I don’t really think that the Linda Lovelace biopic starring Amanda Seyfriend (there are several, one has to keep track) is going to do what The Playboy Club should have and didn’t do: capture the benefits and pitfalls that the sexual revolution offered women, including the freedom to have more sex without fear of pregnancy, and the corresponding expectation that they’d be more sexually available. But I do think it sounds like it might argue the inverse of The Playboy Club‘s silly assertion that the show was going to be about women’s empowerment, and take a hard line against pornography. My guess is based mostly on the fact that the project’s cast Demi Moore to play Gloria Steinem, suggesting her 1980 Ms. Magazine piece “The Real Linda Lovelace” will be some sort of frame device for the movie.

I don’t really think that either of these perspectives really captures the tension of the period. Just because Linda Lovelace was coerced into performing in pornographic films, or because Chuck Traynor coached her on her oral sex skills doesn’t mean no woman can ever find fulfillment in the adult industry or enjoy performing oral sex. Just because the Playboy Club wasn’t a model employer doesn’t mean that no woman ever found independence by working there. There’s no question that a pornografied culture has made headway in America, but it speaks to the success of feminism that it’s made those advances by wrapping itself in the mantle of women’s liberation and independence. Neither a purely anti-porn pitch, nor a pitch that women will be most happy by making themselves sexually available and fine-tuned to men has proven entirely successful. What women wanted was more subtle and complex than any one very successful pornographic movie then, and it remains as tricky and elusive now.

I was sorry that Diane Keaton’s show Tilda, in which she was set to play a Nikki Finke-like blogger terrorizing Hollywood, never went forward at HBO, and now that I’m watching Entourage, I’m even more sorry that we’re not getting an insider-y looking entertainment industry story from a woman’s perspective.

But I regret even more that this show, written by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Marti Noxon, where Keaton was supposed to play “an old-guard feminist leader who tries to give new spark to the cause by starting a sexually frank women’s magazine,” never happened. It would have been the most explicitly feminist show since Maude, right? And even more so since it’s about doing the work of feminism, not simply living by and advocating its tenets. It’s one thing to air a documentary about Gloria Steinem and her role in the second-wave feminist movement and to treat it like history, and another to do a show that acknowledges that the work of that movement is far from finished, and that dives straight into the challenges of the transition from the second wave to the third wave.

I’m not remotely shocked that this show didn’t happen. But I am sort of depressed by the fact that it counts as a good thing that HBO actually considered it.

I haven’t actually seen The Playboy Club (though I’ve got a request in to NBC for screeners), but it strikes me that Gloria Steinem’s call for a boycott of the show on the grounds that it romanticizes a place she found to be sexist and unglamorous is overblown. The network’s decision to sell the show as a parable of women’s empowerment also seems to be overstating the case — in part because I don’t think it’s necessary.

The very thing that’s interesting about the sexual revolution is that it’s contradictory, right? Getting to a place where your sexuality isn’t your father’s to withhold or give away, and where the way you dress and present yourself is governed by your preferences rather than by norms of what’s appropriate is an important first step. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be sexually harassed, or misinterpreted, or end up in a liberation movement where you’re told that your role is to provide sexual comfort for the men leading it. What’s interesting about the ’60s is the process people went through over and over again, whether they thought they’d escaped sexism, or racism, or homophobia, only to find that they hadn’t, and that they had to try in new and different ways to build a more perfect world.

It’s entirely possible both that the women of The Playboy Club thought that setting themselves up as sexual icons, and that they could be harassed and humiliated on the job. In fact, the first big plot arc of the show, in which Amber Heard accidentally kills a customer who tries to sexually assault her, looks like it’s pretty squarely situated in just that dilemma (even if the death itself is of the One Tree Hill Dog Ate My Heart Transplant variety):

And perhaps more to the point, I don’t think Steinem has to worry. This is a show that posits Eddie Cibrian as a poor man’s Jon Hamm. I’m not particularly worried that it’s going to garner a lot of viewers and critical acclaim and stick around for a long time.