Talking about pornography is uncomfortable; at times it scarcely seems possible. There are many barriers to having substantive and useful discussions. Sometimes literally so, with spam filters blocking any email that even mentions the word from reaching its destination.
Is porn a scourge or is it a tool for liberation? Between these two poles, so much gets confused or goes missing. Any discussion about the space where porn and sex work meet will be complex, the two topics being both separate and entwined, and such conversations are not made any easier by the conflation in the public sphere of sex work and sex trafficking. As Cherie Deville, a renowned adult film performer, observes in the New York Times podcast The Argument, porn seems to be ‘the only industry where the legal and illegal side of that industry is thought of as the same, when it just couldn’t be further apart’. On Tina Horn’s podcast, Why Are People into That, sex worker and activist Juno Mac points out that trying to clear up misunderstandings is at the heart of the political debate around sex work, and the same can be said about pornography. They are both topics that can’t be boiled down to a conversation about sex or sexual violence.
I want to find a new way to talk about porn. As a sex-work-inclusive feminist I support sex workers’ self-determination, I recognize sex work as work, as well as the importance of questioning the framing of it as ‘work’ in order to understand what people in the sex trades are fighting for (following discussions such as ‘Sex Work as Work & Sex Work as Anti-Work’, moderated by Lorelei Lee in 2021). I don’t think a conversation about whether sex work or pornography is good or bad is particularly useful. The conversation I hope to have isn’t about morality. It’s about a blindspot.
Considering its importance to modern love and lust, the cultural history of modern commercial pornography is surprisingly incomplete. Many, we know, would prefer keep it that way – after all, suppressing explicit sexual expression in all its forms is a grand, old tradition, but perhaps not as old as one might imagine.
The category of pornography as we know it today took shape in the nineteenth century when Europeans were contending with the vast quantity of erotic visual art being newly excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum. How were they to reconcile their idea of ancient Rome as dignified and noble, ideals to which they aspired, with what they saw as undignified and ignoble depictions of genitals and lovers? They decided to separate the lascivious pieces – the pornography – from what would simply be called art. The obscene artifacts would be preserved in special museums and rooms, but access to them would be restricted and monitored. This is to say, there was no reconciliation, only compartmentalization – a framework in which lust could be sublimated into intellectual inquiry.
In the British Museum one such secret room was created after the Obscene Objects Act was passed in 1857. In it was placed those objects deemed too obscene or perverse to be on view with the rest of the collection. A ‘porn room’, so to speak. Only mature gentlemen of sound morals with a scholarly interest were permitted to enter. Outside of this type of context, scholar Henry Jenkins writes, in an essay called ‘So You Want to Teach Pornography?’, pornographic materials ‘carried a risk for the general population’. That is, without a critical apparatus in place, sexual desire would overwhelm an individual’s intellectual faculties.
A certain acumen is needed to engage with matters of sex, as with any topic, but I wonder how this acumen is to be developed if these objects are kept from view? The phenomenon of the secret museum helped make the idea of pornography amorphous and ill-defined, allowing it, in turn, to become a tool used to further personal or political agendas. The museum’s obscene objects may now be largely integrated with the collections on view to the general public, but the impulse behind the porn room remains. The blindspot around pornography, cultivated across centuries, is getting us into more trouble than we might want to acknowledge.
I look to America today and see the consequences. I see a connection between legislative moves to restrict bodily autonomy – for example, the Supreme Court overturning abortions rights in 2022, or Tennessee’s ban on drag shows and gender-affirming heath care in 2023 – as well as recurring attempts to legislate porn and sex work out of existence. Thanks is due to the work of journalists such as Melissa Gira Grant, adult industry reporters Mark Kernes and Gustavo Turner, sex-worker-led projects such as the Hacking//Hustling collective, the Tits and Sass blog and podcast Heaux in the Kneaux for their coverage of such legislation. This is a large and complex discussion in itself, but for the purposes of this essay, I’d like to focus on this: how we talk about sex and the body, whether the topic is sexual expression or healthcare.
If porn is relegated to a secret room, not only does this sideline sexual art and expression, but it means that questions of the body, gender and sexuality, including science and education around these topics, become unnecessarily complicated and charged. By contrast, I wonder what would happen if we took a fresh look at modern commercial pornography, to explore how the idea has taken shape in the popular imagination. After all, porn is a subject defined by myths, and these myths have shaped our understanding of sex.
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To record a satisfying sex act is to create a record of pleasure. To record a consensual act that is awkward and fumbling, in which two or more performers communicate and adapt to each other’s needs and desires, is to create a record of active, affirmative consent and a reminder that you don’t have to get it ‘right’ with the first try. These records can offer a sense of belonging, assuage insecurity, validate desires. They can normalise awkwardness and constructive communication in intimate, often private and challenging settings. They can also attest to moments of lust, intimacy, love and connection that have been, are, and may again be outlawed. Commercial pornographic projects like these rarely make headlines or get the attention shown to the sexual representation that provokes the harshest (and sometimes the most necessary) criticism. It’s even rarer, outside of specialised media outlets, for porn to be discussed in terms of individual directors and projects.
Sexual shame is one reason for the lack of nuance in discussions about commercial pornography. Another reason could be that sexually explicit media asserts the value of pleasure, turning the focus of sex away from reproduction and challenging heteronormative, patriarchal and capitalist ideals. In doing so, it has the potential to change the way we think about ourselves, about lust, pleasure, desire, and therefore our relationships. If you change the way people think about sex, you change the way people think about family. And so the refusal to treat porn with nuance serves to uphold a certain order of things.
There is another reason why it is hard to talk sanely about these images and videos: the foundational stories that we tell and retell about porn have been so enduring and damaging. One particularly powerful narrative – the ur-narrative, even – took shape in pace with the rise of the commercial adult film industry in the US.
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The archetypal story of modern pornography tells of the rise and fall of a woman known as Linda Lovelace. Back in the 1960s porn films were underground, both in terms of production and consumption, which meant they could be viewed only in adult bookstores, peep show booths at arcades, private screenings on projectors, or public screenings at specialized cinemas, usually in more densely populated places. Access to porn was neither convenient nor easy. It was a time when performers could assume that they’d remain anonymous if they so chose. That is until the day one woman was catapulted into the public eye, and porn found a place in pop culture.
The film that changed it all was Deep Throat (1972), which, turned its star, Linda Lovelace, into the world’s first international porn superstar. Writer-director Gerard Damiano met Linda Boreman while casting for another adult film. During the casting session, she demonstrated her ability to perform the then-novel act of deep throating, and he was inspired to write a new movie just for her, giving the actress her nom de guerre in the process. Deep Throat premiered at the World Theater in New York on 12 June 1972, and ‘Linda Lovelace’ became a household name. Time magazine called it the ‘Citizen Kane of porn’ and it remains one of the most influential porn films – influential films – of all time.
Innovative in its Hollywood treatment of hardcore entertainment, Deep Throat was an outlier at a time when such films were largely made by men for men. Once the owner of a beauty parlor in New York, Damiano had paid attention to the conversations of his female clientele, and decided to make a film about female desire. Audiences were drawn in by the quirky story of a woman (Lovelace), a girl next door, who at first is indifferent to heterosexual sex. She expects fireworks, but has yet to experience them, until the day an affable doctor discovers that her clitoris is not in fact between her legs, but deep down in her throat. Kablooey!
In a way, Deep Throat – released amid a sexual revolution and the second wave of the feminist movement – is a movie about female pleasure and about an organ that would only become the subject of its first comprehensive anatomical study in 1998. At the same time the road to pleasure for Lovelace is an act that she says chokes her. The doctor says she’ll get used to it; an exchange that gestures to a world and a vision of desire that has not in fact changed.
Deep Throat – with its tiny budget, 62-minute run-time, comic screenplay and original soundtrack – was always going to be an ambitious project, but no one imagined it would do much more than follow the usual trajectory for a porn film at that time: spend a brief period on the adult theater circuit, make a modest profit and then fade into oblivion. The film itself might vanish, as celluloid degrades with time. Instead, Deep Throat became the seventh highest grossing film of 1972, part of a top ten that also included The Godfather, Cabaret and Deliverance.
Deep Throat was on everyone’s lips, and everyone it seemed had seen it: business people took long lunch breaks at the cinema, couples sat alongside curious spectators of all kinds, anyone with two dollars to spare. Porn was now part of the national conversation, particularly among the middle classes, and a topic one could openly discuss in the drawing room. By 21 January 1973, the New York Times was heralding a new era of ‘porno chic’. Truman Capote, Nora Ephron and Martin Scorsese had seen it. Frank Sinatra hosted a screening at his Palm Springs compound; one the guests was Spiro Agnew, vice president under Richard Nixon, whose presidency would involve, in his own words, ‘a national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life,’ – a campaign that contributed in no small part toward turning Deep Throat into a sensation. But the more the government tried to crack down on porn by going after Deep Throat, notably by bringing obscenity charges against the owners of the cinemas that screened the film, the more curious the public became. Linda Lovelace was a star, and a household name; desired, envied even.
To many, the boom in pornography must have looked like a scourge: some sense of order had been upset. Not to mention, Deep Throat isn’t much of a film, it’s a bit of schlock. Why all the fuss over something so middling? It’s hard to know just how much money the film made, from box office sales to licensing deals. People in the industry share anecdotes about trash bags full of cash from ticket sales. Money that was weighed rather than counted. Money that suggested a much larger market than previously imagined, offering mainstream recognition and perhaps even respectability, perhaps even allowing workers to speak openly about what they did without repercussion. And so filmmakers, performers and producers began professionalizing; an industry took shape.
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At first Lovelace was cast as an icon of the ongoing sexual revolution. In public and in the press, she presented herself as a woman who loved sex and who had found an ideal medium of expression in porn. Her first two books, Inside Linda Lovelace and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace, both published in 1974, tell the tale of a sexually insatiable twenty-something. In Diary’s jacket copy, Lovelace is presented as ‘the beautiful personification of totally free and unbridled sexuality’, and a person who ‘believes in giving love, enjoying it, and persuading everyone else to do the same.’
Half a decade later, she reiterated her story, with one crucial change: she repudiated her sexual persona. In her bestselling 1980 memoir Ordeal, Linda wrote that she had, in fact, been forced into prostitution and then into porn by her allegedly abusive husband-and-manager Chuck Traynor. It is striking to me that even in Intimate Diary, published back in 1974, Linda Lovelace made charges of violence and abuse against Traynor – why did this matter so little to readers at the time? Perhaps Lovelace’s insistence on her love of sex and pornography meant people didn’t listen to the other story she was telling. When, in Ordeal, Lovelace repudiated her sexual persona, the shift meant that her story reached, and resonated, with a different audience. Linda instead became a prominent figure in the anti-pornography movement, with Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon by her side. Many disputed her account of events, but if it is true, then the world’s first porn superstar was also a victim of abuse, coercion and sex trafficking. Linda’s much-reported story married porn and these horrors on a very public stage.
After the publication of Ordeal, Linda spoke out in the media against the violence she said had been done to her by Chuck Traynor, a violence that becomes equated with the pornography business as a whole in her statements. Her testimony, delivered at the 1984 Congressional Hearing on the Effect of Pornography on Women and Children, is particularly illuminating.
senator specter: So your basic point is that Deep Throat got 600 million dollars, and you got a lot of bruises?
ms marchiano: That is not the main point. The main point is that they took a human being, and through pain and degradation and beatings and constant threats forced me to do something that I never would have become involved in, had it not been a .45 put to my head [sic].
In her testimony, the word ‘pornography’ encompasses commercial adult films, violence against women, sexual exploitation, trafficking and other criminal activity. This makes it hard to discern who should be held accountable, and for which crimes, especially when read in tandem with her books. From all I have read, it seems that the gun was both real and a metaphor for the ever-present threat of violence Linda describes feeling around Traynor, which made her fear for her life.
Linda said she turned down millions because she never wanted to be commercially naked and sexually available again and spent much of her post-Deep Throat life in poverty: ‘Broke again, on welfare again, back on Long Island again – it was back to square one,’ she writes in Out of Bondage, her 1986 follow-up to Ordeal.
In Mary Douglas’s 1966 book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, she looks at how religion has sought to police the boundaries of what is pure and what is polluted. ‘Dirt,’ Douglas writes, ‘offends against order.’ Society, it seems, was punishing the woman who had embodied ‘Linda Lovelace’ because the idea of a sexually insatiable woman offended its sense of order: she was ‘dirt’ and would be treated accordingly. Landlords, movie producers, lawyers, journalists and employers wouldn’t let her leave porn behind. They demanded she continue to be naked and sexually available, or condemned her for having once been. They evicted her, they fired her, they questioned her story and stripped her of the authority to narrate her own life. There was nothing she could do to change their minds: to them she looked like she enjoyed what she was doing in Deep Throat.
This is one of the stories we tell about porn. It is a sad one: that hiding behind every individual account of porn as liberation is a truer story of porn as coercive and violent. The Linda Lovelace ur-narrative has had a profound influence as a lens through which to view porn as a cultural phenomenon.
The questions around Deep Throat and its star will never be resolved, nor will the debate around pornography in its current form. Linda’s story, far too common, was one of intimate violence, the abuse of power, and patriarchal violence – pornography was one aspect of that story, while also being one of the details that made it resound in her time and beyond.
Watching Deep Throat with all this in mind, I sense a vulnerable woman surrounded by men with business interests, Traynor with his sadism – all delighting in what was possible to experience with a woman and how far a woman could be pushed, the line between exploration and exploitation easily blurred in an atmosphere of sexual liberation. How self-possessed and self-aware, how lucky, would one have to be to come out on top, or even unscathed? If one entered this landscape by choice, perhaps aware of the risks, what would it take to navigate it?
Nevertheless, this story, while important and irrevocably part of the history of porn, is not the sole experience of porn performers and sex workers in the US or elsewhere. There are other stories. These stories shouldn’t be told instead, but rather alongside in order to provide a more nuanced context of what was as stake for a person like Linda trying to make her way in the world.
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In California in the early 1960s, another woman who would leave her mark on the sexual and political landscape of the US was getting started. Margo St James was a farmer’s daughter, born in Oregon, and living a bohemian life as a painter and barmaid in San Francisco. Her apartment in the North Beach neighborhood had a reputation as a social hub, with a long and tantalizing list of famous visitors. One day a cop stopped by her home, solicited sex, and proceeded to arrest St James herself for solicitation.
Standing before the judge in 1961, a 24-year-old St James declared that she had never turned a trick in her life. The judge responded that anyone who knew the lingo could only be a whore. With her options for employment now limited by the stigma she faced after she was convicted for solicitation, she started earning her living as a sex worker. ‘If you’re defined as a whore, there isn’t much you can do except be one,’ St James told Penthouse in 1976, and she never forgave the system for its injustice. Years later she helped get that particular judge unseated, and after attending law school for this very purpose, successfully appealed her conviction.
St James’s fight against injustice didn’t stop at her own vindication, but the vindication of the rights of all sex workers. At the core of her activism was a particular tired ethic that continues to limp along: ‘whore stigma’. Her time as a sex worker opened her eyes to the deep structural exploitation of laborers across the spectrum of privilege, from those who worked on the streets to high-end escorts. She saw whore stigma as a tool that encouraged binary thinking and divided society into those who are worthy of protection and those who are not. In 2013, St James told Bitch magazine that she believed that the prohibitions around ‘whores’, as well as drugs, are the ‘mechanisms by which racism and sexism are maintained’.
Mentored by the civil rights advocate and lawyer Florynce Kennedy, St James decided to organize. In 1973, she founded the first organization in the US dedicated to sex workers’ rights: Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, or COYOTE. Before this, she had started WHO (Whores, Housewives, and Others), a consciousness raising group that met in Marin County, California, and allowed women who felt left out of second-wave feminism to explore common ground, actively welcoming marginalized groups, including women of color and lesbians.
After the ‘feminist tide turned against COYOTE’ in the late 1970s and the first so-called ‘porn wars’ began, St James poured her energy into the international sex workers’ rights movement, and today the notion that sex workers’ rights are human rights has been institutionalized by organizations around the world.
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The response to Deep Throat and Lovelace’s performance included everything from boredom and distaste to interest and even liberation. For some audience members, the vision of the Linda Lovelace character discovering her sexual appetite pointed to a way of life and a relationship to sex that was different to the apparent norm.
Annie Sprinkle was in awe of the film when it came out – both the fact that it existed and that it was being shown at the Arizona cinema where she worked. ‘I was not into romance. I was into pure sex,’ Sprinkle says, looking back on that time in The Other Hollywood: An Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. Lovelace’s performance spoke to her.
Soon after watching Deep Throat, Sprinkle moved to New York, pursued a career in sex (including porn), and became involved in the sex workers’ rights movement via Margo St James’s work. Sprinkle moved from working in massage parlors, to filming pornography, to earning a PhD and pursuing a varied career as a sex educator, environmental activist and performance artist. In 1983, together with a group of fellow porn performers celebrating at a baby shower, she founded Club 90, a support group of friends and peers. In the 1990s, her one-woman show Post-Porn Modernist, a candid stage performance about Sprinkle’s life and career, which also calls out moral hypocrisy around sex, became a hit and brought Sprinkle’s work to the mainstream. This performance piece and others by Sprinkle has gone on to be adapted and reimagined by other performers for whom she blazed a trail.
It serves the fiction of Linda Lovelace to think of porn performers as outcast from society and alone, as opposed to part of a dynamic social fabric. Collaboration and community are central ethics in Sprinkle’s life and work. For the past two decades, Sprinkle and her wife Beth Stephens have been creating ‘eco-sexual’ performance art that reimagines Mother Earth as Lover Earth in the hope of inspiring a greater sense of care, responsibility and love for the planet. Dirt Bed, performed in 2012, featured the pair cuddling each other, along with volunteer audience members, in a large bed filled with soil. As part of their durational performance art, they have wedded themselves to the earth, pledging ‘to love, honor, and cherish the Earth until death brings us closer together forever’, and they become one with the dirt.
I am reminded of something a younger female pornographer once told me: that part of what will end the stigma around porn and sex work is witnessing the variety and longevity of different workers’ careers. From this perspective, a performer’s story doesn’t end with their on-camera work, it keeps going. Sprinkle’s ongoing evolution is a testament to that.
Like Deep Throat, Sprinkle’s pornographic work has left a legacy, from bringing certain acts into the sexual vernacular to inspiring new generations of performers. But what is perhaps most interesting is seeing the through-line of sexuality in her work, in which she engages with existence in all its fluid and slick glory. When the artists ask us to consider the earth as our lover, they are offering an experience that points to a new paradigm of human existence: instead of dominance and exceptionalism, they propose inter-being. How do we exist in relation to each other and all that we share the universe with? If we stop to consider what it is that we value about porn what might we discover about ourselves and how might this also transform the pornographic landscape?
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I think of the poetic 1971 film Boys in the Sand, directed by Wakefield Poole, another pornographic milestone. Until Deep Throat hit the market, Boys in the Sand had been the most commercially successful porn film in the history of cinema, with ads in the New York Times and a review in Variety. But Boys in the Sand wasn’t just a summer-soaked terpsichorean vision of gay life and sex, it was a vision of community broadcast to men around the world. It is said to have put Fire Island on the map as an international gay destination. In I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole, a 2012 documentary about his life and work, Poole remembers: ‘I can’t even begin to tell you how many people have said that the movie changed their life. It made their life better. It made their life easier. It made their sex better. They were more content with who they are and who they were going to become.’
Such a life-affirming response must, in part, make the production of sexually explicit media worth the risk and sacrifice – the connection between the performer and the performance, and the effect of both on the audience. Porn is an expression of sex in culture, per Annie Sprinkle. For better and for worse. When we focus on the ‘for worse’, the idea that pornography is, or can be, a record of human pleasure falls by the wayside. Porn is a product of an inherent human curiosity about other humans: who we are and what we could be to each other. The eye wants to see its fill, the I wants to see how it feels.
Image © creative commons, Deep Throat (1972) original film poster
