p_p_man
The 'Euro' European
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2001
- Posts
- 24,253
Some of you won't know her and some of you will....
She deserves an obituary...
Linda Lovelace
Deep Throat porn star who turned her back on the industry to campaign against its abuse of women
"After a brief reign as the first superstar of erotic entertainment through her appearance in the 1972 smash-hit pornographic film Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace repudiated her past to become a campaigner against pornographic movie-making. Both through her autobiographical book, Ordeal, and through a ceaseless round of lecture tours, during which she explained the pitfalls awaiting women coming from dysfunctional backgrounds such as hers, she became in America an inspiration to thousands of women suffering abuse from men.
In Lovelace’s case, it was luck — or misfortune — that Deep Throat came to cinema screens in the United States at the very moment that the blue movie was acquiring mainstream chic. Throughout America vast crowds of men and women queued for city blocks to get into it. America’s former first lady, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, was reported to have given it her imprimatur as a wholesome view of female sexuality. In a series of follow-up books, which included the notorious Inside Linda Lovelace, prosecuted for obscenity in Britain in 1976 — and acquitted — its star extolled the sense of sexual liberation that participation in the movie had given her, by implication inviting all womankind to join her in the nymphomania she had apparently discovered to be her true metier.
That a film so manifestly exploitative of women — based as it was on the ultimate in male oral-sex fantasies — could have been thus received is, at this distance, a matter for wonder. But no one, it seemed, could gainsay its pretty and manifestly wholesome-looking young star, as she gave interview after interview, each of which seemed to be a paean of praise for what, in any other era, would have been deprecated as rank sexual abuse.
Deep Throat grossed $600 million at the box office to become the first smash hit of its genre, and its protagonist the first true star. Then, there was silence. For several years the world heard of Linda Lovelace no more — until 1980, when her book Ordeal emerged from the silence to give matters an entirely different cast. Suddenly the erstwhile high priestess of sexual excess was revealed, after all, to have been no more nor less than a victim, of the vilest abuses, and at that, abuses orchestrated at the instigation of her husband, a man whose principal pleasure was not in sexual activity, but in the degradation of women during that process.
Confronted with these revelations, the world, particularly the ranks of women commentators, took a deep breath. Was such a volte face simply another imposition on human credulity for commercial ends? As revealed in Ordeal, the key to the Lovelace experience was itself a childhood of unremitting abuse, not of a sexual but a psychological nature. She was born Linda Boreman in 1942 in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of a retired policeman and a waitress. Her father was an ineffectual bystander in a brutalising domestic saga in which his forceful but almost unhinged wife set the tone to her children. “He could tiptoe through an earthquake and pretend it wasn’t happening”, as his daughter was subsequently to describe him.
The mother was subject to uncontrollable rages, during which she regularly assaulted her children. From the age of four Linda received beatings on the slightest pretext, these generally administered with a belt. As she grew older the favoured method of chastisement was a broom handle, kept to be handy whenever her mother’s self-control snapped.
Sex was never discussed in the family. But in such a totally dysfunctional unit as the Boreman family had become, it was not surprising that Linda gravitated towards an early experience of it, as an escape from the daily domestic violence. While still in her teens she had given birth to a child, which was put out for adoption by her mother without reference to her feelings in the matter.
With little education, and no prospects of bettering herself, she was attracted by the suggestion of a man called Chuck Traynor that she go and live with him and be “looked after”. Desperate to get away from home, she accepted, unaware that Traynor had a drugs charge outstanding against him, and that he had attempted to make a living off the earnings of prostitution. Before long he was implying that someone of her looks could make a great deal of money from the business for them both. When she demurred, saying she wanted to find regular work, Traynor reinforced his suggestions with blows.
When she attempted to escape, it was, naively, to return to her mother’s house. That fond parent immediately restored her to her tormentor. Literally at gunpoint, she was, she related, forced into sex sessions with a number of men whom he introduced to her. Soon Traynor was having these encounters — whose principal component was sexual violence against her — filmed as eight-millimetre shorts. Only a regular diet of painkillers enabled her to endure the pain these abusive sessions involved.
The relative success of these eventually led to the translation to 35mm and to Deep Throat. It did not release her from her bondage, but its runaway success transformed her life. Although the film was prosecuted in some American States, Traynor had married his star to insure himself against her giving testimony against him in court.
She was anyway, enjoying the exchange of grubby motel rooms and greasy burger joints for celebrity interviews and parties. Visiting Britain, she appeared at Ascot in 1974, wearing an entirely diaphanous minidress of breath-taking brevity, the barest of cover provided only by an occasionally tilted parasol-sized hat.
Victim of a male-created sex industry though she was, Lovelace co-operated in the imposture of being a sexually liberated woman, to a public willing, for the time, to be gullible. As she described it, at every interview she gave, her husband was alongside her with a gun in his pocket, as an insurance against her forgetting the lines they had rehearsed together.
The end came only when Traynor found someone else to replace her as his porno queen. Suddenly dropped by him, Lovelace found herself at last free from his influence over her life, and divorced him. Traynor and his associates had owned 99 per cent of their greatest asset — her. But she never saw any of the money made by Deep Throat and, having no cash to mount a court battle for a percentage of it, was advised by lawyers not to try.
In the mid-1970s she married Larry Marchiano, a plumber and TV repair man, by whom she had two children, and at last achieved a degree of the domestic happiness she had always sought. From then on she devoted her life to writing and speaking against the kinds of abuse to which she had been subjected.
Besides Ordeal, which only found a publisher after she passed lie detector tests, she toured universities, colleges and testified at government and Church commissions on the effects of pornography. Her cause was taken up by the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, herself a forceful campaigner against pornography. MacKinnon was able to use Lovelace’s experiences to frame a powerful warning to young women similarly circumstanced. But as Lovelace was ruefully to say, she could never truly escape from the thrall of Deep Throat, which received a new lease of life in the era of the video. By then it had spawned famous progeny, as the nickname given during the Watergate scandal to the mystery source of the inside information given to the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
The marriage to Marchiano was dissolved in 1996 and Linda continued to campaign under her maiden name, Boreham. Latterly she had been ravaged by a number of diseases which involved her in huge medical bills. Among other complaints, she suffered from hepatitis and had had a liver transplant.
She is survived by her two children.
Linda Lovelace, former porn star and anti-pornographer campaigner, was born in New York on January 10, 1949. She died in Denver, Colorado, as a result of injuries sustained in a road accident, on April 22, 2002, aged 53."
ppman
She deserves an obituary...
Linda Lovelace
Deep Throat porn star who turned her back on the industry to campaign against its abuse of women
"After a brief reign as the first superstar of erotic entertainment through her appearance in the 1972 smash-hit pornographic film Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace repudiated her past to become a campaigner against pornographic movie-making. Both through her autobiographical book, Ordeal, and through a ceaseless round of lecture tours, during which she explained the pitfalls awaiting women coming from dysfunctional backgrounds such as hers, she became in America an inspiration to thousands of women suffering abuse from men.
In Lovelace’s case, it was luck — or misfortune — that Deep Throat came to cinema screens in the United States at the very moment that the blue movie was acquiring mainstream chic. Throughout America vast crowds of men and women queued for city blocks to get into it. America’s former first lady, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, was reported to have given it her imprimatur as a wholesome view of female sexuality. In a series of follow-up books, which included the notorious Inside Linda Lovelace, prosecuted for obscenity in Britain in 1976 — and acquitted — its star extolled the sense of sexual liberation that participation in the movie had given her, by implication inviting all womankind to join her in the nymphomania she had apparently discovered to be her true metier.
That a film so manifestly exploitative of women — based as it was on the ultimate in male oral-sex fantasies — could have been thus received is, at this distance, a matter for wonder. But no one, it seemed, could gainsay its pretty and manifestly wholesome-looking young star, as she gave interview after interview, each of which seemed to be a paean of praise for what, in any other era, would have been deprecated as rank sexual abuse.
Deep Throat grossed $600 million at the box office to become the first smash hit of its genre, and its protagonist the first true star. Then, there was silence. For several years the world heard of Linda Lovelace no more — until 1980, when her book Ordeal emerged from the silence to give matters an entirely different cast. Suddenly the erstwhile high priestess of sexual excess was revealed, after all, to have been no more nor less than a victim, of the vilest abuses, and at that, abuses orchestrated at the instigation of her husband, a man whose principal pleasure was not in sexual activity, but in the degradation of women during that process.
Confronted with these revelations, the world, particularly the ranks of women commentators, took a deep breath. Was such a volte face simply another imposition on human credulity for commercial ends? As revealed in Ordeal, the key to the Lovelace experience was itself a childhood of unremitting abuse, not of a sexual but a psychological nature. She was born Linda Boreman in 1942 in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of a retired policeman and a waitress. Her father was an ineffectual bystander in a brutalising domestic saga in which his forceful but almost unhinged wife set the tone to her children. “He could tiptoe through an earthquake and pretend it wasn’t happening”, as his daughter was subsequently to describe him.
The mother was subject to uncontrollable rages, during which she regularly assaulted her children. From the age of four Linda received beatings on the slightest pretext, these generally administered with a belt. As she grew older the favoured method of chastisement was a broom handle, kept to be handy whenever her mother’s self-control snapped.
Sex was never discussed in the family. But in such a totally dysfunctional unit as the Boreman family had become, it was not surprising that Linda gravitated towards an early experience of it, as an escape from the daily domestic violence. While still in her teens she had given birth to a child, which was put out for adoption by her mother without reference to her feelings in the matter.
With little education, and no prospects of bettering herself, she was attracted by the suggestion of a man called Chuck Traynor that she go and live with him and be “looked after”. Desperate to get away from home, she accepted, unaware that Traynor had a drugs charge outstanding against him, and that he had attempted to make a living off the earnings of prostitution. Before long he was implying that someone of her looks could make a great deal of money from the business for them both. When she demurred, saying she wanted to find regular work, Traynor reinforced his suggestions with blows.
When she attempted to escape, it was, naively, to return to her mother’s house. That fond parent immediately restored her to her tormentor. Literally at gunpoint, she was, she related, forced into sex sessions with a number of men whom he introduced to her. Soon Traynor was having these encounters — whose principal component was sexual violence against her — filmed as eight-millimetre shorts. Only a regular diet of painkillers enabled her to endure the pain these abusive sessions involved.
The relative success of these eventually led to the translation to 35mm and to Deep Throat. It did not release her from her bondage, but its runaway success transformed her life. Although the film was prosecuted in some American States, Traynor had married his star to insure himself against her giving testimony against him in court.
She was anyway, enjoying the exchange of grubby motel rooms and greasy burger joints for celebrity interviews and parties. Visiting Britain, she appeared at Ascot in 1974, wearing an entirely diaphanous minidress of breath-taking brevity, the barest of cover provided only by an occasionally tilted parasol-sized hat.
Victim of a male-created sex industry though she was, Lovelace co-operated in the imposture of being a sexually liberated woman, to a public willing, for the time, to be gullible. As she described it, at every interview she gave, her husband was alongside her with a gun in his pocket, as an insurance against her forgetting the lines they had rehearsed together.
The end came only when Traynor found someone else to replace her as his porno queen. Suddenly dropped by him, Lovelace found herself at last free from his influence over her life, and divorced him. Traynor and his associates had owned 99 per cent of their greatest asset — her. But she never saw any of the money made by Deep Throat and, having no cash to mount a court battle for a percentage of it, was advised by lawyers not to try.
In the mid-1970s she married Larry Marchiano, a plumber and TV repair man, by whom she had two children, and at last achieved a degree of the domestic happiness she had always sought. From then on she devoted her life to writing and speaking against the kinds of abuse to which she had been subjected.
Besides Ordeal, which only found a publisher after she passed lie detector tests, she toured universities, colleges and testified at government and Church commissions on the effects of pornography. Her cause was taken up by the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, herself a forceful campaigner against pornography. MacKinnon was able to use Lovelace’s experiences to frame a powerful warning to young women similarly circumstanced. But as Lovelace was ruefully to say, she could never truly escape from the thrall of Deep Throat, which received a new lease of life in the era of the video. By then it had spawned famous progeny, as the nickname given during the Watergate scandal to the mystery source of the inside information given to the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
The marriage to Marchiano was dissolved in 1996 and Linda continued to campaign under her maiden name, Boreham. Latterly she had been ravaged by a number of diseases which involved her in huge medical bills. Among other complaints, she suffered from hepatitis and had had a liver transplant.
She is survived by her two children.
Linda Lovelace, former porn star and anti-pornographer campaigner, was born in New York on January 10, 1949. She died in Denver, Colorado, as a result of injuries sustained in a road accident, on April 22, 2002, aged 53."
ppman
