Les Belles Dames Sans Merci

Crabs in a bucket, and the 80s implosion of the sex positive femmedom

My publishing partner Debi handled money pressure different than I did. I always wanted to throw in the towel, give up, throw ourselves at the public mercy.

Honey Lee in her first Big Sur Bubble Bath. That's her toes reaching out to the heavens on the right. Today, January 16, is her birthday. She would have been 78 today. RIP.

If we could hire an ordinary press to print On Our Backs, it would have cost us $5000 in 1980’s money. But because we were women, printing a radical feminist erotic magazine, there was only one printer who would “take the risk”— they produced gay men’s sex magazines too— and they charged $1 apiece for a 48-page black and white magazine. That’s before you even get them bundled into trucks.

I would call up printers, looking for a reasonable quote, and urge them to look at the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe in the New York Times¹— to no avail. On Our Backs’ taste in photos was more “avant-garde feminist art show” than “Times Square back-room”— (though hopefully …