Rogan: We've been reading Dorothy Allison's
Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature, from 1994, and oh MAN is this book exactly what we need right now. Dorothy Allison is a lesbian who fought hard to be a kinky femme Southern lesbian from a poor background, despite the heated sex wars that judged her as "misguided, damaged by incest and childhood physical abuse, or deliberately indulging in hateful and retrograde sexual practices out of a selfish concentration on my own sexual satisfaction" (24). ("Retrograde" seems to have been their version of "problematic." Ditto "male-identified" which means something hilariously different now, at least in my circles.)
She talks about the contempt other lesbians showered her with, how real loves and desires were twisted, shamed, and ignored so as to fit the feminist theory of the time. She talks about how shitty it feels, getting that from your own people over totally harmless desires. This thirty-year-old book still feels so relevant to the sexual purity politics of today, just with the vocabulary terms switched out.
As someone who just got kinkshamed out of my housing (yes, that is why we moved, I'm willing to say that publicly now that I'm safely out), this book is a comfort to me. It's perversely reassuring to know that for my whole life, queers have been sexually judging each other so intensely for the smallest, dumbest things that don't actually hurt anyone. Allison was called a tool of the patriarchy, a shill for pornographers. I was called a child molester. Same song, different verse.
( Sex, desire, and Coming In or Staying Out. Matter-of-fact discussion of kink, sex, and porn behind the cut, plus people's contempt for all of the above. )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
