You know, when a woman of my persuasion sees that the New York Times has published an obituary for Gerard Damiano, the director of Deep Throat, she really only has two options: to accept that the New York Times will not report Linda Lovelace’s claims that she was beaten, raped, and coerced with threats of further violence or murder into making that movie, or to accept that the New York Times will manage to report on those claims in a shitty manner.
Guess which path Margalit Fox chose?
In later years, Ms. [Lovelace] denounced the film as depicting her “rape.”
Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the fact that sex workers’ voices are routinely dismissed (if they say they enjoy their work, they’re perceived to be lying, and if they say they don’t enjoy their work, they’re also perceived to be lying – the one constant is that a sex worker never has the right to be the final authority on her own experience). Let’s leave aside the fact that some people still don’t believe that sex workers can be raped. Let’s leave aside the fact that sex workers are perceived as disposable and subhuman, and the fact that they are therefore disproportionately targeted for violence, and the fact that their rapists, attackers, and/or murderers are rarely if ever brought to justice because the society at large perceives sex workers as less entitled to protection than other people. Let’s leave aside, finally, the fact that this has dangerous implications, not just for sex workers, but for any woman who is perceived as “too” sexual, as evidenced by the Haidl rape case, in which a teenaged girl was drugged, raped, and sodomized with a glass bottle and a lit cigarette and a pool cue and the defense argued that it was not rape because she’d said once that she wanted to be in porn. Leaving aside all of this, let me just point out that it is relatively uncommon for women to have clits in their throats, but that there seems to be a nationwide epidemic of “dick fingers.”