Last month saw the premiere of the new film Lovelace at the Sundance Film Festival in Europe. Due for release in April, it’s likely to raise a few eyebrows amongst cinema-goers, least of all because it’s reported to be the most ‘X-rated’ mainstream movie ever produced. I hope its real point of interest will not be the prospect of seeing the doe-eyed Amanda Seyfried re-enacting some pretty visceral pornographic scenes, but rather that the story manages to shed light on historic and modern perceptions of the porn industry.

The film tells the story of Linda Boreman, better known as her ‘professional’ persona ‘Linda Lovelace’. In 1972 she made her name starring in the film Deep Throat, the scenes of the eponymous act being some of the most celebrated, or indeed notorious, pornographic images of the era. Despite a blossoming career as a porn ‘actress’ Linda decided, shortly afterwards, to publicly denounce the industry, revealing that she had been subject to daily abuse, coercion and rape. She claimed that, whilst some scenes had been filmed, her husband and abuser, Chuck Traynor, had been standing just out of shot pointing a gun at her. In 1980 she published her autobiography, Ordeal, in which she hauntingly claimed ‘everyone that watches Deep Throat is watching me being raped’.

Many people, particularly those who worked behind the scenes in the industry, accused her of being a pathological liar and attention-seeker. The main evidence for their claims was that she looked like she was enjoying herself on screen: of course, it was inescapably disingenuous for those who had worked hard to distinguish porn ‘actresses’ from the average sex worker, to then deny that Linda’s apparent enjoyment was, in reality, just an act.

Forty years later it would be comforting to put her experiences down to the disturbing excesses of a pre-Feminist society. But in the parallel universe of pornography, the opposite is true. Our attitudes to pornography have barely changed since the 1970s and society is still choosing to accept the image on screen as the reality. As Angela Carter points out, this is exactly what the porn industry wants; the material portrays fantasy, not reality, ‘its heroes and heroines, from the most gross to the most sophisticated, are mythic abstractions’. Mainstream pornography is designed to make us forget what it is we’re watching.

Harmless escapism is one thing, and in fact many would argue that pornography is needed as an outlet for sexual tension, but the fact that anyone chooses to buy into the notion that pornography is just harmless fun, or even glamorous, for those involved, shows that the increased awareness of gender issues since the 1970s has done little to dismantle those ‘mythic abstractions’.

The proof of this is not in the harmful effects of pornography per se, but in society’s inconsistent attitude to pornography as opposed to other forms of sex work. In a 2008 CATI survey, ostensibly on prostitution, 39% of men agreed that paying for sex ‘exploits women and should be a criminal offence’; yet more agreed that it was exploitative but shouldn’t be criminalised. Yet I would be extremely surprised if those men had never consumed pornography. In fact a recent research project in Montreal on the effects of pornography had to be abandoned after they couldn’t find a single adult male who had never watched any. McCormack Evans, founder of the ‘Anti Porn Men Project’, identified what he describes as “a kind of double consciousness” in his own behaviour, whereby he would profess to support gender equality and respect for women but yet still support an industry that reduces them to sex objects. I think this is probably a sentiment that the majority of people who watch porn, both men and women, could relate to and it is this which allows the myths around pornography to persist: as long as we don’t let ourselves acknowledge that porn ‘actors’ are prostitutes, or even real, it is possible to reconcile supporting the porn industry with our stated principles.

Lovelace is set to confront both sides of that ‘double consciousness’, which is what makes it such an exciting project. The patina of glamour, excitement and arousal which the porn industry has so masterfully constructed could be heavily compromised by parts of the film. Pornography-style close-ups brutally cut with studio shots, reveal a reality of the sexual exploitation of a naïve and desperate victim and expose some of the myths we’re willing to accept for society’s collective piece of mind.