Pat Califia

“SM is an art. Doing it well requires more than a bag full of expensive whips and exotic electrical toys, a closet full of fetish clothes, or a basement filled with bondage furniture.”

“If a young person is surviving by trading sex for the thing they need, what useful purpose is served by criminalizing that activity? Doesn't everybody have the right to try and survive? it might cost more to create shelters or group homes, drug treatment programs, schools for emancipated minors, counseling services, medical care and job training. But such programs can salvage human lives that are otherwise going to be cut short or wasted. If we can afford massive kiddy porn stings, why can't we afford to do this? Is it because, as a society,we obtain more pleasure out of trying to control young people, and punishing the minors who escape our control, than we would out of taking good care of kids who are in trouble?”

“It should not be a crime to discuss any idea, however outrageous ”

“Insisting on maintaining dignity at all costs is paralyzing. Mistakes are informative, and so is playing the fool”

“If you live in a society that wishes you didn't exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible.”

“Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom. ”