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Art What’s On

Detail

In 1984 in San Francisco Debi Sundahl, Myrna Elana and Nan Kinney launched On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian, with Susie Bright first as advertising director and then editor. The backdrop scenario was the 1970s-80s Feminist Sex Wars that inflamed and polarized feminist activism, cultural production, and academia on issues around sexuality in general and heterosexuality, pornography, penetration, BDSM, butch/femme roles, and sex work in particular. The name came as a takeoff on the Washington, D.C., radical feminist antiporn news journal off our backs, while the subtitle was a citation from Playboy’s subtitle ‘Entertainment for Men.’ The first issue’s centerfold with and by the photographer Honey Lee Cottrell as ‘Bulldagger of the Month’ was another pun on Playboy’s ‘Pet of the Month.’ Humour and social commentary were central as much as delivering political and aesthetic issues around sexuality, erotica, pornography.