Good Booty by Ann Powers

Author:Ann Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

THE SOUND OF SOMEONE COMING

One avenue leading to fame for the hungry young women of 1970s Hollywood was hard-core pornography. Until the 1970s, few feature-length porn films existed. Most had vaguely instructional titles like Africanus Sexualis and Man & Wife and depicted “demonstrations” interrupted by professorial commentary. Deep Throat changed that, though cheaply made by people with little film experience. It possessed a coherent story line, a breakout star in perky Linda Lovelace, and sound. In New York, celebrities and ordinary folk mingled in the lobby before watching Lovelace discover pleasure through oral sex. They marveled at sights they’d never previously seen while eating popcorn.

Deep Throat made porn ordinary. Lovelace became a celebrity, securing a book contract and a magazine column and appearing on television talk shows. Although later she would allege that she was being severely abused by her husband and manager, Chuck Traynor, at the time she seemed as wholesome as any starlet. Equally rosy Marilyn Chambers had actually been an Ivory soap girl before making 1972’s Behind the Green Door. Constance Money, star of the witty romp The Opening of Misty Beethoven, resembled a sorority girl, while at thirty-six, Georgina Spelvin in The Devil in Miss Jones was every would-be swinger’s wife gone wild. Moustachioed Harry Reems and teen-idol type Jamie Gillis also seemed like ordinary folk. They possessed less glamour than the average Hollywood actor, and the stories structured around their sex scenes were amusingly accessible. No matter how much it might be still seen as a “pariah,” the new porn was no longer exactly an outsider art form—it was, as its leading theorist, Linda Williams, has noted, a genre among other film genres.15

The rise of hard core in the 1970s coincided with a surge of sexual explicitness in virtually every other popular art form, continuing to the end of the decade. The titillating television comedy came into vogue. Art films like Last Tango in Paris and Midnight Cowboy, the first X-rated film to win an Oscar, entered the canon. Grade schoolers passed around grubby copies of books like Jaws (the “wet panties” scene!) and Jacqueline Susann’s many bestsellers with the pages of the sexy passages earmarked. And sex sounds moved up front in music, too, years before disco: Barry White in soul, one-hit wonders the Jimmy Castor Bunch (“Troglodyte”) and the Chakachas (“Jungle Fever”) in funk, orgasmic Deep Purple and the sex gods Led Zeppelin in hard rock.

Sound was a key element that made the new porn different, signifying sex itself. Stag films, the cheap loops of women undressing or people engaging in coitus that circulated privately in earlier eras, were silent or added a tacky soundtrack. Narrative porn, aspiring to be like “straight” cinema, included dialogue, but the sex scenes used overdubs of the actors moaning and crying out, to enhance the erotic experience. Williams suggests that in this way hard-core pornos resemble musicals: the sensual impact of a song bursting through a story line. She notes that the sounds of pleasure and the sounds of music have similar rhythmic and melodic features.

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