Content area
Full Text
THE OPENING OF GERALD DAMIANOiS hard-core film Deep Throat at New York's World Theater in June of 1972 marked a turning point in American cultural history. Over six thousand people went to see the film in the first week. Mainstream reviewers praised it. Its New York success sparked a nationwide run, giving Middle America a strong dose of coastal cosmopolitan culture. The film, which originally cost only $25,000 to make, eventually grossed over 25 million dollars, making it one of the most profitable films of all time, and it remains one of the top-selling hard-core video rentals. The unexpected success of Deep Throat seemed to signal the apogee of America's sexual revolution, heralding a new age of frank and uninhibited public engagement with intimate issues previously suppressed by Puritanism and prudery. And its focus on one woman's quest for sexual satisfaction additionally seemed to indicate that the dou-ble standard was finally being overturned, that female pleasure was finally being acknowledged in the public sphere.
Within six months, however, the film was banned in New York, and indeed in many other localities across the country. Later that year the Supreme Court, now headed by Nixon appointee Warren Burger, had ruled on the case of Miller v. California, altering the legal definition of obscenity, which had been narrowed down to almost nil by the famously liberal Warren Court. The ruling in Miller v. California determined that local, as opposed to national, community standards could be used to define obscenity, and it replaced the "utterly without redeeming social value" clause with "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."1 The brief Golden Age of Pornography was over, but the century-long battle over the definition and regulation of porn in America was not. In fact, the battle lines had received new energy and emphasis from feminism's equally brief second wave, which took the sex industry as one of its foes in the fight for social, and sexual, equality. In this paper, I will interrogate the complex coincidence of porn's golden age and feminism's second wave. Both emerged at the end of the sixties, enjoyed a brief period in the media spotlight, and essentially ended by the mid-seventies. The consequences of and relationship between both phenomena remain the subject of...