From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Susie Bright on the Hill/Thomas Affair
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 12:45:06 GMT


	In her article "Sex in the Single Pest" in _Susie Bright's
Sexual Reality_, Susie Bright has a distinctive take on the Anita Hill
/ Clarence Thomas affair. She noted that in much of Europe it was
reported with as straight a face as possible with the insinuation that
Americans have a strange thing about sex, and she got the title from a
BBC commentator mentioning in this connection "sex pests", and who
asked whether being a sex pest should be illegal or whether it would
be a further infringement on individual rights to do so.

	She suspected that the real issue was that Clarence Thomas was
somehow sexual, and that he had to be cleared of being that evil
thing. Long Dong Silver was already a familiar name to her, although
she was a tiny bit surprised when a French coal delivery man (she had
been staying in a little French village at the time) told her about
the Long Dong Silver movie _he_ had seen. That pubic hair on a Coke
can bit she considered a total joke. But that Congressional committee
took it all too seriously.

	She criticized a lot of feminists for seemingly taking the
position that women must be defended from men's gross sexual tastes.
According to her, Catherine McKinnon should have taken some position
like Clarence Thomas can read skin mags on his time, but not on Anita
Hill's. Instead, she took the position that men are _evil_ and
pornography makes them that way, a position Susie Bright considers
worthy of Carrie Nation repressiveness and protectionism.

	She also stated that if Clarence Thomas had stated:

	I really do love watching and talking about sex, and Long Dong
is my favorite cocksman hero -- but I would never bring this up to
embarrass or intimidate an employee.

	SB stated that she would have believed him, because (according
to her) being sexual would have cost him his Supreme Court job. She
also charged that if he had only confessed to harrassing Anita Hill,
they would have forgiven him.

	SB also indicted (not surprisingly) the 1986 Meese Commission
for its combination of prudery and Peeping-Tom prurience. She claims
to have gotten three orgasms from the porn included in the
Commission's report.

	And in the chapter "When No Means It Wouldn't Be Like This",
she takes on the question of "date rape", arguing that this is not as
simple a question as it might seem. She criticized one campus feminist
for wanting to put up a sign stating "When I Say No I Mean No". She
said that it sounded like Nancy Reagan or Tipper Gore in their
daughter's bedroom. Why not "Why Can't Women Say Yes Without Duress?",
she asked. She also stated that the whole "Feminism Means No" movement
represents the puritanical side of the sex debates over the last ten
years, and that a woman's "No" may reveal a lack of confidence about
sex. She went on to detail an encounter where she wasn't quite sure of
what to do.

	She has a lot of other entertaining anecdotes, like how it was
once thought Politically Incorrect for lesbians to use dildos when
making love (consider what a dildo most resembles, and you will see
why)(she herself is a dildo connoisseur [connoisseuse?]). She also
tells about going on Phil Donahue as part of program on gay people who
have straight lovers. The gay man she was with stated that his
girlfriend appreciated that he knew what it was like to be _entered_,
emotionally as well as physically, which was the biggest applause
line. And elsewhere in the book, she admits to some bisexuality, even
to producing a child the old-fashioned way. When she was pregnant, she
put on a button she acquired at a gay festival called "I got that way
from kissing boys" and she remembers people looking at her very
strangely one time when she stated that straight sex involved a big
responsibility -- the ability to produce children -- that she had not
been accustomed to considering for much of her life.
-- 
/Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
/lip@s1.gov
Newsgroups: alt.feminism