Laura Antoniou

Laura Antoniou (born 1963) is an American novelist.

"Unsafe at Any Speed or: Safe, Sane and Consensual, My Fanny"
Article in Pucker Up (publisher and editrix: Tristan Taormino), Issue 1, Winter 1995, pp. 12-14


 * My fantasies have never been safe ones.
 * p. 12


 * Fantasies aren't reality, I know, I know, I know. Except when they are. Except when you make them into reality.
 * p. 12


 * And fuck this, I didn't come out of years of fantasy, rescuing myself from a toxic parent and guilt-tripping myself through anti-sex feminism, politically correct lesbianism and socially-programmed homosexual activism so that someone else can make my goddamn sex life into a slogan.
 * p. 12


 * Safe, sane and consensual — what do those words really mean? Assimilation, that's what.
 * p. 12


 * Fighting off a yawn (how rude), I wander past two girls earnestly discussing their upcoming scene. Red means stop. Yellow means slow down. Blue means I want to talk to you about something. Green means you can go faster, harder. I don't tell them about fisting, piss and cock-sucking, why feel older than I am? But I want to tell them about muffled yelps, screams, and the moment before the tears start to flow, that terrible moment when you know that one more sharp pain and you won't be able to hold them back. I want to tell them about watching someone's control slip away, clutching a crotch to find that there's pussy cream mixing with drops of panic-piss, about the redness of a face when the sobbing has become regular. I want to thell them about the pleas of the damned, the cries when someone doesn't know when it's going to stop, or how, only that they want their mommy, they want their master, they want to surrender and fall to the ground and feel a boot at the back of their neck. But I smile and nod and don't say a fucking thing.
 * p. 13


 * What is happening to my sexuality? It's cold, it's pasionless, and what's worse, it's dull. John Preston was right. SM has become a nice, sweet alternative to heavy petting, and the leaders of this SM "community" want us to be the Elks or some other animal-named civics association, gathering to sell expensive clothing and raffle tickets, congratulating ourselves on how nice we are.
 * p. 13


 * This used to be about sex. The literature of my people was pornography, filled with cries for mercy, drama enacted on people without prolonged negotiation, partners engaged in a dance in the middle of a bonfire. Now, it's 300-page manuals about how to make sure nothing bad will happen.
 * p. 13


 * What goes on when people overfetishize safety is that they're relapsing into that old frame of mind that what we're doing is BAD.
 * p. 14


 * I can hear the whines — "But it's BAD to do these things without consent!" No fucking kidding. It's bad to conduct medical experiments on people without consent, yet I don't see the AMA adopting the slogan, "Healthy, Helpful and Consensual!"
 * p. 14


 * The trouble is, SMers are allowing themselves to be defined by what they are not. We think, "Oh, so many people believe that we're all murderers and rapists, and we have to explain that we're not!" Uh — so, a slogan for the gay civil rights movement should be "Normal, Non-threatening and Not After Your Children"?
 * p. 14


 * Fact is, I'm tired of being told what's OK for me. I'm fucking tired of multiple safewords, and sometimes I'm tired of safewords altogether. I don't want to negotiate everything to death, I want to be surprised, or surprise someone. I want to be afraid — I want to cause genuine fear.
 * p. 14


 * There are times when I just want to walk through a room, grab that girl, slap her hard and make her cry. Push her down and fuck her mind over twice as hard as her body. Sometimes, I want to be that girl.
 * p. 14


 * And the harder the SSC ["safe, sane and consensual"] gets pushed at me, the harder I feel like pushing back. Passion, that's what I'm into, passion and blood and honor, so powerful that it pounds through my veins and blinds me, so terrible that I can't look away. Danger, Dementia, and Denial. I want to hear that panic, scream "No, Please!" and struggle through the haze of pain and pleasure and all that stuff that goes on between the moment we touch eyes and the moment when we both collapse and try to catch our breaths and break the silence.
 * p. 14


 * My fantasies have never been safe ones. Don't fuck with me, unless you understand that.
 * p. 14