Opinions of a Sexpert

By Andi Zeisler, Bitch Magazine. Posted March 11, 2006.

Susie Bright was writing about sex way before every men's magazine and college newspaper boasted its own dirty-talking columnist. As an author, pornographer, advice columnist, blogger, and radio-show host, Bright's career combines one part Emily Post, one part Larry Flynt and one part Fran Lebowitz.

Bright was one of the founding editors of On Our Backs, the groundbreaking lesbian porn magazine whose tongue-in-cheek title and subversive photos rendered it, in the '80s, Women's Bookstore Enemy No. 1. Since then, she's written a slew of books on sex, culture, politics and motherhood, and edited a bookstore's worth of smutty-writing collections. There are few folks who've had the kind of front-row seat to our culture's wacky, way-conflicted dealings in sex and politics as Bright, and she's an excellent source of perspective.

Andi Zeisler: In your essay collections Sexwise and "The Sexual State of the Union," you wrote about the hypocrisy of our government meddling in the sex lives of its citizenry. You were one of the first people to talk about politicians in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way as these people whose values are so misaligned with their actual behavior. Do you think it's become more obvious how hypocritical government policy is when it comes to legislating and policing sex?

Susie Bright: One of my favorite fairy tales is "The Emperor's New Clothes." And it seems like, for a long time, puritanism in America has had this very tight class structure that dictates who can be unmasked sexually. I mean, you can always take some poor wanker and make him out to be a dirty old man. But historically, you could never do that with the rich, the protected, the elite. And yet here they were, making the decisions about what everybody else got to read or look at.

I always wanted to make people see that sexual freedom is actually one of the ultimate tests of a real democracy: Do you have the nerve, the courage, to let people educate themselves, make their own decisions about their sex lives? Or are you going to take the mommy-and-daddy-know-best position, where [the government] gets to look at everything, prescreen and then decide what everybody else is going to do?

I think a lot of people misinterpret puritan leadership as being a group of people who want to outlaw all sexual expression. No. They're very interested in looking at it themselves. They want the full range of emotions about everything; they want access to all the esoteric knowledge. But they don't want you to have it, and that's where it becomes so important that sexual speech is the No. 1 suppressed speech in America. Anybody in this restaurant can stand up and say that they wish Bush were dead, or that they'd like to take an ax to Donald Rumsfeld, but when it comes to sexual speech, we are so parochial, so repressed. So as far as I'm concerned, in the recent couple of decades since I've been writing, the unmasking, the closet doors that are being kicked in, like it or not, it's been a heyday for me.

AZ: Has that evolution made you reassess your own ideals?

SS: I was one of those people who could say that the Bill Clinton years were very good to me [laughs] in the sense that I had so much opportunity to write about what I call "lovers' ethics." It was a great opportunity to talk about, How do we do right in sex? And I don't mean do right in terms of the Judeo-Christian idea, but [in terms of] an ethical sexual philosophy that does right by the community and at the same time feeds your soul.

We haven't had that role model from the left wing of American politics, either, because many of them [are] just as puritanical as conservatives. They often feel like -- and a lot of radical feminists felt this way too -- until the revolution comes, keep your legs crossed, because you can't have a genuine sexual feeling under this insane society.

We've talked a bit about Ariel Levy's book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, and the aspects of what I'll call "ambivalent sex" in it -- experiences that look from the outside like exploitation, but are also learning experiences. We allow for learning experiences in every other arena -- we give them that generosity. Nobody says, "Was that school that you went to fabulous? Or was it pure hell?" You say, "Well, it was a mixed bag." And that's OK. So why can't sex be like that too?

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