Notes on pornography

If we choose to involve ourselves in the anti-pornography movement, it would be helpful to keep in mind that many of us were the early victims of vice squad raids, that some of us are lesbian prostitutes and sex workers, that we have a long history of surviving and finding eachother in places other women were too frightened to walk through, that sexuality has always been our frontier. My lesbian history tells me that the vice squad is never our friend even when it is called in by women; that when the police rid a neighborhood of 'undesirables' the undesirables have also included street lesbians, that I must find another way to fight violence against women without doing violence to my lesbian self. I must find a way that does cooperate with the state forces against sexuality, forces that raided my bars, beat up my women, entrapped us in bathrooms, closed our plays and banned our books. Shame and guilt, censorship and oversimplified sexual judgments, the refusal to listen and the inability to respect sexual difference is not the world I have fought to create. The real challenge to all of us lesbians and feminists is whether we can eliminate violence against women without sacrificing woman's erotic complexities. I do not want to become a dictator of desire, not to other lesbians and not to gay men who have the courage to listen to their own voices.
- Joan Nestle