Last night I watched the 2005 film Inside Deep Throat, now out on DVD. For those of you who haven't brushed up on your Nixon era cultural history, before Mark Felt was Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate "Deep Throat" source, the euphemism was recognizable primarily as the title of a wildly popular porn film released in 1972 and banned in 23 states. Inside Deep Throat interviews cultural heavyweights ranging from Norman Mailer to Erica Jong to Hugh Hefner, recalling the Mafia's distribution of the film, the federal government's prosecution of Deep Throat actor Harry Reems, and star Linda Lovelace's subsequent anti-porn activism, followed by her return to the industry in 2001, when she posed for Leg Show magazine at the age of 51. But here's what interested me most in Inside Deep Throat: In the age of Girls Gone Wild, porn star Jenna Jameson's ubiquitous presence on VH1, and concerns that Internet pornography is destroying intimacy in an entire generation, the second wave feminist movement's schizophrenic reaction to Deep Throat is worth examining.

As feminist novelist Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) recalls in the documentary, Deep Throat was de rigueur among New York City intellectuals in the early 1970s. After the New York Times described Deep Throat as a cultural phenomenon, the glitterati screened the porno at house parties, where they smoked pot and made out. Indeed, compared to today's silicon-saturated, cookie-cutter porn, there's lots to like in Deep Throat: real (smallish!) breasts, some witty banter, and discussion of female pleasure. The problem with Deep Throat lies in its ridiculous depiction of the female orgasm. It feels silly to pick apart the"plot" of a porno, but here it is: Linda Lovelace, playing "herself," can't experience orgasm, so she goes to a kindly doctor (Harry Reems), who discovers that her clitoris lies not in the usual place, but deep inside her throat. You can guess what happens next, and it's pure male fantasy.

"Anti-porn feminists," led by figures such as Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller, attacked the film. Their argument was--and still is--that pornography, by depicting women as sex objects and men as controlling studs, contributes to real life violence against women and misogyny in general. "Sex-positive" feminists, some of them with first-hand experience in the porn industry, responded that the answer wasn't to censor porn, but to create porn that depicted female sexuality as it really is: powerful, complicated, messy, and when all goes well, completely earth-moving. More than 30 years later, we've moved only slightly beyond the dualism of this debate. Mainstream pornography, filled as it is with identical Barbie doll blondes and women moaning in pleasure at the mere sight of a penis, doesn't have much to offer feminism. Alternative porn exists mostly online, where there are communities for every fetish imaginable. And feminist porn is out there, represented by spokeswomen like Violet Blue and Candida Royalle.

Porn isn't going away--in fact, it seems we're addicted to it. Rather than continuously railing against the aesthetics of mainstream XXX or asserting that young men are being perverted by the Internet (the same images used to exist on playing cards), feminists should support realistic portrayals of both female and male sexuality, accurate sex education in our schools, and an emphasis on pleasure. Power is an aphrodisiac and depictions of it aren't going to disappear from porn. But it sure would be nice to see more kneeling men.