![]() ![]() It also steps awkwardly around Linda Lovelace’s allegations in her 1980 memoir Ordeal that she made the film under emotional and physical threat, forced at gunpoint by her then boyfriend-manager to participate. ![]() It decries censorship and sexual repression in the usual liberal fashion, forgetting that pornography could hardly exist without them. It wants to resurrect an aura of subversive chic about the porn enterprise while also mainstreaming it and making it wholesome. Inside Deep Throat tries hard to account for what made this film unique, but it doesn’t get very far: For all its efforts, it’s still rather confused about its subject (as well as about the pronunciation of the word “clitoris”). Porn is a world where personality simply doesn’t matter: what a refreshing vacation from the daily reality of coupledom in which one partner’s personality tics and the other’s inability to deal with them is surely the leading cause of couple dissolution, not to mention the sexual anesthesia (or antipathy) that generally precedes it. The usual impediments to acquiring sex don’t exist in pornutopia: Forget social convention, sexual repression, your partner’s personality foibles. Pornography’s capacity to reimagine the world and the quotient of sexual gratification it contains is obviously what most irks its critics, and what its fans can’t get enough of. He calls his doctor to procure the proper procedure, then returns to tell Linda, “He says he can cut it down to any size I want.” Rockets explode sexual utopia for all. But note that Deep Throat’s bodily rehab fantasies cut both ways: Toward the end of the film, Linda acquires a new boyfriend but frets that he’s not well-endowed enough to satisfy her: She needs a man with a 9-inch penis. After all, remaking bodies and organs is also a fantasy about reorganizing the contours of gender. And what an interesting prospect to contemplate: If sexual pleasure were as sure a thing for women as for men, what vast social and personal transformations would follow? If women did have orgasms while performing oral sex, not only would the longstanding war between the sexes instantly terminate, no doubt so too would women’s tiresome role as sexual gatekeepers. The premise may be dopey, but the fantasy of male-female instant sexual synchrony is sort of a poignant one: It imagines a universe where men and women get pleasure from all the same things. ![]()
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