Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) was a feminist anti-pornography activist group based in San Francisco and a major force in the wider feminist anti-porn movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. For BDSM history it matters because the group treated sadomasochism as ritualized violence against women, picketed SM performance, and collided head-on with early lesbian SM organizers—one of the opening fronts of the Feminist Sex Wars.
Founding and Street Actions
WAVPM formed in January 1977 after the San Francisco Women’s Centers Conference on Violence Against Women. Founding members included Laura Lederer, Lynn Campbell, Diana Russell, Kathleen Barry, and Susan Griffin. The group became highly active in San Francisco, picketing strip clubs and peep shows in the city’s red-light districts. Its first public political action was a picket of the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, a strip club and live-sex venue. The specific target was the theater’s Ultra Room, a live show of women performing sadomasochistic acts on one another. WAVPM objected to “women beat[ing] each other for men’s sexual stimulation.” The organization also ran educational tours of pornography stores and peep shows and anti-pornography slide shows—tactics later copied by other anti-porn feminist groups, notably Women Against Pornography in New York City.
War on BDSM and the Clash with Samois
Like later anti-pornography feminists, WAVPM was strongly opposed to BDSM, reading it as ritualized violence against women, and took an especially active role in opposing SM inside the lesbian community. That put them on a direct collision course with Samois, an early lesbian sadomasochist group that WAVPM rebuked and whose events they sometimes picketed. Samois members insisted their SM practice was compatible with feminism and argued that the sexuality WAVPM prescribed was conservative and puritanical. Samois confronted WAVPM openly; the exchanges were among the earliest battles of what became known as the Feminist Sex Wars. For leather and SM readers, that conflict is not a footnote—it is the public record of lesbian feminists refusing to let anti-porn orthodoxy define their consensual kink as violence.
National Conference, Take Back the Night, and New York Spin-Off
In November 1978 WAVPM organized the first national conference of anti-pornography feminists in San Francisco. The conference closed with the first organizational Take Back the Night march, drawing on early-1970s grassroots efforts. Andrea Dworkin spoke at the rally; roughly three thousand women then marched through the red-light district to protest rape and pornography. After the conference, Susan Brownmiller approached Lederer and Campbell and urged them to come to New York to help organize Women Against Pornography. Lederer stayed in San Francisco to edit an anthology from the conference presentations; Campbell accepted and left for New York in April 1979. WAVPM’s energy faded after Campbell’s departure, though the group remained active for several more years. At its peak it claimed over a thousand members.
Decline, Dissolution, and Legacy for Kink Culture
Internal fights over non-violent pornography, free-speech issues, and attempts to reconcile with sex-worker and lesbian BDSM activists—plus fundraising failure and mounting debt—dragged the organization down. WAVPM disbanded in 1983. Its legacy for adult SM culture is double-edged: it helped nationalize anti-porn feminist street tactics and Take Back the Night spectacle, and it forced early lesbian leather groups such as Samois to articulate a feminist defense of consensual sadomasochism in public. Related maps include Feminism and BDSM, feminist criticism of BDSM, Samois history, Women Against Pornography, Dworkin and Brownmiller-era anti-porn politics, and the longer Sex Wars that still echo whenever activists equate negotiated power exchange with patriarchal violence. For bdsmwild readers the file is clear: WAVPM was not a neutral observer of leather culture—it was an organized opponent that picketed SM shows, opposed lesbian SM, and lost the internal feminist argument to debt, free-speech conflict, and communities that refused to apologize for what they did in private with consent.
