The movie Deep Throat was released in 1972. Produced for $22,500, members of the FBI estimate it has grossed anywhere from $100 million to $600 million. More than 10 million Americans have seen it. Wikipedia calls it “likely the most successful and influential pornographic film of all time.”
Linda Lovelace starred in the movie. Later, she said she had been coerced into doing it by her husband at the time, Chuck Traynor. “Virtually every time someone watches that movie, they’re watching me being raped,” she told the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1986. Wikipedia reports, “Traynor and [director Gerard] Damiano confirmed in interviews that Traynor was extremely controlling towards Boreman [Lovelace] and also hit her on occasion. In the
documentary Inside Deep Throat…it is claimed that bruises are visible on Boreman’s body in the movie.”
Many members of the porn industry were upset by Lovelace’s actions. They use the term “Linda Syndrome” to refer to former porn stars who disavow their careers. Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, had given Deep Throat a rave review when it came out. But when Lovelace died from an auto accident in 2002, he said,
Good riddance to trash. She was a good cocksucker. She was a piece of shit. Her book Ordeal was a lying piece of shit. She was a hooker, a scumbag, a lying trollop. I’m glad Traynor taught her to suck cock. I dropped several ejaculations down her throat. I want to do a final load, so when she goes to hell my sperm will go with her.
Here are excerpts from Gloria Steinem’s introduction to Out of Bondage, Linda Lovelace’s follow-up to Ordeal…
[W]e are too close to the time when even rape victims were suspected of “asking for” the crimes of humiliation and violence inflicted upon them; a time when the testimony of a victim was disbelieved unless corroborated by witnesses who had watched the crime, and a victim’s past personal life was admissable in court when the rapist’s past, even if criminal, was not.
No wonder we are still in a time when the thousands of teenage runaways, terrified women and even children who are victims of forced prostitution and pornography each year–victims who are forced to coexist and depend for their lives on their victimizers for far longer than the duration of a rapist’s attack–are accused of cooperating with their captors, even of enjoying their own humiliation, or at least of being suspect because they did not escape.
After all, millions of viewers saw Deep Throat, the first hardcore porn film to enter the popular culture, without asking whether the young woman known as “Linda Lovelace” was there of her own free will. They ignored the bruises that were visible on her body, the terror in her eyes, even the simple empathy that should cause each of us to wonder whether another human being really would enjoy humiliations and dangers that we ourselves would never tolerate…
[W]e have a First Amendment right to demonstrate against pornography, to boycott its creators and sellers, to explain that pornography is to women of all groups what Nazi literature is to Jews and Ku Klux Klan literature is to Blacks. It is as different from erotica as sex is different from rape… [E]ros means sexual love, and love implies free choice and mutual pleasure. The point is to separate sex from violence, pleasure from pain…
Get up the courage to say how you feel, to throw pornography out of your life and house at least. Educate your children in the difference between pornography and erotica, between domination and mutual choice. Support the centers that are helping women and children escape this coercion and find self-respect.
—————-
See also Behind the Scenes of Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace.