The women behind the porn projector

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Mary Fan

She was the breathing blow-up doll of the 70s. The hard porn queen, the fantasy of a real woman as freaky in life as in film.

"I live for sex and will never get enough of it," Lovelace told America, "and will continue to try every day to fine-tune my physical mechanism to finer and finer perfection."

In a pre-HIV awareness age, when oral sex was not safer sex but simply taboo and distasteful to most women, Lovelace was doing it on-screen and off. And how.

"I love (the taste of sperm). It's caviar to me. I can't understand why other chicks get so totally turned off by it," she told Screw magazine.

Men, college students, and couples were eating it up. Her signature porn flick "Deep Throat" grossed millions. Finally, a girl willing to do what their loved ones wouldn't. Finally a girl saying she loved doing what other women found degrading - willing to say that she loved debasing herself.

Loved doing it with animals. With women. With men. With objects. With anything and everything as long as there was someone to see and be pleased.

The story - and Lovelace the woman rather than the talking slab of meat - wouldn't emerge until the 80s when her landmark Ordeal was published.

The real story was an exposé of the porn industry. Of beatings and brainwashing at the hands of her keeper, Chuck Traynor, who sold her to men and later to the porn industry. Of a rape that lasted for years.

If anything could have turned decent folks off hard porn it was this story. Of beatings with steel-toed boots rained upon a women curled into the fetal position on the floor. Then shooting the porn film that would make her master and his masters millions with bruises still visible on her body beneath her heavy make-up. Bruises still visible in the film.

What metaphor more resonant for the industry of hard porn?

The industry should have withered then as it is meant to - not in censorship but in simple revulsion. Revulsion from people, informed by the very medium of free speech and expression that should and does allow hard porn to persist, finally seeing the bruises beneath the make-up and not the action, not the fantasy of a woman taking it and loving it.

Porn censorship proponents approached the problem from an alternate angle. They used Lovelace as another in their arsenal of weapons to get Congress to legislate sanctions against porn.

America balked, as well it should. The approach, as with any censorship approach by its nature, was all wrong.

So instead of revulsion, America perversely developed a taste for the harder stuff. The term hard, of course begs definition, as it is arbitrary over time. The most apt definition: Hard porn involves women performing sex acts that most autonomous women in a society finds disgusting and degrading. That is, sex acts that women, given their choice, would not perform.

We're not talking Playboy centerfold spreads here. In this sexually versatile age, we're not even talking Legends of the Kama Sutra or The Devil in Mrs. Jones.

Hence the bruises. Hence the high rate of drug use, of male "keepers" for the female porn stars. The signs that all is not well for women in the industry.

Of course accurate statistics for women coerced into the industry are hard to obtain. They are anecdotal. Lovelace, after all, wouldn't have been a statistic until her revelation years later.

What we do know is that in 1997, 697 million adult movies were sold or rented, a more than nine-fold leap from 75 million in 1985 that grossed porn-makers $4.2 billion.

And what we do or ought to know by now are the stains and bruises behind these statistics. The Chuck Traynors we clothe and feed and stroke with our dollars.

Thanks to the very standard of free expression, the point is driven home. We have the necessarily graphic, honest film "8-MM." We have exposés about the baby boom-boom industry in southeast Asia and other ports impoverished. Exploitation of street children. Exploitation abroad of young women and boys sold into the sex industry and used by sex junket tourists from nations like ours too enlightened to support such travesties at home. We have a peek into the sex industry. And it is revolting.

The issue, of course, is opposite of censorship, the opposite of legislating bans, of being forced to consume or not to consume. The issue is how we exercise our autonomy, our reason, our freedom and our knowledge, armed by the graphic, chilling information that unrestrained media brings before us.

And the issue, ultimately, is how we use our consumer and personal autonomy to aid women caught in an industry that feeds on stripping women of theirs.

Mary Fan is a journalism and political science senior. She can be reached at Mary.Fan@wildcat.arizona.edu.