Profile of a sex radical.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Lesbian, sadomasochist author Pat Califia

"The things that seem beautiful, inspiring, and life-affirming to me seem hateful, ugly, and ludicrous to most other people."

So writes author Pat Califia in the preface to her book of erotic fiction, Macho Sluts. Califia describes herself as a "sex radical" and argues that gender and class injustice "are based mostly on sexuality--hatred of the body, the state's interest in controlling our pleasures."

Califia is in the tradition of philosophers Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, the gay pioneer Harry Hay, the poet Allen Ginsberg, the journalist Ellen Willis, and the novelist Dorothy Allison, who calls Califia's essays "lucid, intelligent, brave, and true." This tradition holds that sexual liberation is indispensable to true freedom, and that the repression of sexual pleasure is one of the oldest of the master's tools. "There is no task more radical, more in keeping with a vision of a free society, than changing sexual relations," writes Willis in her book Beginning to See the Light. "But for the most part, the left has refused to take sexual politics seriously."

Califia stretches the boundaries of this tradition with her defense of sadomasochism and her controversial critique of age-of-consent laws. Her work raises a central question for leftists: Does the goal of sexual liberation conflict with our goal of eliminating exploitation?

Califia sees no conflict.

"We need the forbidden and the unspeakable not only because it has intrinsic worth, but because it reminds us that we live in a digitized culture where we're taught to crave food that does not nourish us, cookie-cutter relationships, cliches disguised as inspiration, religions without ecstasy, second-hand violence, third-hand sex, two-dimensional lives that are three sizes too small," Califia writes in Macho Sluts.

Califia says frank talk about sex is particularly important for women--it gives women access to their own pleasure. And for Califia, pleasure comes in many forms. "The minority culture controls us by limiting our vision and denying us all possible images of the women we might become," she writes in the introduction to her first book, Sapphistry.

Califia is an original in the gay community. For sixteen years, "I've been standing on the tails of sacred cows, ringing a very large bell," she says. As a lesbian sadomasochist, a minority within a minority culture, she has repeatedly defended gender outlaws. Her essays assert the political importance of sex workers, butch/femme lesbians, and sadomasochists. Califia has aligned herself with "disenfranchised people and topics, even if that meant I would stay poor and be widely hated," she writes in Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex.

Califia has been widely hated, but she has also been widely loved. Sapphistry garnered "wheelbarrows full of vicious reviews," largely because it treated sadomasochism and butch/femme role playing as acceptable forms of sexual expression, she notes. But since its first printing in 1980, the book has been one of Naiad Press's top sellers. And the advice column Califia has written for The Advocate since 1981 is immensely popular.

"I've had more people stop me on the street to say, `Thank you for your work. You saved my life,' than I've had people who hiss and say, `Get out of my way,' and make it clear that they don't approve," she says.

Along with her other battles on behalf of sexual freedom, Califia has fought against the censorship of all forms of pornography. And she has had some intimidating foes. "A system of domination and submission, pornography has the weight and significance of any other historically real torture or punishment of a group of people because of condition of birth," writes anti-pornography feminist Andrea Dworkin.

"As a social process and as a form of speech, pornography promotes not freedom but silence" writes author and lawyer Catharine MacKinnon. "Rather, it promotes freedom for men and enslavement and silence for women."

Unlike feminists who see pornography as inherently degrading to women, Califia has consistently defended it. She does so not only because any censorship violates the First Amendment, but because she believes pornography, like other disdained pleasures, is a form of resistance.

"Pornography is as unpopular with most governments as seditious rhetoric because it has a similar function," she writes in the introduction to Forbidden Passages: Writings Banned in Canada. "Political dissidents voice their discontent with business-as-usual; they say out loud that the emperor has no clothes. Pornography is the great brawling voice of sexual frustration and panic."

Califia insists that the current, popular anti-porn ideology is not just a theoretical issue: "Anti-porn activists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon don't just want to picket porn shops and organize Take Back the Night marches. They want to codify their philosophical position and turn it into state law and fact. In Canada, we have an example of what would happen if feminist anti-porn theory...