Meeting Susie Bright

I feel incredibly privileged to have spent the last two days with “sexpert” Susie Bright, learning from her and seeing validated in her words and wit many perspectives on feminism and sex that I share or have wanted to share but feared would render me politically unsound (a.k.a. hypocritical, self-serving, or “un-p.c.”).

Let me share a few things I learned (or had confirmed). Note: this is my paraphrase, so I may not get it quite right. You want to read Susie Bright in the original, to be sure, and I admit fully that these articulations are written to meet my own needs and according to my means of expression.

(1) We need to ask more directly and more often why violent speech so protected and sex speech so prohibited?

(2) Pornography vs. erotica as an artificial (and classist) distinction that should be replaced by good vs. bad or arousing vs. unarousing.

(3) We can reject the MacKinnon/Dworkin “porn makes rapists” type arguments because there is not only no causal evidence but also because the real issue is the larger culture: why focus on porn when even more overt representations of objectification and violence against women are featured at every multiplex and playing on every X-box? Also, glorification of human sexuality in porn—for all its limitations (sexism, ageism, racism, classism, ableism, etc.) must be seen as in some ways radical and positive in our puritanical, anti-sex culture.

(4) The g-spot, that spongy tissue inside the front wall of the vagina, actually houses the “stalk” of the clitoris (like the “stalk” of the penis); the back of the tissue/stalk can be reached through anal stimulation.

(5) Every major study of human sexuality since Kinsey has been defunded or otherwise made impossible, so we have no reliable statistics whatsoever about any aspect of sexuality in this culture since the 50s. WHY?

Thanks, Susie, for coming to Middle Tennessee and spreading the gospel of sexual goodness!