*Backflips into the sun*

WAP deemed the short story objectifying and anti-woman. Their problem was that Nestle had recounted her narrator “Joan” enjoying a butch/femme sex relationship with a male-passing Puerto Rican taxi driver (“Esther”) “whose lover was a prostitute.” Worse, Nestle had included brief mention of a dildo.

The feminists objected to the following (ostensibly vile and misogynist) sentences:

With extreme tenderness she laid me down…. I was trying so hard to be good for her … I turned to touch her, but she took my hand away from her breast. “Be a good girl,” she said. I knew I would have to work many months before Esther would allow me to find her wetness as she had found mine. The words, the language of my people, floated through my head—untouchable, stone butch.

I can scarcely believe that any “sisterhood” would seek to deplatform this text, which describes a transmasculine dyke with “hands like butterflies shaking with respect and need,” for misogyny. Yet in this period, anti-porn feminists “fought really dirty,” or so the leather-community feminist veteran Patrick Califia recalls. “They attacked anybody who argued with them as an advocate of violence against women, a child molester, or (gasp) a sadomasochist. They weren’t above calling employers, publishers, or dissertation committees to inform them of the ‘perverts’ in their midst.”

Nestle received a call to let her know “that if I write about butch-femme relationships in the past, I am O.K., but if I am writing about them now in any positive way, I am on the ‘enemy list’ … a ‘reactionary,’ ‘heterosexually-identified Lesbian,’ ‘believer in patriarchal sex.’”]

Black Velvetopia level concepts by Peter chan

Black Velvetopia level concepts by Scott Campbell