If you want to hawk a new product or revivify the sales of an old one, the experts will tell you there is no substitute for timing. Linda Lovelace crawled out of the pop-cultural primordial soup just in time to take advantage of a sea-change in the country's morals. Porn was briefly hip and society was taking instructions from the likes of Alex Comfort rather than, say, Billy Graham. She stayed in the limelight long enough for the title of her one hit movie, Deep Throat, to become a byword for adult pleasure, as well as the name for the rat who helped Woodword and Bernstein bring down a president.

It was never the intention of Linda Lovelace (née Boreman) to make the country safe for fellatio and dangerous for Nixon. She wrote that her ambition had been to be a nun. At this vocation, as in so many others, she failed. Yet she did succeed in one thing: she refused to be silent. Long after her work in porn loops ceased, Linda Lovelace spoke out eloquently to condemn pornography.

Far from providing freedom from inhibition, hard-core pornography all too often represents a depressingly familiar servitude on the part of the viewer. How could it be otherwise? Despite the fact that our culture idealizes fidelity and sexual responsibility, the powerful tools of socialization are incapable of breaking our desire to stray. The wild power of sex grips us all and our morals and ideologies are bent to breaking. Though the fantasy of the "happy hooker" is pervasive, the cultural response is the same as the title of John Ford's play: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. The woman who publicly engages in such behavior is shamed and marked, perhaps permanently. Nobody has succeeded in legitimizing sex workers, even as their legitimizers seek to neologize them. Inevitably the events which brought Lovelace in front of the cameras were sordid. This mix of dark gossip and sex added up to compelling viewing.

Thus the attraction, perhaps especially in 1972, year of the saturnine Nixon, of a woman without inhibitions whose clitoris, conveniently, was (so the movie's plot ran) in her throat. That actually was the whole plot. Even so, it was 100 percent more plot than almost any other porn movie had to date. Before Deep Throat, hard core on celluloid had been limited to "loops" - short, low-budget numbers depicting the act. They were viewed within the intimacy of tiny masturbation booths or at stag parties. Somehow the addition of a tiny plot, smaller even than Lovelace's feminine counterpart to the Adams Apple, made the thing respectable for mass and mixed audiences.