Salon.com > Donna Minkowitz

The softer side of S/M

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:35:00 +0000

At the age of 20, Stephen Elliott writes, nearly penniless and staying at a scuzzy Amsterdam youth hostel, he meets a woman with "a bored expression on her face" who was "old compared to me, and not pretty. She had thick shoulders, a football player's body, and short spiky hair that had gone grey in patches ... Her skin was the color of clay." Oh, and she's very pockmarked. Yet Elliott's interested in her because he's seen her torturing a "soft and shapeless" man at a local S/M bar.

He encounters the woman hanging out by the hostel's lockers, where two men are trying to force their way upstairs so they can beat up a guest who owes them money. Outside are lots of muggers and pickpockets, "gays in chaps and shirtless women cruising" and "junkies [who] sat on bags of garbage sticking their arms." Elliott tells the clay-colored woman where he saw her before (she asks, "What were you doing in that bar?") and, although he's terrified he will have to walk back to the hostel alone -- because "there was no safe way back to the hostel at night" -- he goes with her for a drink, then to her hotel room.

“The Gnostic Bible,” edited by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 21:00:00 +0000

Imagine a Bible that begins like this:

God said, "I am the Lord thy God, and there are no other gods but me." Then a voice came out of the deepest heaven and said, "Thou liest, god of the blind!"

Or think about what church or shul would be like if the sacred text said this:

Then the authorities came up to their Adam. When they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became very excited and enamored of her. They said, "Come, let us sow our seed in her," and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches, she became a tree, and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully.

Gnosticism is the most radical religion I know, because it is the only one that entertains the idea that God is evil -- and wants us all to rebel against his bullying, rapacious, jealous rule.

The left’s answer to the Osbournes

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 20:00:00 +0000

Warning: This article contains scurrilous, unsubstantiated gossip about American leftists. Unfortunately, irresponsibly, unethically, but in some cases deliciously, that constitutes most of Susan Braudy's new book about Kathy Boudin and her family of gorgeous, superconnected, intimidating, idolized and hated radical superstars.

No, I'm not talking about her family of sorts in the Weather Underground, or later, in the "white, anti-racist, anti-imperialist" brigade of compañeros who annoyed every other progressive within scolding distance in the late '70s and early '80s. If you were around and on the left during that time, you probably heard these folks (in organizations called the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, the May 19th Communist Organization, and the Women's Committee Against Genocide) delivering stalwart but incomprehensible chants like "Sekou Odinga, live like him," and shouting that your own organization promoted "genocide" because you did not endorse violence tomorrow to usher in a special, all-black nation that was supposed to take over six Southern states and live segregated from whites.

“The Blindfold’s Eyes” by Dianna Ortiz

Tue, 19 Nov 2002 17:13:00 +0000

My first exposure to torture was the comic Nazi on the laugh-tracked POW comedy "Hogan's Heroes" hissing, "Ve have vays of making you talk." My second exposure was the excitement of watching Batman and Robin suspended above boiling oil. American children's media has a surprisingly high number of references to torture, but our adult pop cult has even more -- just count the gorgeous scarred chests and backs on an average episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Don't even get me started on music videos. If you judge by our entertainment media, Americans find torture jazzy and titillating. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But what's truly weird about it is that we love watching depictions of an experience less likely to happen to us than to almost any other population in the world. Americans are not crueler than other people, or even more sadomasochistic. Why do we so like to fantasize about the terrible things that the rest of the world -- oh, for example, Central Americans, Africans, and Bangladeshis -- can readily undergo without the benefit of fantasy?

The living and the dead

Thu, 04 Oct 2001 21:51:00 +0000

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the few writers I know who excels at both political fiction and epic fantasy. She's brilliant at both. But unfortunately, she's not always brilliant at both at the same time, and indeed, bringing them together is very, very hard. The intuitive demands of myth-making are only uneasily combined with the keen analysis required by a search for justice and equity.

As an avid Taoist, Le Guin knows this better than anyone. Suspect all correctives, look askance at attempts to restore benevolence and righteousness, Le Guin might say, yet her two new books, "Tales From Earthsea" and "The Other Wind," have been written as a sort of corrective to her stunningly inventive Earthsea Trilogy, originally published between 1968 and 1972.

In the new story collection and novel, Le Guin drastically revises the politics of her archipelagan fantasy world, changing its outlook on gender, class and hierarchy. Can a fantasy world have an outlook?, you may ask. Certainly -- just ask yourself if the elves are good in Tolkien, and if his trilogy believes in kings. Le Guin, who is now 72, has also drastically revised Earthsea's worldview on death.

My favorite author, my worst interview

Thu, 03 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

It was the most unpleasant interview I've ever done.

And one of the most instructive.

Science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card wrote one of my favorite books of all time. So when he came out with a sequel, I was delirious with the desire to interview him.

"Ender's Game," which won the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1985, is the best book I have ever read about violence. Who would have thought it would result in an interview in which I wanted to throttle the author? "Ender's Game" is also about loving your enemies, a goal so important to me that I wrote a book about it myself. How could I guess that interviewing the author would make me question that entire project?

A strangely empathic novel about 6-year-olds forced to be military commanders, "Ender's Game" brought together a fan base that might reasonably be expected to be at one another's throats (in some cases literally): progressives, children and soldiers. It was cherished by middle-schoolers and adults harrowed by child abuse; it was passed around by Gulf War bomb-droppers and used as a text by the Marines. And as for me, well, I'm a Jewish lesbian radical who wrote a book about what I have in common with the Christian right, so Card's paradoxes are right up my alley.

Vampiros lesbos

Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Dear Joss Whedon,

Please. Please. Please.

You have power now. You like lesbians. For Christ's sake, you're a guy who minored in feminist film theory!

Do this one thing with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for us and we'll never even complain about the sucky macho politics of "Angel."

Make Willow gay.

You heard me. You must know that millions of your lesbian- and gay-adoring fans (some of whom are straight) held their breaths the other week when Willow held hands with that cute Wicca girl so they could make really, really strong magic together! (Afterward, the girl told Willow she was "powerful" and "special.")

It's not just that Alyson Hannigan looks adorable with that red dye job, or that she made nerds and people who read Latin sexy forever. There are fundamental principles at stake.

You suppose you're radical because you made Willow a lesbian in that "It's a Wonderful Life" alternate-reality episode where she was also a torturer and a vampire. Well, my Laura Mulvey-reading friend, that's just not good enough!

Sympathy for the devil

Thu, 18 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

I often write about violent people, and the way I write about them usually makes people mad. People tell me my work makes them queasy because I obviously spend a lot of time with homophobes, killers and rapists -- and a lot of time thinking about them and writing about them. Weirdest of all, I apparently feel concern for these creepy people, even though I'm the kind of person they target.

Someone once said all Southern literature is about either admitting or denying one's "whippedness," and the same thing definitely applies to my writing. A member of several oppressed groups (gay, Jewish, female, more below), I have always related strangely to all threatening people and things: violence, hatred, terror, the site of our undoing. The place we were originally hurt, and where we may well be hurt again. Loss. Enemies. What can never be repaired or restored. The dark place. The place that preys on us, years after we've left it behind. I have always wanted to go there.

Am I brave, or just a masochist? I've always wondered.

Russell, Aaron and me

Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the news takes you farther than you really want to go. After I read the blood-spattered story in the New York Times a year ago, I found myself identifying with Matthew Shepard's killers, the boys who tortured him for being gay. Now that Aaron McKinney is about to go on trial for the murder, I still identify in a way that makes me flinch. I am gay. I hate violence. And I never tortured anybody. Why would I feel any sense of kinship for the creeps who hit Shepard with a pistol butt?

I've been channeling them ever since the murder. I can see them in the bar, as he pays for their drinks, as he gets affectionate. They're 21 years old, and they are starting to get stirred up in a way that's unusual for them, heavenly and enraging all at once. There is nothing wrong with what Matthew Shepard is doing; he is a beautiful boy who is lonely and romantic and who thinks he may finally have a date. In Laramie, it's hard to meet people if you're gay. It's even hard to meet people if you're straight.