what belongs to him even if it is a hopeless cause, even if he will be punished for making the attempt. Women are not supposed to have machismo, to be macho, but then, we’re not supposed to be sluts, either. And without machismo, a slut is just a commodity. In the midst of theoretical discussions, it’s important to remember that the state has power to take action against obscenity, and does not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value; appeals to prurient interests; goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters; and depicts or describes in a patently offensive way, explicit sexual conduct of a specifically defined nature—that book is obscene, and it is contraband. Reading this won’t make you an outlaw (it’s not that easy, sweetheart), but if you enjoy it, you might think about why the law is trying to get in between you and your prurient interests.
    I’m afraid that the opprobrium of right-wing, pro-censorship feminists is not the worst thing that will confront this book. We are in the middle of a crackdown on porn, especially S/M porn. For my birthday this year, I took a trip to Times Square to watch some loops in the peep show booths at my favorite porn store. This store used to feature a great diversity of material, and was always friendly to women. But all their S/M stuff was gone from the peep shows and the magazine racks. They had moved all their kinky magazines and videos to just one store, to protect the rest of them if that one got busted. If I wanted to look at an S/M movie now, I would have to buy the whole tape. I checked out several other adult bookstores on Times Square. Most of them were not selling any S/M material.
    I was very upset, but not because this meant I would be cut off from a primary source of arousal. The typical commercial S/M flick or magazine does not turn me on. Most of it is made by people who think S/M is weird and sick, and just want to make some easy money off the leather freaks. Many of the actors and actresses perform in S/M movies or pose for bondage photos because they get paid as well as they would if they did hard-core (penetration, cum shots, cock-sucking), but they don’t have to do any genital sex. Most S/M porn doesn’t even require full frontal nudity. I check out adult bookstores for the occasional gems—the movies that star friends of mine, the magazines that feature professional dommes who really enjoy what they do and do it well, the ’50s books put out by Mutrix, magazines illustrated by Stanton and other classic bondage and fetish artists, F. E. Campbell’s novels, reprints of John Willie’s drawings. Even this comparatively rare, high-quality material doesn’t include many of the staple images of my eroticism. The kind of woman I try to be and the kind of woman I cruise just isn’t sexy to straight sadomasochists.
    What is most upsetting about this sudden disappearance of all the corny magazines full of sloppy bondage and the grainy movies about leather-corseted women who don’t know how to aim their whips is the message it sends out that S/M has become even more forbidding, beyond the pale, and dangerous for me to pursue. It’s as if it suddenly became