In January 1977, the San Francisco Women’s Centers Conference on Violence Against Women led directly to Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, WAVPM. Founding members included Laura Lederer, Lynn Campbell, Diana Russell, Kathleen Barry, and Susan Griffin. Through the late 1970s and the 1980s the group was a main force in feminist anti-pornography organizing. In San Francisco it picketed strip clubs and peep shows in the red-light districts, ran educational tours of pornography stores and peep shows, and gave anti-pornography slide shows. Other anti-porn feminist groups later copied those street tactics, notably Women Against Pornography in New York.
WAVPM’s first public political action was a picket of the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre. The theater had strip shows and live sex. The specific target was the Ultra Room, a live show of women performing sadomasochistic acts on one another. WAVPM’s objection was that women beat each other for men’s sexual stimulation. Reading sadomasochism as ritualized violence against women set the tone for the fights that followed with early lesbian SM groups.
Head-on with Samois
WAVPM opposed BDSM with particular energy inside the lesbian community, and that put it on a collision course with Samois, an early lesbian sadomasochist group. WAVPM rebuked Samois and sometimes picketed its events, calling the practice ritualized violence against women. Samois members insisted their SM could sit with feminism, and they called the sexuality WAVPM prescribed conservative and puritanical. They confronted WAVPM in public. Those exchanges were among the earliest battles of the Feminist Sex Wars.
For leather and SM readers the fight is a public record, not a side note. Lesbian feminists refused to let anti-porn orthodoxy define their negotiated kink as violence. Through the argument, groups like Samois stated a defense of negotiated power exchange inside feminism.
A national meeting, and Take Back the Night
In November 1978 WAVPM organized the first national conference of anti-pornography feminists, in San Francisco. The meeting closed with the first organizational Take Back the Night march, drawing on grassroots practice from the early 1970s. Andrea Dworkin spoke at the rally. About three thousand women then marched through San Francisco’s red-light district, protesting rape and pornography.
After the conference, Susan Brownmiller urged Lederer and Campbell to come to New York and help organize Women Against Pornography. Lederer stayed in San Francisco and edited an anthology from the conference talks. Campbell accepted and left for New York in April 1979. After Campbell’s departure the group’s energy dropped, though it stayed active in San Francisco for several more years. At its peak it claimed more than a thousand members.
1983, and what the fight left behind
WAVPM disbanded in 1983. The reasons stacked up: internal fights over non-violent pornography and free speech, attempts to reconcile with sex workers and with lesbian BDSM activists, failed fundraising, and rising debt. The legacy for adult SM culture cuts two ways. The group helped spread anti-porn feminist street tactics, and the spectacle of Take Back the Night, across the country. It also pushed early lesbian leather groups such as Samois to say, in public, a feminist defense of negotiated sadomasochism.
WAVPM was not a neutral observer of leather culture. It was an organized opponent. It picketed SM shows and opposed lesbian SM. It then lost the argument inside feminism to debt, to the free-speech fight, and to communities that would not apologize for what they did in private by agreement. The echo is still there whenever activists treat negotiated power exchange as patriarchal violence: feminism and BDSM, criticism of BDSM, and the longer Sex Wars.
