My dear friend Thomas has some really interesting thoughts about the 10 Zen Monkeys sex panic interview I posted a day ago, and talks about being a porn writer while dating and living in the very sex-negative, anti-porn feminist climate of circa-1980 Santa Cruz, CA (home of UC Santa Cruz). Image from the truly terrible porn flick Club Satan: The Witches Sabbath, via Evil Now. Snip from Thomas’ Panic for Satan: How I Learned to Freak Out and Wrote Lots of Porn Anyway:
The interview is about the broader schema of sex panics and kiddie porn, but I find the Satanic angle really mind-boggling because I remember it so vividly from the ’80s. I remember being told by a fundamentalist friend that by purchasing Dungeons & Dragons books, even if I wasn’t worshipping Satan, I was giving my money to people who did. I remember listening to the famed back-masking radio program of Jacob Aranza, who played “Stairway to Heaven” backwards (“There’s no escapin’ it… it’s my sweet Satan”) and claimed that the “Hotel California” was the Church of Satan in California Street in San Francisco (on which street I later lived). Most vividly, I remember Ms. Magazine, in January 1993, running a cover that asked me to “Believe It: Child Ritual Abuse Exists” — AFTER I had already read, in numerous sources, the (almost inarguable) debunking of many of the 1980s Satanic ritual abuse claims… many, not all, sure but once you’ve proven that the world has gone stark raving mad, how much slack do you give its claim that the Belgazarans from Theta Omicron Eleventyseven are trying to get through its tinfoil hat?
This Beta Panic occurred after I had met numerous women who were sexually abused as children, most of them by family members and none of them in a ritual setting. (The women weren’t the only ones abused, but I guess guys didn’t talk about that shit in the ’80s. Since then I have met plenty of guys who were abused, physically and/or sexually, as children, some by family members and some by non-family members, none of them in a ritual setting). Several of these women, and many other self-identified feminists I met from 1986-1990, believed not only that Satanic ritual abuse existed, but that it was a feminist’s duty to vigorously pursue its exposure. More importantly, some of them believed that to question the claims of Satanic abuse’s purported victims was concretely the same as questioning all abuse victims, participating in a culture of silence that had kept women down for thousands of years.
I also remember my affair, circa 1988, with one of those women, with whom I was madly in love for reasons I remember only after half a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Red or Black works, but Blue Label’s way too classy. She told me that by writing porn novels with titles like All the Way in the Hay and Hot Wife in Heat, I was directly contributing to and causing — her words, not mine — the rape of little girls. Her words, exactly, not mine.
Link.
