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.

Amanda Seyfried has apparently officially taken the role of Linda Lovelace in a biopic of the Deep Throat star that’s been in development for a long time and been through multiple recastings. I’ll be curious to hear what folks who work in or closer to the industry think of the casting and the project, but I’ve always found Lovelace fascinating — she was, as Daphne Merkin pointed out in her obituary, at the crux of every major debate about pornography since she helped the genre go mainstream, or close enough to it, in Deep Throat, and through her conversion and years as an anti-port crusader, and her withdrawal from a feminist movement she felt used her and into an accommodation with her past — in other words, sort of where society as a whole is today. Given the breathless and panicky debates we have about pornography, it’s worth a serious and considered look at that history in its context. The People vs. Larry Flynt is a great movie, but it’s largely from a free-speech perspective, which isn’t the only one worth considering here.

I also really like Seyfried, who’s very good at playing ingenues with more going on beneath the surface than she lets on, whether in Mean Girls or Big Love. I don’t think In Time gave her very much to do, but it proves she can put on a bit more of an edge. I hope the script is enough to do the issue and the actress justice, and to make clear the distinction between the idea that doing porn is inherently oppressive and the idea that forcing people into porn and taking their compensation from them is oppressive.

There are a lot of disturbing ideas in the pledge that the FAMiLY Leader is asking Republican candidates to take, among them the idea being gay is a choice (presumably heterosexuality’s totally genetic), or the statement that sex is inherently better after marriage. But I think it’s worth singling out the part of the pledge where candidates who take the pledge — to this date, only Michele Bachmann — promise that they’ll provide “humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy..from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion, and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.”

The whole thing is a lovely illustration of ways Bachmann’s out of the American mainstream. Equating pornography with human trafficking, prostitution, or infanticide suggests that Bachmann doesn’t know very much about any of those things, or much about the sex lives of actual Americans (particularly those she claims to represent). And if Bachmann interpreted that pledge as a mandate to seek a governmental ban of pornography and pornography broadly defined (rather than, you know, folks doing the work to keep kids away from material they don’t want them to access), it would be a demonstration of what startlingly low value Bachmann places on the First Amendment. “All forms of pornography” can be interpreted to include a lot of art and popular culture. None of this is surprising, I think, but it’s not minor. And it merits pointing out and pushing back against.