Question 1:
What inspired you to become vocal about female sexuality -- a specific event, a general frustration, a philosophical imperative, a sexual desire . . . ?
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Question 1: What inspired you to become vocal about female sexuality -- a specific event, a general frustration, a philosophical imperative, a sexual desire . . . ? |
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 I guess I don't consider myself all that vocal about an entity known as "female sexuality," so much as someone who's constitutionally in the habit of trying to figure out what's been brushed under the rug. In this respect, I'm not sure I ever warmed to Ms. magazine, which always struck me as p.c. even before the term was invented; nor did I cotton to endless discussions about the joys of masturbation and self-exploration. (The notion of tasting my own menstrual blood is about as appealing to me as drinking a cup of my own urine.) Very little of the available thinking on the erotic life of women that I imbibed during high-school and college struck me as really to the point -- which is that sexual fantasies and fears are inherently wildly idiosyncratic, as well as elusive. I came from an Orthodox Jewish background and went to religious (co-ed) day schools up until college, and what I mainly noticed was that girls defined themselves through boys, which for reasons not entirely clear to me I was never willing to do. Or they defined themselves against the opposite sex, which is what I noticed when I went to Barnard in the early '70s. Everywhere I turned sat a budding lesbian, taking notes in Political Science just like I was, but having mysteriously abjured a choice I hadn't yet fully considered, much less rejected. I wrote an essay about a romance with sexual spanking, called "Unlikely Obsession," which appeared in The New Yorker Women Issue (although it wasn't written specifically for that issue, and was originally not supposed to be in it) because I had never read anything by a cerebrally-inclined woman which even remotely admitted to, much less expressed, those kind of longings. The furor of response which the piece generated has convinced me that the context is at least as important as the subject: i.e., you can say anything you want in an S/M publication or book that's specifically devoted to the subject of sexual fantasies, but to try and beam a psychological flashlight (which is what I hoped to do) on one's personal erotic map in a literary magazine was to step across unacknowledged but very tight boundaries in a way that aroused a lot of uneasy interest. Still, I can't say this wasn't clear to me before I published the essay, as was the unstated law which says that sex is not a suitable high-brow subject, unless it's being written about by an Updike or a Mailer -- male intellectuals, in other words. I think the people who had most trouble with my piece were female intellectuals, who had thought of me as one of them until I went public with the content of my libidinal character. 
- Betty's response to Daphne |
Question 1 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 2 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 3 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 4 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 5 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 6 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale |
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