Susie Bright > Quotes

“Behind every erotic condemnation there's a burning hypocrite.”
― Susie Bright

“…The shocking thing about any stripper gathering, I discovered, was that you have never heard women talk so fast and so explicitly about money in all your life. They make the guys on the trading floor on Wall Street look like a bunch of pansies.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“Here was the real scandal of On Our Backs photography: We were women shooting other women — our names, faces, and bodies on the line — and we all brought our sexual agenda to the lens. Each pictorial was a memoir. That is quite the opposite of a fashion shoot at Vogue or Playboy, where the talent is a prop…

When we began our magazine, female fashion and portrait models — all of them — were shot the same way kittens and puppies are photographed for holiday calendars: in fetching poses, with no intentions of their own.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“What's so wonderful about experiments is that often they don't work. They do blow up in the oven; the Bride of Frankenstein does crawl out and strangle you with a black leotard while you shout your last prayers. It's only once you've tasted your own shocking failures, harebrained ideas, and sudden departures that you will realize something quite wonderful.”
― Susie Bright, How to Write a Dirty Story: Reading, Writing, and Publishing Erotica

“I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers’ revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“Americans had to tie every radical aspiration into a puritanical knot.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“Radical feminists didn’t need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“There was one rumor that “Susie Bright” and sex theorist “Pat Califia” were one and the same, and that this individual was not actually a woman at all but a pimp hired by an entity composed of the Mitchell Brothers and a Japanese porn syndicate, which was selling women as sex slaves overseas.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love?”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“I wanted to be Emma Goldman. I wanted to digest Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebooks like biscuits. I felt like Harriet the Spy, looking for a dumbwaiter to hide in, scribbling down all I witnessed.”
― Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

“When a young woman discovers her power, both sexual and intellectual, she unleashes her own voice, her righteousness. The first things she has to jettison are the Devil and any religious representation of her gender as stained or subservient. She's just naturally going to be attracted to Goddesses or witches or, as in my case, a scientific understanding of the body and a historical view of sexual politics.”
― Susie Bright, Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression

“Sex is one of the few honest places inside us; it doesn't know how to lie, even if we change the story for the public.”
― Susie Bright, Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression

“Let's face it, we can't shop for intelligence, creativity, or freedom.”
― Susie Bright, Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression

“Sexual creativity is a mystery that will never be solved by commercialism.”
― Susie Bright, Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression

“Sexless stories about human relationships are dishonest. How did anyone write about love, life, or death, and manage to avoid it so neatly? It was a hoax, and thankfully behind us.”
― Susie Bright, The Best of Best American Erotica 2008

“It didn't occur to me that they would never take my gender and age seriously-- that as long as I was a young woman, they projected their sexual feelings on me, regardless of what I did.”
― Susie Bright, Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression