{"id":1356,"date":"2005-02-10T13:54:08","date_gmt":"2005-02-10T21:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/10\/the-deep-throat-and-catherine-mckinnon\/"},"modified":"2005-02-10T13:54:08","modified_gmt":"2005-02-10T21:54:08","slug":"the-deep-throat-and-catherine-mckinnon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1356","title":{"rendered":"The Deep Throat and Catherine McKinnon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThe 1970’s porn movie Deep Throat<\/em> is coming to movie theaters near you:
\n<\/a><\/p>\n


\nDeep Throat,” the infamous 1972 adult film that led to a government crackdown on pornography, is being re-released in theaters as a new generation of lawmakers wages a renewed assault on smut, trade paper Daily Variety reported in its Tuesday edition.<\/p>\n

The release of the Linda Lovelace opus, which was banned at the time in 23 states, coincides with the premiere of the documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” which hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston on Friday.<\/p>\n

The original film, which was made in six days for $25,000 and has grossed over $600 million, will not be ready until at least Feb. 18, the paper said. Las Vegas-based Arrow Prods., which owns the rights to the mob-funded “Deep Throat,” started striking 10 prints on Monday, it added. Five of the prints will be edited to garner an “R” rating, which allows admission to children aged under 17 if accompanied by an adult.
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The media reports I have read seem to present the relaunch as yet another battle between the freedom of expression gang and those who want to ban pornography, and every one of them so far has taken the side of the freedom of expression. This is not that surprising. Porn is everywhere today and things which were seen as shocking in the early 1970’s are no longer so. That porn, and especially violent and misogynistic porn, might directly or indirectly hurt some women is not a hot topic<\/a> in the mainstream media, and neither is the possibility that plentiful supply of porn geared towards the sexual desires of mostly men might lead to a distorted view of women’s sexual needs and the expected sexual behavior of women. Instead, when something sexual provokes wider outrage this tends to be about the consequences of porn to its unintended viewers, such as children. The Janet Jackson breast episode is a good example of what the media might address.<\/p>\n

All this explains the treatment of Catherine McKinnon’s comments about the movie. She participated in a panel discussion at the New York premiere of Inside the Deep Throat, a documentary about the movie, and she appears to have been the one on the panel who was most vigorously arguing the unpopular points about porn’s possible effects. This is how she was written up later on:<\/a><\/p>\n


\nMitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. “What’s so funny?” she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff’s hand shot up – “I can do it,” he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going “me too!” (Gigi Grazer – wife of Brian – later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touch\u00c3\u00a9). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And:<\/a><\/p>\n


\nFormer New York Times movie critic Elvis Mitchell moderated, and the group consisted of HarperCollins publisher and controversy lightning rod Judith Regan, journalist Peter Boyer, famed criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz and feminist professor Catherine McKinnon.<\/p>\n

The latter, who turned out be quite mad, I thought, immediately coined the phrase “throat rape” about what happened on screen to the movie’s late star, Linda Lovelace.<\/p>\n

That declaration produced hissing, and a few laughs, from the audience.<\/p>\n

McKinnon, infamously known in intellectual circles as the “feminist censor,” does not often appear before mainstream audiences. Her “partner in crime” is the militant feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was not among us.<\/p>\n

“Inside Deep Throat” producer Brian Grazer’s hair was already standing straight up. More of McKinnon’s theories might have made it curl.
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And so on. In other words, Catherine McKinnon is viewed as an extremist, someone quite removed from mainstream ideas, someone who is a safe object for general ridicule. Yet I could list many current commentators whose views are more extremist in some other directions and who still get accorded both respect and a place in public debate. Consider Ann Coulter’s proposal to nuke Islamic countries and to convert them to Christianity or Michelle Malkin’s views on detention camps as a good way to prevent terrorism. To name the men whose ideas are even more outrageous would take me the rest of this post. Clearly, some extreme views are more acceptable than others.<\/p>\n

But what does McKinnon really say? The anti-feminist websites tend to have a field day picking out isolated comments from her writings, all of which are intended to show how unreasonable McKinnon is, and sometimes her name is used in debates to tar all feminists with the same brush of freakiness. This is partly McKinnon’s own fault. She likes to use strong statements as a rhetorical device, and they do work to draw attention to what she is saying. But they tend to do this only in a superficial sense and seldom lead to an extended discussion of what her actual arguments are. Or this is what I believe. Though using careful phrazing is not as exciting to begin with, it tends to turn fewer listeners off and ultimately results in a more fruitful discussion.<\/p>\n

Consider the often heard argument that McKinnon compares all heterosexual sex to rape. I read the book in which this idea is discussed before I was aware of McKinnon’s mythological proportions among the anti-feminists, and this let me interpret her arguments quite differently. Not necessarily agree with them, but to see what her point might be, and to me it was that if sexuality is defined by purely patriarchal standards women living in patriarchy are unaware of their true sexual desires and needs and therefore cannot in a fundamental sense make free choices to engage in sex. This may not be the reading that McKinnon intends, but it’s quite a different reading from the one which equates voluntary sex with rape. Even more generally, McKinnon writes theory and to understand her arguments one must understand the way she defines the concepts. Not that this excuses her use of the terms in public debates without proper definitions.<\/p>\n

All this is background for my argument that when McKinnon called the events in the Deep Throat<\/em> “throat rape” what she said was quite different from what the audience heard. Linda Lovelace, the actress performing in the movie, stated in her autobiography that swallowing a penis so deeply did not come naturally to her but needed a lot of practice. She also revealed that her then-partner and manager had used physical violence <\/a>to control her during the making of the movie:<\/p>\n


\nUnlike two earlier autobiographies, Ordeal was not a titillating affair, and the liberation Lovelace talked about was not sexual but deeply personal. Chuck Traynor was not her ‘creator’ as she had previously announced, but her abuser. She claimed that she had made Deep Throat under threat of physical harm, and explained that Traynor would use guns and knives to get his way. There was also a confession that some found ironic: on the set of the movie, Lovelace felt less threatened than she had before; the movie people were a creative family, and she drew strength from her new relationships. Traynor observed this, and would double his beatings.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

The generous reading of McKinnon’s comments would take all this into account. But feminists seldom receive generous readings these days and radical feminists practically never, even when the point they are making is one that deserves wider discussion.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\nThe 1970’s porn movie Deep Throat is coming to movie theaters near you:<\/p>\n


\nDeep Throat,” the infamous 1972 adult film that led to a government crackdown on pornography, is being re-released in theaters as a new generation of lawmakers wages a renewed assault on smut, trade paper Daily Variety reported in its Tuesday edition.<\/p>\n

The release of the Linda Lovelace opus, which was banned at the time in 23 states, coincides with the premiere of the documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” which hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston on Friday.<\/p>\n

The original film, which was made in six days for $25,000 and has grossed over $600 million, will not be ready until at least Feb. 18, the paper said. Las Vegas-based Arrow Prods., which owns the rights to the mob-funded “Deep Throat,” started striking 10 prints on Monday, it added. Five of the prints will be edited to garner an “R” rating, which allows admission to children aged under 17 if accompanied by an adult.
\n<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism-sexism-etc","category-sex-work-porn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}