Catharine A. MacKinnon on "Lovelace", and the subject (not object) of the film, Linda Marchiano

The
pornographic film Deep Throat,
released in 1972, was a cultural sensation whose star, “Linda Lovelace,” was
said to put a girl-next-door face on the sexual revolution. But the actual life
of Linda Boreman, as depicted in the new biopic Lovelace, was one of beatings, rape, and terror. Feminist legal
scholar Catharine MacKinnon, author of such works as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and Only Words, represented Boreman after she came forward with her
story, and later, with Andrea Dworkin, pursued civil rights litigation as a
means to fight pornography. We asked MacKinnon about Boreman, Lovelace, and the potential impact of
the film.
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Q. You’ve noted that prior to the 1980 publication of Linda Lovelace’s Ordeal, you had no view of pornography
one way or the other. For those unfamiliar with her story, who was Linda Lovelace?

“Linda
Lovelace” was the fictional name of Linda Boreman, later Linda Marchiano, who
was forced into captivity and made to perform fellatio and other sex acts by
pimps, including organized crime, so that pornography, notably the notorious film Deep Throat, could be made of her. The film was instrumental in establishing
pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. After her escape, Linda’s
valiant opposition to the sex industry included chronicling her abuse in Ordeal and extensive public testimony. Her revelations enabled a change in the
way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from
morality to harm.

Q. This
film comes decades after the landmark pornography civil rights hearings at
which Marchiano testified, as documented in In
Harm’s Way. Can you remind us what was at stake in those hearings?

The
anti-pornography civil rights hearings collected in In Harm’s Way created a space for people victimized by pornography
to speak about what had been done to them in its making or through its use.  Up to that point, the legal argument over
pornography had essentially only considered the freedom of speech issues.

The hearings
documented the inequality that is foundational to the industry: that the “speech”
of the pornographers is the use and abuse of the bodies of mainly women, who
were far from free and were not speaking for themselves. The consequences of
the distribution and use of the materials was shown to be equally silencing and
endangering to legions of women and children who are abused by its
consumers.  Thus the sexual exploitation
of women and children in making pornography is mass-produced through its
consumers to become violation of other women and children.

The civil rights
ordinances the hearings debated were passed several times, then found to
violate the First Amendment on the theory that the more harm the materials do,
the more protected as speech they are–an incorrect, indeed reversed, view of First
Amendment law. The ordinances could
still be passed and found constitutional today.