Pillow Talk

“Is the very act of a woman spreading her legs and wanting sex degrading?” asks Lisa Palac in “The Edge of the Bed.” She argues against the assumption of both anti-porn feminists and right-wing conservatives that images of female desire are inherently exploitative or oppressive, questioning why we can’t see such images as “powerful and liberating” instead. As she points out, “if we’re going to examine degrading images of women, why limit ourselves to pornography? What about, say, laundry soap commercials and their depiction of women whose self-worth revolves around removing stains?”

Welcome to the world of female porn-meisters, mainstreamed masturbation and proud prostitutes. These three books, one a disarmingly charming memoir, one a provocative academic study and the last a “secret history,” together take us on an excursion into the wilder territories of female sexuality, desire and identity.

Strap yourself in--or on, if that’s your pleasure--and get ready for the ride of Lisa Palac’s life. Raised a good Catholic girl, she had never even seen a vibrator until, at the age of 20, one fell on her head while she was dusting a closet shelf in a rented apartment. An anti-porn feminist herself at college, Palac was further appalled when, ferreting in her boyfriend’s wardrobe for a sweater, she released an avalanche of hard-core magazines and videos. She self-righteously informed her mortified beau: “Either this sleazy shit goes or I go.” In the end, neither went, and Palac tells us she even came--to a video titled “Aerobisex Girls.”

Palac, newly turned on to the potential of porn, approached it with all the zeal of a convert. She made a graduation film that left her fellow students rolling on the floor in laughter at what she considered its “most meaningful and erotically provocative dialogue.” It also prompted her father to storm out of the auditorium, turning her graduation celebration into an emotional Hiroshima. From this inauspicious start, and after a string of hysterically disastrous day jobs, Palac went on to become a senior editor of the San Francisco-based, sex-positive lesbian magazine On Our Backs, the founding editor of the oddly conceived and short-lived publication Future Sex, the producer of the CD series “Cyborgasm” and a prominent spokeswoman for feminist pornography.

Palac could never take the world of porn quite as seriously as it sometimes takes itself. While working at Future Sex, Palac played a prank on the media, whose tireless fascination with the notion of virtual reality sex (their interpretation of the title of her magazine) was beginning to bore her. She offered readers a vision of “Love Machine” techno-lingerie so advanced it was able to survive even nuclear attack. The joke sparked a virtual invasion of the Future Sex office by reporters from all over the world, unaware they’d been hoaxed, and all hoping to try on the mythical sex suits for themselves.

Alongside her tales of life as a pornographer, Palac documents her personal sexual odyssey. She recalls how at 7, while watching a TV program in which a prisoner of war was tied up and whipped by his captor, she “got hit by an all-over tingly crazy feeling.” She got so worked up that she gnawed on her uncle’s hi-fi, leaving two big tooth marks on the cabinet and getting herself into “a whole lot of trouble.” Palac, you might say, was a natural submissive.

She links the fascination she developed as an adult for sexual sadomasochism to her strict Catholic upbringing, its ritualized guilt, confession and Communion. “I’d taken the dynamic of love and punishment, which terrorized me as a child and made me feel helpless--kneeling down and sticking out my tongue to receive his body . . . doing penance to show my love--and turned it into a powerful source of erotic pleasure.” Referring to its glorification of martyrdom and penitence, she provocatively labels the church “the biggest S / M community in the world.” This part of Palac’s memoir may disturb some readers. Underneath her sometimes jokey tone, however, she speaks with complete sincerity. As she comments in a later chapter, “I’ve worked hard to reconcile my politics with my sexuality but they rarely fit together, all nice and neat. If they did, life would be easy. Sex is right up there with love and death and truth--raging with contradiction.”

Whether describing the literal ups and downs of a porn shoot or her personal adventures with rent boys, cybersex and beyond, Palac is engaging and articulate. She can also be thigh-slappingly funny. “The Edge of the Bed” is confessional literature at its best. The author uses her personal experiences as a springboard from which to dive into the larger issues of sexuality, pornography and religion in America today. She also gives us the real facts on cyberporn, debunking Time magazine’s famous 1995 cover story on the subject, argues that snuff films are an “urban myth” and ferrets out the final taboos in our sex-saturated popular culture--female masturbation being one of the big ones.

Palac certainly has her finger on the button. So does Jane Juffer, author of “At Home With Pornography.” Women’s appropriation of pornography is a central concern of Juffer’s work. If Palac is exceptionally at home with pornography, we discover through Juffer’s work that she is hardly home alone.

“In the two decades of debates around pornography,” writes Juffer, echoing Palac’s concern, “. . . we remain mired in a fruitless back and forth about the status of women in relation to the genre: hapless victims or transgressive agents?” She asserts that the question is no longer a “useful one, if indeed it ever was.” As a scholar, Juffer is more concerned with the ways in which pornography is consumed and produced by women, and how it has been brought into the domestic sphere by technologies such as video, cable and the home computer.

Juffer’s take on the issue is decidedly more academic than Palac’s. She peppers her text with words like “valorization,” references to the likes of Michel Foucault and the language of cultural studies. She loses me a bit when she says things such as, “I have theorized genre as a regulated dispersion, in which the objects that together constitute the genre of domesticated porn exist not as a coherent unity but in a field regulated at a number of dispersed sites.” I think that means she is happy to consider a range of apparently unrelated texts, from the Playboy Channel to lingerie catalogs, as part of the genre of “domesticated porn.”

Still, her subject matter, her pop cultural references and her personal interjections keep it lively. Juffer discusses how in recent years women have been more active in producing erotica for their own enjoyment and shows how this has affected the nature of erotica itself. She chronicles the rise of literary porn written by women for women, showing how books like Nancy Friday’s collections of female fantasies helped pave the way. She penetrates the hidden meaning of the word “bedroom” in “Mars and Venus in the Bedroom” and trains her telescope on the planet from which John Gray really hails. Gray, Juffer notes, “says women can fantasize, but only about their husbands; women can masturbate, but only in preparation for sex with their husbands.” He suggests, she concludes, “that the only fantasy material a woman needs is right there beside her, even if he’s snoring.”

Juffer’s wit is no less sly than Palac’s, and she too is a sharp observer of the media. She notes, for instance, that promotions for mail-order vibrators are among the only advertisements aimed at women that “do not play on women’s insecurities and attempt to make them buy in order to conform to certain standards of beauty.”

In one of her most fascinating chapters, Juffer goes behind the velvet curtains of the Victoria’s Secret empire. She entertainingly deconstructs the Victoria’s Secret catalog as a “kind of free soft-core porn” and analyzes exactly what it is about merry olde England that gets our silky knickers into a twist. She asks why a company with headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, prints the word “London” so prominently on its mailings and speculates on why there have traditionally been so few black models for VS lingerie.

“There seems to be a remarkable nostalgia for . . . Victorian England in the 1980s and 1990s,” observes Juffer, “a harking back to a time when sex was more domestic in the contained sense of the word, when boundaries between public and private were more clearly defined, and where certain rules of class and etiquette were more rigidly enforced.”

As she points out, to the power-dressing middle-class career woman there’s something appealingly naughty and sophisticated, even liberating, about wearing sexy lingerie under her business suit. It’s as though her public, professional role is somehow inherently defeminizing. Her little “Victoria’s Secret” reminds her that while she’s in the boardroom now, the bedroom is not far away.

The reality of life as a woman--working or not--in the actual Victorian era, of course, was rather different from the fantasy world of Victoria’s Secret.

In Victorian times, American society no less than English society squeezed itself into the corsets and restraints of sexual repression. Women suffered most of all, and not just in the bedroom. As Lael Morgan points out in her beautifully written and impressively researched “Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush,” there were American laws that allowed girls to be married off at 10. The law forbade women in America from purchasing property without their husband’s consent--even when spending their own money. Though the Industrial Revolution offered women jobs outside the home, they were paid so much less than men that legitimate work was hardly an ideal path to independence. For some of the most adventurous and spirited women, the red light districts of the frontier lands of the northern gold rush offered a unique and tempting path to freedom and self-reliance.

You had be tough to get to the Yukon or Alaska and even tougher to survive once you got there. Many were those--male and female--who perished just in the attempt to reach the North. But the far North was not just a place where you could make a fortune if you were lucky, it was a big open land with lots of room for big open personalities. The “good-time girls” were characters who went by nicknames such as “Rough Rider,” “Diamond Tooth,” “Oregon Mare” and “Pile Driver.” The good-time girls were also gunslingers, entrepreneurs, big spenders, lovers, fighters and philanthropists, and some accumulated fortunes rivaling those of the luckiest miners. Free for the most part of the parasitic pimps and legal restraints suffered by their peers in the United States, they were, Morgan tells us, “extraordinarily independent women, not only for their time but by today’s standards as well.”

Morgan explains how despite the fact so little has been written on these women, they were very much a part of community life up North from the start. With hundreds of men to every woman in the mining towns, prostitution was seen most of time by even the judiciary as a “necessary evil.” Even the “respectable” women of the settlements welcomed the establishment of red light districts--if only to keep themselves from being constantly, lewdly propositioned. The line between “respectable” and “sporting” was always a bit blurry anyway--a number of the “good-time girls” eventually married into society. Others devoted themselves to good works, nursing the sick and contributing to community welfare, so that, while they remained prostitutes, they earned acceptance.

The individual stories of these women and the men who loved them make for fascinating reading. The abundant, luscious photographs of these amazing women, the “cribs” from which they worked, their customers, their lovers and the frontier towns they helped to pioneer are themselves worth the price of the book.

Even as we prepare to enter the 21st century, there is much pious hypocrisy as well as honest confusion surrounding the subjects of pornography and prostitution--and the subject of women’s sexuality is at the heart of it. Personally, soap powders have never turned me on.