Letters to the Editor
JHinOakland
Published Letters: 11 Editor's Choice: 1
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Is it real or is it BDSM?
[Read the article: "Bitches-and-hos" lesbian subculture]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Having spent the last many years of my life in BDSM subcultures, I read this and wonder whether what I'm seeing here is a consensual enactment of dominance/submission.
A lot of folks play with sexism and other oppressive dynamics for erotic fun, then leave them behind when egalitarian communication is what's called for. It's a way to get the cave(wo)man turn-on of this sort of behavior, without having to live with it day in and day out.
I'm not prepared to judge this issue until I see how these women treat each other at home. I'm wondering if the club behavior is a persona, as erotically "meta" as a leatherman's chaps and studs.
This is all outside my cultural milieu so I don't know for sure about these particular women. What I *do* know is that in erotic power play, things are almost never what they seem.
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The lights go dark on Broadway
[Read the article: A move that's likely to fail]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Has anybody considered what will happen in NYC when they have to close down the multi-Tony-winning smash "Spring Awakening," whose showstopper is called "The Bitch of Living"?
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consciousness raised
[Read the article: "Show me your hose"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think the world might be a better place if more heterosexual men had the chance to find out what sexual harassment feels like. However, making it a job requirement seems unreasonable.
It's a lesson wasted, really. These firefighters are too angry -- and rightfully so; they've been abused by their employer -- to be able to learn anything from their experience.
I wonder if one of them might be willing to write a firsthand accounting of what it felt like, for Salon or some other publication? I'd certainly read it.
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"Domestic discipline" = "erotic spanking"
[Read the article: Spare the rod, spoil the wife]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Call it whatever you want, it's still kink.
It's very typical of BDSMers, particularly those who live their BDSM roles 24/7, to insist that what they do is "real" and not roleplay. Which is shocking to outsiders, of course -- especially when the role has echoes of real-world oppression (black people who like to bottom to plantation-slave scenarios, Jews who dig Nazi roleplay, et al).
But the fact is that this *is* consensual erotic roleplay. "Domestic discipline" is explicit code for spanking play, regardless of the gender of the participants -- you could just as easily find "domestic discipline" groups whose stated purpose is female-supremacist.
In other words, your initial instincts were correct. These are folks who are dressing up their spanking kink in Christian dogma. Not my kink, but I'm all for more eroticism in the world. If they're happy, I'm happy for them.
- Janet Hardy (aka Lady Green, author, "The Compleat Spanker")
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Look to the classics
[Read the article: What do you call a female cuckold?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Penelope sat at home weaving while her husband was out having adventures. Maybe "Pennies"?
People get married and stay married for all sorts of reasons. The asexual wife who would just as soon her husband gets his needs met elsewhere became a stereotype for a reason. Who's to say these women aren't getting exactly what they want -- stability, status, companionship, whatever -- out of their atypical marriages?
Janet Hardy
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Rape can be funny, but this wasn't.
[Read the article: Is rape off-limits for laughs?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And for anyone who wants to debate the first part of that thesis, allow me to offer the "Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life" scene from Young Frankenstein as evidence.
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a doll is a doll
[Read the article: Your girlfriend seems so fake]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If the RealDolls are conditioning their owners to treat human women roughly, then perhaps we should quit giving baby dolls to little girls? I seem to remember being pretty brutal to mine when I was four or five, and yet my actual children, now grown, seem to have survived my parenting.
Seriously, it's a rare human who gets all his or her needs met by other humans. We have the flickering images on the tube to entertain us, our dogs and cats to make sure we get plenty of touch, our sex toys to get us off, the symbolic humans in books to stimulate our imaginations -- the RealDoll is simply an extension of any or all of those. And nobody I know has any trouble distinguishing between any of them and the actual humans we meet on the street or at work or school or church.
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regarding Seal Press
[Read the article: Seal Press scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]To the couple of people who have decided that the problem is that Seal Press is tiny and hence unprofessional:
Welcome to today's independent publishing scene. I too run a small independent press, and mine's even smaller than Seal: I run it singlehandedly. And we're small for much the same reasons -- an independent distributor, which is the channel that enables small publishers to compete with the giants for shelf space at Barnes & Noble, declared bankruptcy and burned them for a lot of money. Seal used to be a lot bigger, and I hope it will be again someday.
I don't know Seal's sales figures, but our bestselling book, _The Ethical Slut_, is currently at about 75,000-80,000 copies sold -- not exactly New York Times bestseller list material, but a resounding success by the standards of even the largest publishing house.
Desktop publishing has made page layout a lot easier, but it hasn't made paper or printing any cheaper. There have always been small presses, because someone needs to disseminate the stuff that's too niche or too edgy to interest the big guys. Remember, Virginia and Leonard Woolf ran a small press too, and without it you might not have seen the work of one of the century's most important feminist voices.
However, it is absolutely true that micro-publishers don't generally go out looking for a particular kind of author. By the time I finish going through the slush pile, negotiating the contracts, editing the manuscripts, doing the layouts, supervising the production, spearheading the marketing, doing the bookkeeping (ugh), answering the phones and sweeping the floors, aggressive action toward a diverse author list -- desirable though I know it may be -- simply tends to drop off the bottom of the list.