You're Wrong About - Porn Wars with Nona Willis Aronowitz

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Here’s some money, go see a Porn War. This week we’re going on a field trip to Times Square with Nona Willis Aronowitz, author of Bad Sex, to learn about Deep Throat, “porno chic,” and the unresolved feminist battle over whether to eradicate pornography or make more of it. Digressions include Carol Clover, this discovery of the clitoris, and Harry Reems (Joel Reems’ distant cousin).Here's where to find Nona:WebsiteBad Sex (book)Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBonus Episodes on Apple PodcastsDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.theothernwa.com/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttp://apple.co/ywahttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

I think it's true that in American history, like, there has never been a correct amount of sex for women to be having. It's always the wrong amount. Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Today we are learning about the porn wars with Nona Willis Aranowicz, the author of Bad Sex. I'm excited to bring this episode to you because I feel like this is a grand feminist debate that was never really solved and also kind of a cousin to the satanic panic.

And you know I love that whole family. It's something that makes us think about ethics and free speech and sex and gender and pleasure and ultimately in this conversation, utopianism. It's also, to me, a summer story because we're going to take you to Times Square in the 70s. And when I think of Times Square in the 70s, I imagine feeling very sweaty. Some of the debates we're talking about in this episode is the grand question of porn. Does it liberate?

Does it subjugate? Does it do both at the same time somehow? And is media depicting the abuse of women the result of an abuse of culture or its cause? We will try to answer these questions in one hour and we will fail, but you'll enjoy listening to it I think. And I'll also get some real-time sex education. And we are also going to talk about all kinds of sex the whole time, as you might guess. If you haven't heard, we're also going on tour in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and

LA between September 16th and September 22nd. There's still a few tickets left, so come see us if you can. And if you want bonus episodes, you can subscribe on Patreon or on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you like this one. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we take field trips to Times Square before Giuliani. Oh yeah, way before.

With me today is a very special guest. Very special guest. Who the heck are you? I'm Nona Willis Aranowicz. I've been obsessed with the topic of porn for, I guess, 20 years at this point. I've been obsessed with newsies for that long, so you know, we just have to love what we love. Yeah, I mean, I've since expanded my work to journalism and feminist history.

I have a book coming out called Bad Sex, which combines all this stuff. And I've known about the feminist sex wars, also known as the porn wars for quite a while, so I'm excited to sort of take a trip down memory lane. My gut sense is that this is a conversation that nobody ever managed to resolve and that we're still essentially living inside of, even if we don't know it. Oh yeah, well, this conversation just has so many different threads, some of which really directly intersect with your work and some of which you might not know anything at all about.

So tell me what you do know about this, Sarah, because as we said, it is sort of adjacent to your work, but I've never actually heard you talk about this topic. Yeah, that's funny. Well, first of all, I thought of a great joke to start with, which is, here's $5, go see a porn war. Yay. Oh my God, $5 is actually what deep throat cost when it came out. Wow, that seems expensive for the time.

It is. It's like the equivalent of $32. What? That's how much it cost to watch Cruella when it premiered on Disney Plus. It's actually slightly more. Yeah, no, it was expensive. It was kind of an event. It was like, this is a night out on the town for us.

Like we might not even get dinner afterwards, because it's $32. Oh my gosh. Okay, so I know we're going to talk about deep throat. Yes, it's the 50th anniversary. June, 1972 is when it came out. Happy birthday, deep throat, have a hot girl summer. So my understanding is that it's the first porno to basically crack into the mainstream, that it was essentially something that made it more permissible for not just random guys

to go to a porno movie theater, but couples and women and, I don't know, people. People who identified as non-porn consumers that this opened a door for them is my understanding and that then we had, for various reasons, an explosion of the genre in the 70s. And part of second wave feminism into the late 70s and the 80s got into attempting to ban pornography and that this was something that Andrea Dworkin was very focused on and that famously, infamously, maybe apocryphally, this legislation caused her own books to be banned. And I think I want to say Calgary because they also got it through in Canada. But similarly, there was a faction of second wave feminists who became strange bad fellows

with conservatives and Republicans and the Christian right and that this kind of culminated in my understanding with Andrea Dworkin testifying before the Mies Commission under Reagan, essentially saying like, we need to have less freedom of speech because women are being abused horribly in these films. And again, it feels like this led to some questionable results, but that the goal was extremely earnest and well intentioned and that you can't collaborate with Republicans on anything, which I think we all know by now. Yeah, most of that is right. We'll get into all of it. So yeah, I think probably the reason why you're thinking of this word porno is because there was this big splashy article in the New

York Times called porno chic that came out a couple months after Deep Throat had truly become a phenomenon, a very profitable phenomenon. I mean, it was made with a budget of $25,000 and then it eventually made what many estimate was between $25 to $200 million. So it's like my big fat Greek wedding, basically. It's a perfect movie, but it kicked off all these obscenity trials and it kicked off this kind of like cultural cachet of going like a lot of celebrities went like Johnny Carson went and Jack Nicholson went and all these women went and Angela Lansbury went and all these people, you would not be expecting to go see, you know, an honest to goodness porn movie.

Right. I mean, this seems like a good distinction too of like what a porno makes like for anyone who doesn't know like what is this genre exactly? Oh, God. Well, here's the way I'm going to describe it. Before what's called the golden era of porn, which I would think is like, you know, from 1970 to 1980, roughly, porn was this private affair. There weren't like porn theaters per se, and there weren't porn movies. There were like stag films with a bunch of like episodic kind of comedic sex that like frat houses, private male clubs would like rent these reels and then sort of like watch them together. But like in a private setting, that's why they called them stag parties, you know, like these stag films,

like they didn't have plots. They didn't have production value, you know, I wouldn't have remembered this 10 minutes ago, but I did at one time read Linda Williams's Hardcore. Oh, best book ever. Right. Wonderful book. But I feel like that is to porn what men, women and chainsaws by Carol Clover is to slash your movies. That's a deep cut. But I trust you for the four people who get it, you know, hooray. And also if you haven't read it, you should read that book. But essentially, it's a scholarly work that kind of was one of the first things to legitimize a very loads genre. But something I remember Linda Williams mentioning is that early on, you would have like a short little film that

you would maybe show to enticemen to have sex as well, right? Like you would go to a brothel, right? And they would be like, here's a little movie, don't you want to have sex now? Okay, great. So the movie itself wasn't a sexual act. It was like a little appetizer. Oh, yeah. And it was like three minutes long. And like all of the like errors of flaccid penises in like premature ejaculation like stayed in like people did not have money for these films. But then for many reasons in 1972, there were opportunities to make real films. I mean, Deep Throat is an hour plus long. And it has like a real beginning, middle and end and it has stars. It was it starred Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems. Linda Lovelace was this like very

girl next door type. She had this like amazing 70s curly haired situation. She was really cute, but like not, I mean, not like glamorous, you know, like you watch her and you feel like you could probably just like see her like on the street. Harry Reems was actually not even slated to be in this movie. He was like on the set, a PA or something like that, which is incredible because like physically, he's quite gifted, right? Yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's like the heart and soul of this movie, in my opinion, he is this kind of her suit, Jewish man, who later became a born again Christian, but we will not fault him for that. That was like really in vogue back then. But at the time he was like, he had, you know, long, curly dark hair and was like, had a big mustache

and was quite charming. And the rumor on the set is that Linda had a big crush on him. So they like do have a lot of chemistry. And the plot of the movie is that Linda Lovelace, you know, has a lot of sex. She's a modern woman in the 70s. She adjoys it, but like she just gets like little tingles. She doesn't get huge orgasms. And she's like kind of wondering what's wrong with her. And so she goes to a doctor, Harry Reems, and he discovers that her clitoris is not within her vulva, it's in her throat. And therefore, she should give as many very deep blowjobs as humanly possible to procure this elusive orgasm. And it definitely is like much more complicated than the vast majority of porn movies that had come out before then. It's such an almost dumb idea. But

like it really works, you know, it's like, it's so silly. Like I feel like maybe that, I don't know, made it less scary as a concept to people. Well, yeah, because it's funny. Right. And the movie is funny. It is. It's lighthearted. It's like not that serious. I mean, there are some like serious like humping scenes, but a lot of people are, they're smiling, they're making jokes. Like there's lots of like dumb corny jokes. Yeah. And also, like the theme song is a fucking earworm. Like I have not watched this movie in probably 10 years. And like since just when I got up this morning, and I was thinking about doing this episode, I've had it stuck in my head. And I believe it goes deep throat deeper than deep your throat. Oh, yes, Sarah. I feel like you're a secret deep throat

expert. I'm a secret deep throat fan, honestly. And like, I guess I should just like say what cards I have on the table at this moment, because when I first became sexually active, which was relatively late, I remember feeling like, okay, I need to watch some porn now, because I don't know, I need to learn about what I'm doing. And so you watched deep throat. Wow, that's so refined. Well, yeah, I like the classics, you know, skip the rest, go straight to the best. And I had seen more recent porn and always been like, just a little bit overwhelmed by it. And that's how I still feel about it. It's that it's just like, it's like eating meat. You're like, I'd like to believe this was ethically produced, but like, let's be honest. Oh, yeah, it's more easy to be aroused when you're not

like, stressed out about the ethics of what you're doing the entire time. Well, yeah. And I think that this has always been a problem as we'll get into, you know, Linda did seem like she was having a really nice time. And maybe on some level, she was because she had a crush on Harry Reems. But then we find out later that that was not necessarily the case. And it's pretty disturbing. Yeah. But I remember when I saw deep throat, I was really struck, you know, and this connects to just all the complications about sort of what was Linda experiencing on and off set, but kind of watching the movie in that moment, I was like, this is the first time I've watched a woman give a blowjob in a film. I guess I hadn't seen it happen live. This is the first time I've seen this act depicted in a way

where it doesn't feel like the point is to treat her mouth like a garbage can. Yes. And it just felt like genuinely pleasurable and joyful. And like, whether or not that's true, it conveyed that idea to me and conveyed the idea that like, there was joy to be had in performing oral sex, which honestly is like a hard concept to hang on to in this world. Well, yeah, I mean, so it's 1972, the public is learning about clitoral orgasms, like the word clitoris is all over this movie, which was definitely not the case in stag films or like really any other movies up until a few years ago. And it genuinely is concerned with women's pleasure. You know, it's giving the female character like some level of interiority, like a hero's journey. Yeah,

she wants to have an orgasm, which like, that's a great goal on one hand. But on the other hand, here we have some clear sort of male anxiety about sexual liberation of women, like the clitoris is not in your throat, it's on your vulva. And it is nowhere near where the penis goes, it's several inches away. And I think that that really produced a lot of anxiety in men, like that they would become expendable. I mean, some feminists were coming out and saying that like, actually, sexual intercourse is like, not usually how women have orgasms. And like, let's just admit that. But this movie is sort of like re centering the focus of women's pleasure on the penis, you know, as if to directly refute those feminists being like, yes, women literally need a dick in order to orgasm. So it's like a highly

ambivalent narrative, one that we will see again and again, in like the golden age of porn. But you know, we got to talk about the sexual revolutions era. I'm so ready. I mean, the 50s are thought of as this like very repressive era and like by many accounts it was. But there were like lots of rebellions happening all over the place from like teen girls, you know, loving Elvis, who was like very explicitly sexual to Hugh Hefner and like the playboy sort of like eschewing commitment. And then in 1960, or like the early 60s, really, when it became mainstream, the birth control pill came on the scene. And it really separated reproduction from sex. And it was very important. A moment depicted beautifully in the Loretta Lynn song, The Pill.

I don't know that song. Can you sing it to me? Yeah. You wind me and dine me when I was your girl promised if I'd be your wife, you'd show me the world. But all I've seen of this old world is a bed and a doctor's bill. I think it goes I'm tearing down this brooder house, because now I've got the pill. That is amazing. I'm glad that like we're 20 minutes into this and you've already sung two songs. Yeah, that's a record from even me. But yeah, I mean, it was really in the air. And sex itself was getting liberated. But feminism did not yet exist. So of course, that created all kinds of binds and problems for women. It was great to not be ostracized for being like a tramp. And it was

great to not be an abject fear of pregnancy all the time. But at the same time, like, here we are, it's pre feminism, men now feel entitled to sex, they like have this narrative of, come on, baby, like, leave your hang ups at the door. And it got even worse with the counterculture, because like, sex, drugs and rock and roll, it's like, what are you frigid? And all of a sudden, like women felt like the right to say no had like slipped through their fingers. I think it's true that in American history, like there has never been a correct amount of sex for women to be having, it's always the wrong amount. Well, right. You know, women were in quite a bind, they like wanted to and were participating in the

counterculture. And they wanted to liberate themselves and indulge their own fantasies. But there was no real sort of infrastructure in which to do that. And a lot of dudes were just like being total dicks about it all. And not only that, I mean, this was before everybody knew about the clitoris, right? So like, a lot of this sex was really bad. In retrospect, I feel like reading the belgium at a young age really like tacked another couple years on to how long I was a virgin, because like, so much of the foundational literature that you read about like women who have had sex before you, it's just like, why is this supposed to be so great? Like, did what happened after you bled everywhere?

Well, right, exactly. So let's fast forward to the late 60s. You know, the antiwar movement is in full swing, the civil rights movement has been in full swing for quite a while. A lot of women are involved in these movements, but they're kind of being treated like shit by the dudes, they're like stuffing envelopes, they're expected to like have sex with all these men in the movement, who are like ultimately sort of disrespecting them and like not seeing the cognitive dissonance between fighting for other people's human rights, but then like treating the women in their lives like dirt. It's very disturbing that like so much effort went into people like maybe possibly discovering the North Pole decades and decades before anyone tried to find the clitoris.

They're like, the North Pole is easier. We're going there first. Well, you know, centuries ago, they actually thought women's orgasms were connected to reproduction. So they like put a lot of effort into producing them. And then when they realized that actually ovulation is spontaneous, they were like, Oh, never mind. I guess that's not really, I guess that's not really very important. But then yes, what you're referring to is like this Freudian fallacy, basically, that vaginal orgasms are the mature version of orgasms and clitoral orgasms are immature. And if women can't produce vaginal orgasms, or if the men they're with can't produce them, then, you know, they're at like high risk of becoming hysterics.

Oh, hysteria. Yeah, you got to be careful about that. So all of these movements are happening. Women are involved in these movements, but they're treated like second class citizens. And then they start having consciousness raising sessions with each other, which are sort of like the earliest inklings of second wave feminism. I mean, I guess the early, early one was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, of course. But when we really start talking about radical feminism, we're really talking about these consciousness raising sessions. And a lot of them, they happened, you know, in like somebody's apartment, there was like 20 women talking about what used to be considered things that you do not talk about. And one of

those major topics was sex. So like, all this stuff came up, like all the double standards, like how shitty it was that like, men are pressuring women into sex, even if they might want to have sex, these women are having like bad sex. I mean, I love cheeseburgers, but if somebody shoves a cheeseburger in my face, I'm going to be pretty pissed. Exactly. And it's like kind of hard to articulate. If you don't have somebody being like, yes, I understand exactly what you're talking about. I think a lot of women had these feelings for years, but they just like didn't have other women to talk to them about. So I think there was this real sense of sort of like, this is a political issue. This is important. This isn't just like a

personal hang up. Like we really have to talk about this in terms of politics. Like that famous phrase, the personal is political was conceived around this time by Carol Hanish. And so around this time in 1968, notes from the first year was published. And this was sort of like the first evidence that the consciousness raising sessions were happening to like a larger audience. And one of the entries in notes from the first year was sort of like a transcript of one of these sessions about sex. And one quote just like always gets me, we've got to learn to sleep with people because we want them, not because they want us, not to make them feel better about their masculinity, not out of weakness or inability to say no, but simply because we want to. I guess this is a trueism

now, but like we still kind of struggle with this. You know, oh, I still completely struggle with that personally. I think that there's something in my experience about existing as a woman in America, where if you have any kind of tendency towards codependency or toward having trouble determining like, am I doing this because I want it or because somebody wants me to want it? Yes, you were encouraged to behave that way in order to peacefully fit your social role. Like you are bad at being a woman if you're mentally well, I think. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. And another very famous entry into notes from the first year was Anne Coates, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. And basically saying like, technically, if you

consider only the anatomy, men are kind of expendable, you know. So here's this moment, this is like a couple years before deep throat. But this is really like the first moment when radical feminism takes up sex like in this public way. Hmm. That's wonderful. Seriously. So okay, but there's also something really interesting around this time going on with porn. So Lyndon B. Johnson is still the president in the late 60s. And he commissions this president's commission on obscenity and pornography. And I think it actually started in 1967, if I'm not mistaken. But you know, they take a couple of years for these president's commissions, I guess,

not that I know much about president's commissions, but by the time it came out, it was 1970, and Nixon was president. This commission was like very, very unusually liberal about porn. Like it basically recommended against any restriction of porn for adults. Yeah, like they could find no evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials played a role in like delinquent or criminal behavior, which was kind of like a conceit at the time. Right. Basically, the recommendations was like, all of this legislation prohibiting the sale, the exhibition, the distribution of sexual materials, like all that should be repealed. And so, you know, here are these like liberals coming out with this liberal commission. But like, the Nixon administration

is like, fuck that. Like he vowed like he's like, as long as I'm in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut. Like I still really care about this. But like, I sort of undermined them, right? Like functionally, it's just sort of like added fuel to the fire of like a more relaxed attitude towards porn. What if porn watching leads to dope smoking? You know, what about that? That would be a disaster. Can't allow it. Well, right, exactly. And at this point, nobody cared about like violence towards women or anything. I think they just cared about like teen delinquents. So like that's probably pretty apt. You know what I mean? No official like laws are repealed or anything. But it still sort of ignites this porn

explosion, like it really starts the golden era of porn. Like after this, you know, hardcore cinemas grew to like 1000 across the nation, which is kind of a lot. But so there were a few of these like hour and a half like movies with plots and stuff before Deep Throat. But Deep Throat is the one that like really hit for all the reasons that we said, like they just it was sort of like a perfect storm of like appealing stars and like acute conceit. And just like where the sexual revolution was at that point, it had really gone mainstream. Like it was really very chic, as they called it, porno chic. This is sort of like worst now smack in the middle of like porn's golden era. All of these women are like walking contradictions of like innocent looking good girls who

also like secretly enjoy sex and are insatiable. They kind of all go through some sort of sexual awakening during the movie. All the stories center on like a woman protagonist, discovering like the joys and like the liberation of like fulfilling amazing sex, like often from some sort of like ravishment or tutelage by a dude. Like it's a very, very consistent. Do you remember the joke on Seinfeld about Rachelle Rachelle? Oh my God, I am such a bad New York City Jew. I do like Seinfeld, but I'm not like a huge super fan. So like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm sorry. But there's this running joke on Seinfeld that's first a movie and eventually becomes a musical

called Rachelle Rachelle. And the tagline is a young girl's strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk. Oh yeah. Totally a 1970s porn. Right. And it feels like also kind of taking the classic like the hero's journey, like the wizard of Oz model. And like, if you're a boy, your hero's journey is like you pick up a lightsaber and you save the resistance and the universe. And if you're a girl, many times your hero's journey is like having sex with a bunch of dudes in this genre. Oh yeah. I mean, all of these narratives, again, just sort of like re-centered the penis. Like there was like a huge amount of like penis worship. And of course, like the money shot was

invented during this time. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, what is the money shot? Just like a visible ejaculation happening outside of a woman's body. Whereas before in stag films, like, you know, either there wasn't an orgasm at all, or it just like sometimes happened inside kind of furtively, like inside a woman's body. And now in the 70s, like the real climax was this like phallocentric ejaculation. And it was very important. And like in the manuals of the time, they were like, you must have your money shot. Like it is essential. Men were feeling kind of slighted. They were feeling nervous and worried about women's sexual liberation. And this was a

way to sort of comfort those worries. Right. Like it's all about the penis. Like nothing can happen without it. It's like the maypole that all of this festivity is happening around. Sorry for the mental image. You're welcome. No, I love that image. I really do think it was a way to be like, yes, these women are embracing sex, but they still need you. Don't worry. Don't worry. They can't have sex without you. No one is having fun without you. Exactly. Pay no attention to the lesbian behind the curtain. Yeah. And there were of course, lesbian scenes during this time, like things were getting like a

little more gay in the 70s. But it was like, of course, there was like a whole nother genre of like gay porn. But like what I'm talking about is the mainstream straight porn, which like had these gratuitous like lesbian scenes, which like to this day are still like similarly meant to sort of show like how down and like cool this woman is. But like ultimately she wants the dick. Right. And it's like framing like any kind of girl on girl sexual experience is like something that you do to like make yourself an even better dick lover. Right, right, right. Of course. Well, yeah, and the feminists were kind of like, there's all this like sexual revolution pressure

that's happening and it's coming from the porn. It's coming from the cultural messages. But like feminists are like kind of gearing up to address this issue. So we do have to talk about a very important Supreme Court decision. I know that's a little dry. No, nothing could be moisture for me than the Supreme Court. Yeah. Well, it did involve some moistness within the dry decision. So here we are. It's 1973. Miller v. The State of California. This is really kind of a landmark decision that still stands today, although it's like not very relevant because of internet porn, but it still technically is like on the books. So basically what happened was this bookseller Marvin Miller shipped some

pornographic materials in the mail and like the wrong people got it, like a mom and her son got it and were like outraged and like called the police, basically. And so like what the decision stated was like obscene material, like is not technically protected by the First Amendment. But this decision sort of made it harder to define and therefore like harder to prosecute pornography by tightening the criteria, the most famous of which was like obscenity would be partly determined by community standards. Idaho might not have the same community standards as New York and New York City might not have the same community standards as upstate New York. And so like it's super vague. Functionally, it made it really hard to prosecute obscenity cases.

Yeah, I would imagine because like it feels like that language at the end of the day could mean literally nothing. Well, exactly. It's like the, you know it when you see it kind of thing of like, what exactly is porn? What exactly is obscenity? Who knows? The mid 70s is really when the whole country started taking notice of like this movement that's happening, this feminist movement, this women's liberation movement. And by that time, the feminist movement looked kind of different. It wasn't like these cool like women in consciousness raising sessions. It was like, they were on the cover of Time Magazine and they were like writing books and stuff. And some of them like this was

the beginning of sort of like a real focus on rape and violence against women and like what causes it and porn and stuff. So this work on rape and violence is like extremely important, like of course, you know, I think it couldn't all just be like women's desires. Like it also had to be about like, what's oppressing women? What's like preventing them from living full lives? Like these are some landmark books that like I fully respect. And also for legal context, a fact I find really illuminating is that the first marital rape case in the country ever was tried and I believe 1980. So this is like before the legal existence of marital rape.

So like, of course, they are very important, but they did sort of start the anti porn movement and everything that came afterwards. So I really want to give Susan Brown Miller the credit for having like one of the first like major books about rape that like really stuck in the craw of our national consciousness. And that's against our will. A very important book, although it's a little racist, like the word for word and sentence for sentence, it doesn't necessarily hold up, but talks about like the paradigm of rape, like that how you don't have to literally be a rapist as a man to assert dominance onto women through sex. What she argued was that this paradigm made it really difficult for heterosexual relationships to function correctly.

I don't know where she got that idea from. I mean, surely not by merely looking around her each day. Yeah, I mean, some of these were very warranted critiques of heterosexuality. I mean, they were heterosexuality was like a nightmare back then. I think it's still in a really weird spot, right? Yes. Are the straights okay? No, never have been working on it. I mean, this is when radical lesbianism sort of like came to flourish. A lot of women were sort of defecting from heterosexuality, saying like, this is a horror show. I don't want to be part of it.

I don't want to be raped. I don't want to be hit in my domestic life. Like I just sorry, bye. And one of these lesbians, Robin Morgan, another very famous anti porn feminist, she has a pretty famous 1974 essay, which again, laid the groundwork for a lot of anti porn movements. I want you to read this paragraph. Here it is. Pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Rape exists anytime sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman out of her own genuine affection and desire. Anything short of that is in a radical feminist definition, rape. Because the pressure is there and it need not be a knife blade

against the throat. It's in his body language, his threat of sulking, his clenched or trembling hands. How many millions of times have women had sex quote willingly, with men they didn't want to have sex with, even men they loved, it must be clear that under this definition, most of the decently married bedrooms across America are settings for nightly rape. Yeah, true. Yes. This quote could be written today by somebody with slightly different wording. And I feel like it would strike people as equally revelatory. Well, exactly. I think when Me Too happened, there was this real moment of appreciating these types of

feminists who at this point have been kind of disgraced because of their anti porn attitudes. And we'll get to that later why that is. And also they were just like generally espousing like an extremely dark truth. But I think there was sort of a renaissance of some of these women during Me Too because it was like, yeah, you're really sort of fucking saying it, you're just putting it out there. When it feels like you can agree about what the problem is and disagree about what the solution is. Exactly. And I think that a lot of the solutions of these women were sort of just like, men are evil. You know, and I think a lot of women felt like, well, wait a second, I love men. Another very important book came out in 1974, our favorite, Andrea Dworkin, she came out with

Woman Hating. I want to read something she wrote. I think that was like, presumably in response to the female deep throat fans who were like, this sexually liberated me or even just like women who really appreciated the gains of the sexual revolution. Yeah. So as a deep throat fan, she's talking to me and I bet she's maybe not angry but disappointed. Yeah. Hold on to your hats. Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore. Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat. Corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question sell cunt. Racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or

red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure. Violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex. The new pornography is left wing and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the left has gone to die. The left cannot have its whores and its politics too. So she was basically just like, oh, great. Okay. Once sex is involved and like none of your other values matter. Okay, cool. Some of these porn movies were like very baldly capitalist. I mean, like they were just trying to make money in harnessing the most universal fantasy of like young men, basically. And a lot of these narratives like were racist and kind of aggressive in many ways. And so like, I get it. But she like fundamentally, she's also kind

of like, shaming other women for possibly liking porn. It's like, okay, Andrea. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I'm working on it. No, seriously, like, we're just doing our best. She became kind of like the face of the anti porn movement, which was like very convenient for a lot of people for like First Amendment opponents for like misogynists who didn't like feminism, because like, she really was kind of out there and angry in many ways. Yeah, I'm sure she did not give generic copy to anybody covering anything she ever did. She just like was very prone to hyperbole. You know, that can be very effective. And that can also just be like super easy to make fun of and denigrate. So like here we have Robin Morgan, we have Andrea Dworkin, we have Susan Brown Miller, we have a lot of women

who are sort of feeling like the most important topic and direction that feminism needs to go in is sort of like defensive, like protecting women from men's worst impulses. And that can be rape, that can be domestic violence, that can be what we see in porn. Moving on, we eventually see the formation of the group that would eventually become women against pornography or WAP. It's a different acronym now. I know when I saw that when I was like writing my book, I was just like, oh my god, like, thank you so much, Cardi and Megan Thee Stallion for like revising what WAP means to us. And forever outing Ben Shapiro is someone who has never aroused his own way.

Oh my god, classic tweet. And so within a couple of years, the group became official. One of the main sort of pastimes of theirs was like giving time square tours of the peep shows and sex shows. Like they would blend in kind of with like all the other vendors on the street being like, take my tour, take this tour. I mean, I feel like my understanding of this is a little bit weak. Like a peep show was essentially you would like go in, you would have like an individual, like a little booth, I assume most of the time, and you would like put in money. And then a woman would, I don't know, get naked or do something sexy.

Yeah, well, I think there were like live peep shows like that. You could also pay to like see a slideshow, essentially. And so this tour was kind of like bringing like people from Middle America into these booths to like show them what they were actually talking about, like to show them the porn that would like outrage them for like probably not feminist reasons, to be honest with you, like probably like Puritan reasons. Right. The underlying point was like propagating the idea that porn caused violence rather than just reflected violence, like bringing people in these booths and being like, well, of course, if you see this, aren't you going to become like a violent person?

Gosh. So like, okay, so we're in the late 70s. It's 1979. There's like this big moment for the anti porn movement. Again, on our favorite place, Times Square, there's like 5000 people there. The most famous feminists in the country are there. It's like Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug was there, like a major players. This was a mainstream protest. And by this time, like women of color are sort of getting engaged. Like I feel like at first this was like a white woman's thing. But then like Alice Walker and Audre Lorde and like Patricia Hell Collins, like they were all chiming in. This was like a wide ranging movement of anti porn. Like by the end of the 70s, this was really the focus of

the feminist movement. If you were like from Mars and like went to the archives and like read about feminism during this time, you would have thought that this was like the major issue that people cared about. Maybe the key difference or one of the key differences between like the way I feel about porn, which is like, sometimes I've enjoyed it. Sometimes I've dramatically unenjoyed it. I think that it can be made ethically. I think that there's a lot more incentive for it to be made unethically. I think that in a society where like as a woman, you are actively encouraged from birth to like hide what you actually want from everyone, including yourself. It's hard to access what you actually want to

do sexually in an economic situation where it is effectively impossible for many people to find jobs that compensate them in a way that gives them any quality of life. You know, you can say, well, do you have the freedom to choose sex work? If it is your only viable option? I don't know. I think it's possible to feel conflicted about the conditions in which porn is made and in which sex work is carried out and still see these things as things that can be good for everybody and should be able to be good for everybody. But that that becomes impossible when you look at porn and think this is not an effect of things being fucked up. This is making them dramatically more fucked up. Like, what is that the difference between kind of where I am and where they're

coming from? Yeah, I think they were trying to say sort of like, life imitates art rather than art imitates life. And I think like what a lot of feminists were looking on at this and being like, sure, like a lot of porn is misogynist, we live in a misogynist culture, movies are misogynist, TV is misogynist, rock and roll is misogynist, even though a lot of women like it. Like, we're forced to like a lot of things that hate us. That's kind of a theme. Absolutely. And yet there are a lot of women who are enjoying porn and enjoying sex. And so I think, yes, porn can be misogynist, but that all of this sort of indictment of porn and determining of like, what's good for women versus what's bad for women and what's sexuality versus what's sensuality and what's erotica and what's

pornography, all it's doing is just like making women feel bad about their own desires because like, what if they desire what you're saying is bad? Yeah, we have to bring it back full circle to Linda Lovelace. Hi, Linda. Hi, Linda. So at this point, she has disavowed her stage name, her real name is Linda Borman. She's become a born again Christian, like everybody else. This was like a real thing in like the 70s and 80s, people really became born again Christians. But this is like the cusp of the Reagan revolution. And it's like really starting. So Linda, she came out with a book called ordeal in 1980 that like really painstakingly described her time in porn and her relationship with Chuck trainer, who was a producer on deep throat. And it's truly heartbreaking.

Like, well, she accused trainer of like physical and psychological abuse and like making her engage in sex acts she didn't want to engage in. She alleges that he forced her into acting in deep throat against her will and like literally had a gun to her head on set, which sounds terrifying. I mean, some people dispute that particular detail. But like, I don't think anybody disputes that he was just an enormously controlling and abusive partner. And like people started pointing out that like in the movie, you can even see bruises on her legs and like, yeah, the anti porn movement of course recruits her and brings her on like talk shows and stuff like that. She and Gloria Steinem went on like a late night show to talk about this, that I actually, I think I'm going to

send you the clip of this, like this would be great to play. How did Linda Lovelace and Gloria Steinem join forces? How did the two of you get together? I saw Linda on the fill down here show. And she was being questioned by Phil, who I think is usually more sensitive questioner than he was this time. And by the audience with enormous disbelief. And I still find it very hard to believe that you have become a changed person. Is there something about the way you were raised in your view that made you vulnerable to this? What did lead you to become a hostage? If we could now ask the question, but it doesn't go back beyond that to your childhood that you were a susceptible person?

Let's see now what you do. You're doing what made me so angry. You know, because we don't say that the hostages in Iran, what in your, what in your background led you to be in the embassy? The situations are not nearly comparable. They are, it's force. It's like on one hand, like I think it's very clear that Gloria Steinem is kind of like using Linda for this cause that like she may or may not have been aligned with before. But like also this host is like such a victim blaming piece of shit.

It's still very clear that people think that if you're an abusive relationship, it's your fault. Or like if you decided to be in porn, like you have no right to complain, I feel very torn when I see something like this. Cause I'm just like, oh, like Linda, like you are clearly not treated right. But like also you're being used as a pawn in like a feminist movement. And before you were used as a pawn in like a other misogynist movements. So like, I just feel like she was really caught between two worlds in this like really shitty way. Well, and having read ordeal years and years ago, I mean, it is like, it's an absolutely harrowing book. And the impression I remember coming away from it with, and this is just my interpretation

is that, you know, her marriage to Chuck trainer was incredibly abusive that he, you know, according to her, broke her down psychologically, forced her into sex work, organized a gang rape at one point in order to, you know, kind of break down her will. And then when they were making deep throat, it seems like it was actually like a relatively better time in the sense that he wasn't around as much and that like they could create excuses for him to have to run imaginary errands. Yeah, I think that actually the deep throat experience was like maybe more of an ambiguous experience than her relationship with Chuck in general, like, which sounds just completely

horrific. And I don't know, looking at that now, I feel like even if he didn't have a gun to her head the whole time making the movie or part of the time, even if that's not literally the case, I think that that's true, right? In the sense that you can do something and be part of this cultural moment and get all this praise for like this thing that you're saying at the time, like, I love this, I love my life, I love making these movies, la, la, la. And then you, you know, time passes and you get outside of the trauma and then need to survive the relationship. And you're like, I didn't choose that for myself at all, you know, absolutely. Yeah. Later in her life, she was just like, very broke, she couldn't get a job because

of everything that had gone down. And she actually went back to porn, which like, nobody will ever know like truly how she felt about that. But I think like what she said in interviews was sort of like, listen, this is like how I can make money. And like, at least now, I'm in control of it. And then she just like died in a car accident, like way too young. Right. She was like in her early fifties, right? And it does make it sort of like a more complicated experience to watch deep throat, for sure. Yeah. So anyway, so ordeal comes out in 1980. This is the absolute height of the anti porn movement. It's a very mainstream movement. I think a lot of people in America are aware of it. Yeah, it's all happening. We had a nice guy as president, and we swore never to do it

again. Seriously. And this was like very dismaying for a lot of feminists, including my mom, Ellen Willis, who actually coined the term pro sex feminism. Thank you, known as mom. Yeah, I guess now it's technically sex positive feminism, but that was a clear precursor. And like my mom and her friends were the same women in those consciousness racing sessions, like 10 years before, who like really had sort of like utopian ideas about what the sexual revolution could look like with a feminist lens. And now all of a sudden, there's this anti porn movement that they like just totally don't relate to. And like, nobody's listening to them, where they're sort of saying, you know, one can criticize sexual exploitation without just wholesale rejecting the real and true and palpable

advances of the sexual revolution. Like for a lot of these women, the sexual revolution and like the beginning of feminism were sort of inextricable. And it was just like a supremely exhilarating moment for them. And here are these women being like, you know, you're playing yourself if you're like even talking to men, which also really sucks, like to as an adult be told this thing that you think you like, you don't actually like. And I realize I've just been saying this whole time that women are so relentlessly gaslit by society that it's hard to tell what we actually do want to do. But sometimes we really do know. So you know, it is possible. And even if we don't know, we should have this right to explore without both conservatives and supposed feminists yelling at us, you know, right, like you

don't have to take a strange erotic journey. But if you want to, you really should. Exactly. And I think a lot of the pro sex feminists were very disturbed by the unlikely alliance with conservatives like Jerry Falwell, and all these total assholes who used to be, you know, feminist enemy number one. And now all of a sudden, they're like joining forces with Andrea Dworkin and and these anti porn feminists. Jerry Falwell, who in the eyes of Tammy Faye, managed to as a character make Jim Baker look sympathetic. Exactly. I mean, my mother was not the only pro sex feminist. We also have Gil Rubin. We also have Carol Vance. We have Susie Bright. We have all these people who sort of started to react to this

anti porn movement. So there was sort of like this reaction of these pro sex feminists that like culminated in a very famous conference called the Barnard Conference on sexuality in 1982, which I really do see as the kind of the climax of what we're calling the sex wars or the porn wars or whatever you want to call them, where like these feminists really kind of came face to face and like really duped it out. And again, it's like, it's sort of sounds dry. Like, here's this conference at like Barnard, but like, there actually was like a lot of drama. It's the moistest of the seven sister schools. Well, I feel like Barnard itself could have used a little bit more moistness, because like, during this time, they like kind of were a stick in the mud when these pro sex

feminists were trying to organize this conference. So okay, this conference is organized by Carol Vance. And it was sort of like this moment to push back on this very pervasive anti porn narrative and not just anti porn, but kind of like anti BDSM anti heterosexuality in general, like, this is why people call this time the sex wars sometimes, because it encompasses more debates than just pornography. But at the conference, a lot of attention was paid to porn. This conference was very controversial, even before it began. WAP and other anti porn groups were like calling to complain about it. And the day before the conference Barnard officials confiscated like 1500 copies of the pamphlet that was going to be handed out, like the program. Why? Because it was

obscene. This is why I'm saying they're not the moistest. They could have been cool, but they like didn't. They're the chicken breasts that's been in the oven too long. Yeah, somebody should have put some foil over Barnard. Yeah. But the conference ultimately went on as planned on the day of WAP was like picketing the conference, like lots of news outlets covered it. It was like a real event in New York City. And I thought it was fun for kind of like mainstream media to be like, look at these feminists fighting with each other. They can't get anything right. Exactly. It was catnip for the media. And then there was like this tension between the white pro sex feminists and the women of color who are sort of like, there's this sense that they were sort of retrospectively

invited into this debate that like, they had not set the terms for it all. Well, that never happens now. We've really licked that problem. And like, these women were sympathetic to the goals of sexual liberation, like they weren't like bad fits for this argument. But like, they tried to point out that there were like, other cultural factors that made it difficult for like women of color to totally embrace sexual freedom, you know, and it was awkward because it was sort of just like, okay, so like, you're just kind of inviting us to have this debate that like up until five months ago, you didn't care to include us in. So like the anti porn feminists at this point, I mean, frankly, they doubled down after the early 80s, like this is sort of like the legislating pornography

era, you know, with like Catherine McKinnon getting involved in like, attempting to pass like local ordinances against pornography, like actually trying to legislate pornography. And this is when I really think the anti porn feminists fuck up. I think a lot of people were offended and jarred by this. I mean, they just kept losing case after case, like there were no victories for them. And it made them look like total prudes. It just made them look like censorship activists. Because not a cute look, which is not a cute look. And I think it was a lot less sympathetic than just saying, Hey, this pornography is damaging to women or it depicts violence against women. In some ways, it was a good wake up call for some people. But once you start legislating it a

lot of people were like, Whoa, you guys are going too far. Well, it reminds me of the temperance movement. And my understanding is that in, you know, the late 19th century kind of pre suffrage, the ways for women to be listened to in a public sphere have, you know, political agency, you could be a temperance activist, and you could try and get rid of alcohol, or you could do seances and be a spiritualist and channel ghosts and people would listen to you kind of by listening to the ghosts. So like neither of these seem like great options. And it feels like, you know, like another way of knowingly or not finding a way to do something in the public sphere that happens to align with the desires of politically conservative people who

you agree about basically nothing else with. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the temperance movement is a really good metaphor that I think people actually used at the time. Why don't you try to get to the root of the problem and like not make people feel bad or shamed about entertainment that's like, of course, laden with misogyny, but like it is ultimately entertainment. And it's like not going to solve the problem. And it's cutting off other women from like having a smart cocktail or, you know, watching a sexy movie if that's what they need at the end of the day. So feminists were out here like attempting to pass amendments to like civil rights laws that like would

recognize pornography as a violation of the civil rights of women as a form of sex discrimination. They attempted to pass and by they I mean, like Catherine McKinnon was really prominent, but there was like a whole like fleet of like feminist lawyers try to do this. They attempted to pass an amendment to Minneapolis's civil rights law in 1983. And then like two city councils passed the law, but the mayor vetoed it both times. So similar laws were passed in Indianapolis, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Bellingham, Washington, like these were local fights happening on local city councils. These sort of like local fights really bleed into why they even had like a Meese commission in the first place.

It's time for this beautiful tributary to flow into the River Reagan that we always end up at again. Oh, yeah. The Meese report is just like classic peak Reagan. Here we are in the mid 80s. It's named after Attorney General Edwin Meese. And it found that the link between porn consumption and violence like held water and found is kind of a loose term because it was based almost exclusively on testimony. And like the studies they did use were just pretty willfully misinterpreted according to the academics who made these studies. Like these academics were sort of like, wait, you're like misapplying my data. Like it was widely criticized by anybody who knew anything about this topic. Like it was really a very moralistic and conservative document. And people knew that even

at the time, like for instance, the link between porn consumption and violence, like what they said was like, it requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence. Like they admitted that like they couldn't really find it in the evidence. And yet they concluded that quote, we see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions that are plainly justified by our own common sense. Oh my God, I love it when like you get this like legal or government document that's written in like sort of highfalutin government deeds and is essentially saying like, we've decided to just proceed thinking what we thought already with no justification. Goodbye.

WAP, of course, was as you mentioned, in the top of the hour was instrumental in putting this together. Andrea Dworkin testified, Linda Lovelace spoke at these hearings, she said, very memorably, virtually every time someone watches that movie, meaning deep throat, they're watching me being raped. Which again, I'm just like, Oh, awful, you know, yeah. And I feel like that can be true. Like I don't disagree with her, right? Like I don't think she's wrong. I don't think she's lying. I just think you can't hang your policy for the entire country on that. Yeah, of course. Like, but like also the Mies commission, they're like, not your friends.

Ronald Reagan does not give a fuck about you, Linda Lovelace. Ronald Reagan is nobody's friend. If Ronald Reagan were a flavor of ice cream, he would be praline and dick. But you know, so this Mies commission came out in 1986, there was kind of a crackdown, like a performative crackdown on porn for a while. There were some like obscenity trials, which again, were kind of hard to prosecute because of this like three pronged community standards criteria. And like, did this affect this happened to Harry Reem, right?

Yes. Harry Reems, he was found guilty of acting in Deep Throat. You know, they gave Linda Lovelace immunity. They gave the director Gerard Demiano immunity. And like Harry Reems was kind of just like hung out to dry and made an example of. Basically, Harry Reems was arrested in 1974. It really dragged on. And then by the time he was convicted in April, 1976, and of course, an election was going on. And by the fall, there was a new president, Carter. So his conviction was overturned on appeal a year later in 1977. Good old Carter.

So like, thankfully, Harry Reems did not go to prison, but like his entire life was destroyed. You know, he was kind of just like a pariah. And like at one point, just like descended into like drug use and homelessness. And like, then he moved to Park City, Utah, and like turned around his life and became a born again Christian and like became a real estate mogul. And so like, it's a happy ending. But I think he really went through a very dark time all because of like these fucking idiots. Yeah, it feels like the like the social forces surrounding the movie are just, I don't know, I like, I don't want to come off as like too biased of a deep through to apologize. Like if

you see it as fruit of the poison tree, then like, I really can't disagree with that. But I it feels like society is the problem. Oh, and also it was just like made an example of because it was so popular. Like obviously, if you were going to pick out the most like, quote unquote, harmful porn of the time, like it wouldn't be deep throat. You know what I mean? Like it was kind of just like vanilla comparatively. So, you know, the years between the Meese Commission and the so called third wave of the 90s was like really a pretty quiet time for feminism. And I think that was like, I mean, I guess partly about the Reagan years, but also like partly because just like the sex wars, the

porn wars, whatever you want to call it, just like did so much damage to the feminist movement. It was really just like kind of devastating that, you know, on the right, there's this fantasy, I guess, that the left is like this highly organized, you know, militia of like radical lefties, and we're storming the schools, and we're going to steal your kids. And what always strikes me as highly ironic is how the right and particularly the Christian right has been engaged very openly for decades in like a shameless culture war, right? Like the first generation of essentially millennials who grew up being homeschooled in this big homeschooling movement were called are called the Joshua generation, because the idea is that they're going to rise up and take control of culture. And

like, it has been working, like it's working, they're doing it. You know, I think everything is projection. And so this idea that leftists are a coordinated force, it's like, no, we're not, all we do is fight with each other. Exactly. Maybe the question that is like, can you have a political movement with less in fighting without surrendering to essentially like a top down hierarchy, which I think is why the right is able to do that. But I mean, as you know, as somebody who's like given a lot of time, a lot of thought, a lot of love to this topic, like, what do you feel it is informing you of in this moment today? Like,

what do you feel you're able to recognize about trying to build a better world and what it takes from understanding what happened in this story? Of course, you have to call out misogyny and violence and fight against it. But ultimately, if you're going to be an effective feminist activist or any type of activist, you have to offer people a more pleasurable, exciting world rather than a smaller world. But I think ultimately, none of that stuff will be effectively addressed unless we like offer an exciting and encouraging alternative rather than just being like, this stuff is bad, and you should have like less sex and you should have less casual sex and you should watch less porn. It's like, give me a vision that I can get

behind, you know, going back to the consciousness raising sessions, like those women in those living rooms in like 1968, 1969, they had imagination, man, like, that's what I love about them. Like, they were like, we've got to have sex because we want it. Like, here are fantasies. And let's talk about them rather than just like, like, being straight sucks, like, are the straights okay? Like, porn sucks. It's disgusting. Like, like, yes, that's true. But like, you can't stop there. The people who had a very exhilarating imagination about what's possible, like, they're the true heroes of the story, you know, maybe every big topic and social change comes back to the ability to imagine bigger. And I mean, just believing in a world where you can make porn ethically, where

you can have pleasurable sex readily available to you, where you can be confident about what you want, even if that's not possible for you now, like believing that you can get there, I think. I think it also comes down to people being able to imagine joy for themselves and individually conceiving of themselves as being deserving of pleasure. That feels important too. Oh, yeah, it's so important. I think that is so much harder than just having like defensive politics all the time. And of course, you can critique like where desire comes from, like, of course, society shapes desire. And sometimes we collaborate with like our own oppression within our desire, like, yes, so we can talk about that while still not making people feel that they have

to have these like impossible standards and expectations, and they have to like denounce all the men in their lives, and they have to force themselves to be like, more queer or more creative with sex or like, dictate what they should be doing. That's just like never worked. And it will continue not to work. Something in the world today is going to give you pleasure. And my wish for you is that you find it. That's beautiful. And that was our episode. Thank you so much to Nona Willis Aronowitz. If you want to learn more about this, you can read her book, Bad Sex, which will be out very soon. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, who makes all of this possible. We'll see you in two weeks.