Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz (San Francisco, 1978)

Take Back the Night revealed the Madonna/whore dichotomy that inspires pornography. The first national “Perspectives in Pornography” conference was an important opportunity to include women visual artists in political organizing. Ariadne: A Social Art Network, invited artists from around the state to offer events, performances, and exhibitions for the conference planned by Women against Violence and Pornography in the Media. Motion, a San Francisco performance collective organized a panel of female eroticism and art and created rituals to open and close the conference. Micki McGee and Mary Lynn Hughes designed a bus poster and printed postcard series on violence. The Feminist Art Workers created a tour/art performance for women artists traveling from Los Angeles.

On Saturday evening Lacy and Labowitz, along with Monica Mayer, Rosemarie Prins, Betsy Irons and Ann Klix created a mass public performance for 3000 women marchers who left the conference and. marched on the Broadway strip, San Francisco’s porn district. There they greeted a brightly-lit float with chants and ululations. Holly Near sang “Fight Back” as a two sided float moved slowly through the crowds—its front a Madonna bedecked with flowers and electric candles after the Santa Semana celebrations in Latin America and its back a three headed lamb carcass, like the goddess Hecate, whose open gut cavity leaked layers of black and white pornography. Marchers ripped the pornography from the backside of the float as it went by.