Reviews for Some Women

The average rating for Some Women based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-04 00:00:00 Daniel Hong I liked this book and got perhaps more out of it than I expected to, for reasons I'll go into. If what I say below is canted more to the critical than the laudatory, that's probably because I've been in the BDSM scene myself for a few decades now and have become familiar with a lot of the issues & perspectives covered in this wide-ranging anthology of writing. {It may or may not be germane to anybody reading my comments to know that I'm heterosexual, white, genetically & socially male, and identify as a top with dominant tendencies. In addition, I've lived in San Francisco for over twenty years and have played a minor but public role in what I think of as the het/bi BDSM scene here. I was raised by a feminist hetero mother to be a feminist hetero man and, for what it's worth, have been dubbed an 'honorary lesbian' at various time by a handful of dykes. Some of my best friends, etc.}. This collection benefits and suffers from the inevitable (and perhaps intentional) unevenness inherent in a work written by nearly forty different hands. There is some excellent writing here, as well as some dreary cant. There are witty observations as well as utterly generic declamations of identity politics (one woman actually writes something along the lines of, "we're here, we're kinky, get used to it!" without any detectable irony at all). There is wise, insightful self-reflection, and there is somewhat infuriating, self-important drivel. This is to some extent a matter of historical perspective. This collection is approaching its twentieth anniversary and is therefore unavoidably dated. Some of the essays now read more like time capsule descriptions of battles fought in the past, rather than the full-throated declarations of purpose and conviction that they were undoubtedly intended to be when first published. Much of the best writing contained herein is by editor Laura Antoniou herself, in her brief introductory essays preceding each thematic section of the book. I'd say the single best piece of writing, unsurprisingly, is the generous fifty-page Introduction by Pat Califia (now Patrick). As always, Califia's active, engaging, coruscating style sheds much light and not a little heat. His writing stands the test of time, no matter the original context in which it was produced. Probably the most dated pieces in the book are the most explicitly political ones: as noted above, these are mostly valuable now (NB: from my perspective) as historical markers of distances travelled. Written about twelve years after the essays in the classic SAMOIS collection Coming To Power, these pieces show the evolution that had occurred since the time that Califia et al. had taken their stand against the hatred and contempt heaped upon leather-women by the broader feminist sisterhood. The standout among the more political pieces is Cecilia Tan's 'An Open Letter From a Masochist to a Feminist', an excellent pr�cis of the enduring tension between one canonical notion of feminist principles and BDSM practices. Conversely, the most immediate pieces are those that recount personal experiences with S/M or D/S. One of them, 'The Fine Line' by Anonymous, is the most harrowing account of dominance and submission that I've ever read. If the description of what the author experienced is literally true (and it certainly reads that way), it's the single most hair-raising cautionary tale imaginable of what can happen when two people journey as deeply into D/S as their needs and desires compel. An amazing story, much more powerful than any fifty shades of anything. Robin Sweeney's 'Be A Bottom, Not A Jerk: Notes on Bottom Pride' would be required reading in my imaginary BDSM pre-req course for aspiring pervs. Droll, slightly exasperated wisdom from a woman who's seen a lot of the missteps that bottoms still sometimes take. In particular, Sweeney puts her finger right on an issue that still plagues the scene (at least the het/bi scene I know): the notion of 'removable consent'. This is when a bottom or sub decides, after a scene the particulars of which they'd previously agreed to, that they actually didn't consent, or didn't 'really' consent, or weren't in a position to consent, etc. This still happens, and it's probably the single greatest reputational and potentially legal risk to tops and doms. Just because you feel bad or freaked out two days after the scene doesn't mean that you're a victim. If limits were violated or safewords ignored, that's one thing; if you were having a great time at the time and only later decided that you'd gone too far, that's a different matter altogether. The very next essay in the book, however, Susan C. Peacher's 'Am I Less?', is an unintentionally self-parodic bit of whining about how she'd been treated by various doms and tops. Apart from the dated and therefore amusing ubiquitous use of 'wimmin', 'wommon', and other earnest-but-ridiculous radical feminist attempted neologisms, this essay is marred by an almost total lack of self-responsibility. A lot of her problems seem to have stemmed from an inability to simply say, "I like to play the bottom physically, but I'm not a submissive." There are a couple of wince-inducing editorial oversights (Amy Marie Meek, International Ms. Leather 1993, assisted by Houseboy Renfield, notes that SM has come a long way since the Marquis de Sade's heyday during the Renaissance. What's 250 years between friends?), but on the whole the essays are well-written�for what they are. Some of them read like they were first written as introductions to programs or pitches for organizations, not like essays for a book. Some feel like they might have been introductions for different books, perhaps for something the essayist hoped to publish on her own someday. Finally, there are the two concluding pieces, 'The Orb and the Scepter' by Catherine Wolf, and 'My Life as Lesbian, Domina and Witch: A Personal History', by 'Ms. C'. These are, in a word, bizarre. I would not want to have to sit next to either of these women on a bus. Both attempt to explain how the authors have decided to go about instituting goddess-centered female supremacy organizations and mind-sets. "We have discovered," Wolf self-effacingly claims, "that through the sexual and philosophical teachings of the Orb & Scepter [Wolf's female dominance group], male sexual potential is vastly improved. (For example, our longest sustained erection was twelve hours�) �indications are that the lifestyle even has a positive effect upon the aging process (but only if it is practiced in a certain way). That this is nonsense, albeit hilarious nonsense, should go without saying. I'm not sure exactly why Antoniou felt compelled to include this delusional spew, but it does have a certain documentary utility, if nothing else.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-18 00:00:00 dexter nuro How to be a more open minded and powerful Goddess