HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017198.jpg

4.2.12
WC: 191694

Several weeks prior to the scheduled showing, Gloria Steinem had written an article in Ms.
magazine about Deep Throat and the exploitation of its female lead, Linda Lovelace. Pointing to
the $60 million allegedly made on the film, Steinem characterized Deep Throat as “a national and
international profit center and dirty joke.” At the heart of the joke was Linda Lovelace “whose
innocent face offered movie-goers the titillating thought that even the girl-next-door might be the
object of porn-style sex.” But, according to Steinem, it was a joke with widely felt consequences:
“Literally millions seem to have been taken to Deep Throat by their boyfriends or husbands (not
to mention prostitutes by pimps) so that each one might learn what a woman could do to please a
man if she really wanted to.”
Moreover, Linda Lovelace was now claiming that her innocent face had been a mask covering up
a battered wife who had been imprisoned by her husband-pimp. Several years after the
completion of Deep Throat was completed, Lovelace wrote an autobiography entitled Ordeal, in
which she told a sordid story of how she had been compelled to perform her “sexual sword-
swallower trick” at gunpoint.

After reading Ordeal I called Reems and asked him whether his recollections of the filming of
Deep Throat corroborated her claim that she had been forced into performing. Harry, who was
then working off-Broadway in a stage play, laughed and said, “Are you kidding? Sure her
husband, Chuck, was an asshole, but he was hardly around during the filming. Damiano sent him
away because he would get jealous of how much she was enjoying the sex. She was really into it.
We had a good relationship before and during the filming.”

I told Harry that Lovelace had written that when “she saw how upset Chuck was, [she] decided
[she] would pretend to enjoy it with Harry.” I asked whether it was possible that she was only
acting.

“Linda Lovelace acting?” Harry exclaimed. “Have you seen her in a film? She couldn’t even
pretend to be acting.”

Whether true or false, Lovelace’s account struck a responsive chord among many feminists.
Gloria Steinem’s article presented a sympathetic portrait of Lovelace as the victim of everything
the “sleazy pornocrats” had come to represent. Using Lovelace’s Ordeal as a symbol of sexist
repression, many feminists declared all-out war against pornography. The movie Deep Throat
came to symbolize the anti-women evils of the sex industry. And I became the symbol of the
“pornocrat lawyer,” getting rich off the suffering of exploited women (even though I charged
nothing for these cases).

The organization through which Gloria Steinem spoke—Women Against
Pornography—advocated boycotts as its primary weapons in the war on porn. The boycotts were
directed not only against theaters and bookstores, but against lawyers who represented them on
First Amendment grounds. When I and several friends opened a Kosher deli in Harvard Square, it
was picketed with signs of saying “How can a porn pig serve Kosher food?”

Although boycotts are themselves protected by the constitutional right of free expression, civil
libertarians are appropriately concerned about the effect of overly broad boycotts, such as those

111

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017198