Inept

3 notes

What if the sexual arousal of the audience is, in itself, an artistic, cultural, or political aim?

The example that leaps to my mind most readily is On Our Backs, the “by lesbians, for lesbians” sex magazine published in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Some of the work in On Our Backs certainly had serious literary, artistic, political, etc. content — Dorothy Alison wrote for them, as did Sarah Schulman, Jewelle Gomez, Sapphire, me, and other serious writers. Ditto for the photography. But plenty of the work in that magazine was porny porny porn porn. It existed to get women turned on, and to get them off. Period.

Yet that, just in itself, was an act of serious political defiance.