Porn Wars with Nona Willis Aronowitz

Here’s some money, go see a Porn War. This week we’re going on a field trip to Times Square with Nona Willis Aronowitz, author of Bad Sex, to learn about Deep Throat, “porno chic,” and the unresolved feminist battle over whether to eradicate pornography or make more of it. Digressions include Carol Clover, this discovery of the clitoris, and Harry Reems (Joel Reems’ distant cousin).

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Transcript

Sarah: I think it's true that in American history, like there has never been a correct amount of sex for women to be having. It's always the wrong amount.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Today, we are learning about the porn wars with Nona Willis Aronowitz, the author of Bad Sex. I'm excited to bring this episode to you because I feel like this is a grand feminist debate that was never really solved, and also a cousin to the satanic panic. And you know I love that whole family. It’s something that makes us think about ethics, and free speech, and sex, and gender, and pleasure, and ultimately in this conversation, utopianism. It's also, to me, a summer story. Because we're going to take you to Times Square in the seventies and when I think of Times Square in the seventies, I imagine feeling very sweaty.

Some of the debates we are talking about in this episode is the grand question of porn. Does it liberate? Does it subjugate? Does it do both at the same time somehow? And is media depicting the abuse of women, the result of an abusive culture, or its cause? We will try to answer these questions in one hour. And we will fail, but you'll enjoy listening to it, I think.

And I'll also get some real time sex education. We are also going to talk about all kinds of sex, the whole time, as you might guess. If you haven't heard, we're also going on tour in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and LA, between September 16th and September 22nd. There are still a few tickets left, so come see us if you can.

And if you want bonus episodes, you can subscribe on Patreon or on Apple podcasts. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you like this one. 

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where we take field trips to Times Square, before Giuliani. 

Nona: Oh yeah. Way before. 

Sarah: With me today is a very special guest. Very special guest, who the heck are you? 

Nona: I'm Nona Willis Aronowitz. I've been obsessed with the topic of porn for, I guess, twenty years at this point.  

Sarah: I've been obsessed with Newsies for that long. So, we just have to love what we love.

Nona: Yeah. I mean, I've since expanded my work to journalism and feminist history. I have a book coming out called, Bad Sex, which combines all this stuff. I've known about the feminist sex wars, also known as the porn wars, for quite a while. So I'm excited to sort of take a trip down memory lane. 

Sarah: My gut sense is that this is a conversation that nobody ever managed to resolve and that we're still essentially living inside of, even if we don't know it.

Nona: Oh yeah. Well, this conversation just has so many different threads, some of which really directly intersect with your work and some of which you might not know anything at all about. So, tell me what you do know about this, Sarah, because, as we said, it is sort of adjacent to your work, but I've never actually heard you talk about this topic. 

Sarah: Yeah, that’s funny. Well, first of all, I thought of a great joke to start with, which is “Here's $5. Go see a porn war.” Yay… 

Nona: Oh my God. $5 is actually what Deep Throat cost when it came out. 

Sarah: Wow! That seems expensive for the time. 

Nona: It is. It's like the equivalent of $32. 

Sarah: What?! That’s how much it cost to watch Cruella when it premiered on Disney+. It’s actually slightly more. 

Nona: Yeah! No, it was expensive. It was an event. It was like, this is a night out on the town for us. Like, we might not even get dinner afterwards cause it's $32. 

Sarah: Oh my gosh. Okay. So I know we're going to talk about Deep Throat. 

Nona: Yes. It's the 50th anniversary. 

Sarah: Aww.

Nona: June 1972 is when it came out. 

Sarah: Happy birthday, Deep Throat. Have a hot girl summer. So my understanding is that it's the first porno to basically crack into the mainstream. That it was essentially something that made it more permissible for not just random guys to go to a porno movie theater, but couples and women, and people who identified as non-porn consumers. That this opened a door for them is my understanding. And that then we had, for various reasons, an explosion of the genre in the seventies and part of second wave feminism into the late seventies and the eighties, got into attempting to ban pornography. This was something that Andrea Dworkin was very focused on and, famously/infamously, maybe apocryphally, this legislation caused her own books to be banned in I think I want to say Calgary, because they also got it through in Canada. 

But similarly, there is a faction of second wave feminists who became strange bedfellows with conservatives and Republicans and the Christian right and this kind of culminated, in my understanding, with Andrea Dworkin testifying before the Meese Commission under Reagan essentially saying “We need to have less freedom of speech because women are being abused horribly in these films.”

Nona: Yes. 

Sarah: And again, it feels like this led to some questionable results, but that the goal was extremely earnest and well intentioned and that you can't collaborate with Republicans on anything, which I think we all know by now. 

Nona: Yeah, most of that is right. We'll get into all of it.

So, yeah, I think probably the reason why you're thinking of this word “porno” is because there was this big, splashy article in the New York Times called, Porno Chic, that came out a couple months after Deep Throat had truly become a phenomenon. A very profitable phenomenon. I mean, it was made with a budget of $25,000 and then it eventually made what many estimate was between $25 to $200 million. 

Sarah: That’s like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, basically.  

Nona: It's a perfect movie. But it kicked off all these obscenity trials and it kicked off this kind of cultural cache of going. Like, a lot of celebrities went. Johnny Carson went and Jack Nicholson went and all these women went and Angela Lansbury went and all these people you would not be expecting to go see an honest to goodness porn movie. 

Sarah: Right. I mean, this seems like a good distinction too of what a porno makes. For anyone who doesn't know, what is this genre exactly?

Nona: Oh God. Well, here's the way I'm going to describe it. Before what's called the golden era of porn, which I would think is from 1970 to 1980 roughly, porn was this private affair. There weren't porn theaters per se and there weren't porn movies. There were, like, stag films with a bunch of episodic, kind of comedic sex that like… frat houses, private male clubs would rent these reels and then watch them together, but in a private setting. That's why they called them stag parties. Like, these stag films. They didn't have plots. They didn't have production value. 

Sarah: I wouldn't have remembered this ten minutes ago, but I did at one time read Linda Williams's Hardcore.

Nona: Oh, best book ever. 

Sarah: Right? 

Nona: Wonderful book.

Sarah: But I feel like that is to porn what Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol Clover is to slasher movies.

Nona: That's a deep cut, but I trust you. 

Sarah: For the four people who get it, hooray. And also, if you haven't read it you should read that book. Essentially, it's a scholarly work that kind of was one of the first things to legitimize a very loathed genre. But something I remember Linda Williams mentioning is that early on you would have a short, little film that you would maybe show to entice men to have sex as well. Right? Like, you would go to a brothel. 

Nona: Right. 

Sarah: And they would be like, “Here's a little movie! Don't you want to have sex now? Okay, great.” So the movie itself wasn't a sexual act. It was like a little appe-teaser. 

Nona: Oh yeah. And it was like three minutes long and all of the errors of flaccid penises and premature ejaculation stayed in. Like, people did not have money for these films. But then, for many reasons, in 1972 there were opportunities to make real films. I mean, Deep Throat is an hour plus long and it has a real beginning, middle and end and it has stars. It starred Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems. Linda Lovelace was this very girl next door type. She had this amazing, seventies, curly haired situation. She was really cute, but not glamorous. Like, you watch her, and you feel like you could probably just see her on the street. Harry Reems was actually not even slated to be in this movie. He was on the set, a PA or something like that.

Sarah: Which is incredible because physically he's quite gifted. Right? That should have been apparent. 

Nona: Oh yeah. I mean, he's like the heart and soul of this movie, in my opinion. He is this kind of hirsute, Jewish man who later became a born again Christian, but we will not fault him for that. That was really in Vogue back then. But at the time he was like… he had long, curly, dark hair and had a big mustache and was quite charming and the rumor on the set is that Linda had a big crush on him. Like, they do have a lot of chemistry. 

And the plot of the movie is that Linda Lovelace has a lot of sex. She's a modern woman in the seventies. She enjoys it, but she just gets little tingles. She doesn't get huge orgasms and she's wondering what's wrong with her. And so she goes to a doctor, Harry Reems, and he discovers that her clitoris is not within her vulva. It's in her throat. And therefore she should give as many very deep blow jobs as humanly possible to procure this elusive orgasm. It definitely is much more complicated than the vast majority of porn movies that had come out before then.

Sarah: It’s such an almost dumb idea, but it really works.

Nona: Yeah.

Sarah: It’s so silly. I feel like maybe that, I don't know, made it less scary as a concept to people. 

Nona: Well, yeah, because it's funny. 

Sarah: Right. And the movie is funny.

Nona: It is. It's lighthearted. It's not that serious. I mean, there are some serious humping scenes, but a lot of people are smiling. They're making jokes. There's lots of dumb corny jokes. 

Sarah: Yeah. And also, the theme song is a fucking ear worm. I have not watched this movie in probably ten years and since just when I got up this morning and I was thinking about doing this episode, I've had it stuck in my head and I believe it goes “Deep throat deeper than deep your throat.”

Nona: Oh yes, Sarah. I feel like you're a secret Deep Throat expert. 

Sarah: I’m a secret Deep Throat fan, honestly, and I guess I should just say what cards I have on the table at this moment because when I first became sexually active, which was relatively late, I remember feeling like, okay, I need to watch some porn now because, I don't know, I need to learn about what I'm doing. 

Nona: And so you watched Deep Throat? Wow. That's so refined. 

Sarah: Well, yeah. I like the classics. Skip the rest, go straight to the best. And I had seen more recent porn and always been just a little bit overwhelmed by it and that's how I still feel about it. It's like eating meat. You're like, “I'd like to believe that this was ethically produced, but let's be honest.” 

Nona: Oh yeah. 

Sarah: It's more easy to be aroused when you're not stressed out about the ethics of what you're doing the entire time. 

Nona: Well, yeah. And I think that this has always been a problem. As we'll get into, Linda did seem like she was having a really nice time and maybe on some level she was because she had a crush on Harry Reems, but then we find out later that that was not necessarily the case and it's pretty disturbing.

Sarah: Yeah. But I remember when I saw Deep Throat, I was really struck, you know? And this connects to all the complications about what was Linda experiencing on and off set. But watching the movie in that moment I was like, this is the first time I've watched a woman give a blowjob in a film. I guess I hadn't seen it happen live. This is the first time I've seen this act depicted in a way where it doesn't feel like the point is to treat her mouth like a garbage can. 

Nona: Yes. 

Sarah: And it just felt genuinely pleasurable and joyful and whether or not that's true, it conveyed that idea to me and conveyed the idea that there was joy to be had in performing oral sex, which honestly is a hard concept to hang onto in this world.

Nona: Well, yeah. So, it's 1972. The public is learning about clitoral orgasms. Like, the word “clitoris” is all over this movie, which was definitely not the case in stag films or really any other movies up until a few years ago and it genuinely is concerned with women's pleasure. It's giving the female character some level of interiority, like a hero's journey.

Sarah: Yeah. She wants to have an orgasm. That's a great goal. 

Nona: On one hand. But on the other hand, here we have some clear male anxiety about sexual liberation of women. Like, the clitoris is not in your throat. It's on your vulva and it is nowhere near where the penis goes. It's several inches away and I think that really produced a lot of anxiety in men. Like, that they would become expendable. I mean, some feminists were coming out and saying that. That actually sexual intercourse is not usually how women have orgasms and let's just admit that, but this movie is sort of recentering the focus of women's pleasure on the penis to directly refute those feminists being like, “Yes, women literally need a dick in order to orgasm.” So it's a highly ambivalent narrative, one that we will see again and again in the golden age of porn, but you know, we got to talk about the sexual revolution, Sarah. 

Sarah: I'm so ready. 

Nona: I mean, the fifties are thought of as this very repressive era and by many accounts it was, but there were lots of rebellions happening all over the place from teen girls loving Elvis, who was very explicitly sexual, to Hugh Hefner and the Playboy sort of eschewing commitment and then in 1960, or the early sixties really when it became mainstream, the birth control pill came on the scene and it really separated reproduction from sex and it was very important. 

Sarah: A moment depicted beautifully in the Loretta Lynn song, The Pill. 

Nona: I don't know that song. Can you sing it to me?

Sarah: Yeah. “You wine me and dine me when I was your girl.”

Nona: Ooh. 

Sarah: “Promised if I'd be your wife, you'd show me the world. But all I've seen of this old world is a bed and a doctor's bill.” I think it goes, “I'm tearing down this brooder house because now I've got the pill.” 

Nona: That is amazing. I'm glad that we're twenty minutes into this and you've already sung two songs.

Sarah: Yeah, that's a record for even me. 

Nona: Yeah. I mean it was really in the air and sex itself was getting liberated, but feminism did not yet exist. So, of course, that created all kinds of binds and problems for women. It was great to not be ostracized for being “a tramp” and it was great to not be in abject fear of pregnancy all the time.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: But at the same time, here we are. It's pre feminism. Men now feel entitled to sex. They have this narrative of, “Come on, baby. Leave your hang-ups at the door.” And it got even worse with the counterculture because sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It's like, “What are you? Frigid?” And all of a sudden women felt the right to say no had slipped through their fingers.

Sarah: I think it's true that in American history, like, there has never been a correct amount of sex for women to be having. It's always the wrong amount.

Nona: Well, right.  Women were in quite a bind. They wanted to and were participating in the counterculture, and they wanted to liberate themselves and indulge their own fantasies, but there was no real infrastructure in which to do that, and a lot of dudes were just being total dicks about it all. Not only that. I mean, this was before everybody knew about the clitoris, right? So a lot of this sex was really bad. 

Sarah: In retrospect, I feel like reading The Bell Jar at a young age really tacked another couple of years on to how long I was a virgin cause so much of the foundational literature that you read about women who have had sex before you– it's just like why is this supposed to be so great? What happened after you bled everywhere? 

Nona: Well, right. Exactly. So let's fast forward to the late sixties. The anti-war movement is in full swing. The civil rights movement has been in full swing for quite a while. A lot of women are involved in these movements, but they're being treated like shit by the dudes. They're stuffing envelopes. They're expected to have sex with all these men in the movement who are ultimately sort of disrespecting them and not seeing the cognitive dissonance between fighting for other people's human rights, but then treating the women in their lives like dirt.

Sarah: It's very disturbing that so much effort went into people maybe, possibly discovering the North Pole decades and decades before anyone tried to find the clitoris. They're like, “The North Pole's easier. We're going there first.”

Nona: Well, centuries ago they actually thought women's orgasms were connected to reproduction. So they put a lot of effort into producing them and then when they realized that actually ovulation is spontaneous, they were like, “Oh, never mind. I guess that's not really very important.” But then yes, what you're referring to is this Freudian fallacy, basically, that vaginal orgasms are the mature version of orgasms and clitoral orgasms are immature and if women can't produce vaginal orgasms or if the men they're with can't produce them, then, you know, they're at high risk of becoming hysterics. 

Sarah: Oh, hysteria. Yeah. You got to be careful about that. 

Nona: So all of these movements are happening. Women are involved in these movements, but they're treated like second class citizens and then they start having consciousness raising sessions with each other, which are sort of like the earliest inklings of second wave feminism. I mean, I guess the early, early one was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, of course, but when we really start talking about radical feminism we're really talking about these consciousness raising sessions. A lot of them happened in somebody's apartment. There was like twenty women talking about what used to be considered things that you do not talk about and one of those major topics was sex. So like, all this stuff came up. All the double standards, how shitty it was that men are pressuring women into sex even if they might want to have sex. These women are having bad sex. 

Sarah: I mean, I love cheeseburgers, but if somebody shoves a cheeseburger in my face, I'm going to be pretty pissed.

Nona: Exactly. And it's hard to articulate if you don't have somebody being like, “Yes, I understand exactly what you're talking about.” I think a lot of women had these feelings for years, but they just didn't have other women to talk to them about. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: So I think there was this real sense of this is a political issue. This is important. This isn't just a personal hang-up. We really have to talk about this in terms of politics. That famous phrase, “The personal is political” was conceived around this time by Carol Hanisch. So around this time in 1968, Notes from The First Year was published and this was sort of the first evidence that the consciousness raising sessions were happening to a larger audience and one of the entries in Notes from the First Year was sort of like a transcript of one of these sessions about sex and one quote just always gets me: “We've got to learn to sleep with people because we want them, not because they want us. Not to make them feel better about their masculinity. Not out of weakness or inability to say no, but simply because we want to.” 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: I guess this is a truism now, but we still struggle with this. You know?

Sarah: Oh, I still completely struggle with that personally. 

Nona: Yeah. 

Sarah: I think that there's something in my experience about existing as a woman in America where if you have any kind of tendency towards codependency or toward having trouble determining “Am I doing this because I want it or because somebody wants me to want it?”

Nona: Yes. 

Sarah: You were encouraged to behave that way in order to peacefully fit your social role. Like, you are bad at being a woman if you're mentally well, I think.

Nona: Right, right, right, right. Yeah. And another very famous entry into Notes from the First Year was Anne Coates’ “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” and basically saying that technically, if you consider only the anatomy, men are kind of expendable. So here's this moment. This is a couple years before Deep Throat, but this is really the first moment when radical feminism takes up sex in this public way. 

Sarah: That's wonderful. 

Nona: Seriously. So, okay. But there's also something really interesting around this time going on with porn. So, Lyndon B. Johnson is still the president in the late sixties, and he commissions this president's commission on obscenity and pornography, and I think it actually started in 1967 if I'm not mistaken. But you know, they take a couple of years for these president's commissions, I guess, not that I know much about president's commissions. By the time it came out, it was 1970 and Nixon was president. This commission was very, very, unusually liberal about porn. It basically recommended against any restriction of porn for adults. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Nona: Yeah. Like, they could find no evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials played a role in delinquent or criminal behavior, which was a conceit at the time. 

Sarah: Right. 

Nona: Basically their recommendation was like, all of this legislation prohibiting the sale, the exhibition, the distribution of sexual materials, like, all that should be repealed. So, here are these liberals coming out with this liberal commission, but the Nixon administration is like, “Fuck that.” He vowed, like, “As long as I'm in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut. I still really care about this.” But it sort of undermined them, right? Like, functionally it just sort of added fuel to the fire of a more relaxed attitude towards porn. 

Sarah: What if porn watching leads to dope smoking? What about that? That would be a disaster. Can't allow it.

Nona: Well, right. Exactly. And at this point, nobody cared about violence towards women or anything. I think they just cared about teen delinquents. So that's probably pretty apt. You know what I mean? No official laws are repealed or anything, but it still sort of ignites this porn explosion. Like, it really starts the golden era of porn. After this, hardcore cinemas grew to like a thousand across the nation, which is a lot. So there were a few of these hour and a half movies with plots and stuff before Deep Throat, but Deep Throat is the one that really hit for all the reasons that we said. It was sort of like a perfect storm of appealing stars and acute conceit and just where the sexual revolution was at that point. It had really gone mainstream. It was really very chic, as they called it. Porn was chic.

This is we're now smack in the middle of porn's golden era. All of these women are like walking contradictions of innocent looking good girls who also secretly enjoy sex and are insatiable. They all go through some sort of sexual awakening during the movie. All the stories center on a woman protagonist discovering the joys and the liberation of fulfilling, amazing sex often from some sort of ravishment or tutelage by a dude. It's very, very consistent. 

Sarah: Do you remember the joke on Seinfeld about Rochelle,Rochelle? 

Nona: Oh my God. I am such a bad New York City Jew. I do like Seinfeld, but I'm not like a huge super fan. So I don't know what you're talking about. I'm sorry. 

Sarah: There's this running joke on Seinfeld that's first a movie and eventually becomes a musical called Rochelle, Rochelle and the tagline is “A young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsky.” 

Nona: Oh yeah. It's totally a 1970s porn. 

Sarah: Right. And it feels like also taking the classic hero’s journey, like the Wizard of Oz model, and if you're a boy your hero's journey is like you pick up a light saber and you save the resistance and the universe and if you're a girl, many times your hero's journey is like having sex with a bunch of dudes in this genre. 

Nona: Oh yeah. I mean, all of these narratives, again, just recentered the penis. There was a huge amount of penis worship and of course the money shot was invented during this time.

Sarah: For anyone who doesn't know what that is, what is the money shot? 

Nona: Just a visible ejaculation happening. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Nona: Outside of a woman's body. Whereas before, in stag films, either there wasn't an orgasm at all or it just sometimes happened inside a woman's body kind of furtively and now in the seventies, the real climax was this phallo-centric ejaculation and it was very important and in the manuals of the time they were like, “You must have your money shot. It is essential.” Men were feeling kind of slighted. They were feeling nervous and worried about women's sexual liberation, and this was a way to sort of comfort those worries. 

Sarah: Right. Like it's all about the penis. Nothing can happen without it. It's like the maypole that all of this festivity is happening around. Sorry for the mental image… or you're welcome.  

Nona: No, I love that image. I really do think it was a way to be like, yes, these women are embracing sex, but they still need you. Don't worry. 

Sarah: Don't worry. They can't have sex without you. No one is having fun without you.

Nona: Exactly. 

Sarah: Pay no attention to the lesbian behind the curtain. 

Nona: Yeah. And there were of course lesbian scenes during this time. Like, things were getting a little more gay in the seventies, but of course there was a whole other genre of gay porn.

Sarah: Right. 

Nona: But what I'm talking about is the mainstream straight porn, which had these gratuitous, lesbian scenes, which to this day are still similarly meant to sort of show how down and cool this woman is, but ultimately, she wants the dick. 

Sarah: Right and it's like framing any kind of girl-on-girl sexual experience as something that you do to make yourself an even better dick-lover. 

Nona: Right. Right, right. Of course. Well, yeah and the feminists were like, there's all this sexual revolution pressure that's happening and it's coming from the porn. It's coming from the cultural messages, but feminists are kind of gearing up to address this issue. So, we do have to talk about a very important Supreme Court decision. I know that's a little dry. 

Sarah: No. Nothing could be moisture for me than the Supreme Court. 

Nona: Well, it did involve some moistness within the dry decision. So here we are. It's 1973. Miller v. the state of California. This is really a landmark decision that still stands today although it's not very relevant because of internet porn, but it still technically is on the books.

So basically what happened was this book seller, Marvin Miller, shipped some pornographic materials in the mail and the wrong people got it, like a mom and her son got it and were outraged and called the police basically and so what the decision stated was like, obscene material is not technically protected by the first amendment, but this decision sort of made it harder to define and therefore harder to prosecute pornography by tightening the criteria, the most famous of which was like, “Obscenity would be partly determined by community standards.” Idaho might not have the same community standards as New York and New York City might not have the same community standards as upstate New York. So like, it's super vague. Functionally, it made it really hard to prosecute obscenity cases. 

Sarah: Yeah, I would imagine because like it feels like that language at the end of the day could mean literally nothing.

Nona: Well, exactly. It's like the “you know it when you see it” kind of thing. What exactly is porn? What exactly is obscenity? Who knows? The mid-seventies is really when the whole country started taking notice of this movement that's happening, this feminist movement, this women's liberation movement. By that time, the feminist movement looked different. It wasn't like these cool women in consciousness raising sessions. It was like they were on the cover of Time magazine and they were writing books and stuff and some of them– like this was the beginning of a real focus on rape and violence against women and what causes it and porn and stuff. So this work on rape and violence is extremely important.

Like, of course. I think it couldn't all just be women's desires. It also had to be about what's oppressing women, what's preventing them from living full lives. Like, these are some landmark books that I fully respect. 

Sarah: Also, for legal context, a fact I find really illuminating is that the first marital rape case in the country ever was tried in I believe 1980. So this is before the legal existence of marital rape.  

Nona: So of course they are very important, but they did sort of start the anti-porn movement and everything that came afterwards. So I really want to give Susan Brownmiller the credit for having one of the first major books about rape that really stuck in the craw of our national consciousness and that's Against Our Will. It’s a very important book, although it's a little racist. Like, the word for word and sentence for sentence doesn't necessarily hold up, but it talks about the paradigm of rape and how you don't have to literally be a rapist as a man to assert dominance onto women through sex. What she argued was that this paradigm made it really difficult for heterosexual relationships to function correctly. 

Sarah: I don’t know where she got that idea from, I mean, surely not by merely looking around her each day.

Nona: Yeah. I mean, some of these were very warranted critiques of heterosexuality. Heterosexuality was like a nightmare back then. 

Sarah: I think it’s still in a really weird spot, right? 

Nona: Yes. 

Sarah: Are the straights okay? No. Never have been. Working on it.

Nona: I mean, this is when radical lesbianism sort of came to flourish. A lot of women were sort of defecting from heterosexuality saying this is a horror show. I don't want to be part of it. I don't want to be raped. I don't want to be hit in my domestic life. Like, I just… sorry. Bye. One of these lesbians, Robin Morgan, another very famous anti-porn feminist, she has a pretty famous 1974 essay, which, again, laid the groundwork for a lot of anti-porn movements. I want you to read this paragraph.

Sarah: Here it is: “Pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Rape exists anytime sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman out of her own genuine affection and desire. Anything short of that is, in a radical feminist definition, rape because the pressure is there, and it need not be a knife blade against the throat. It's in his body language, his threat of sulking, his clenched or trembling hands. How many millions of times have women had sex ‘willingly’ with men they didn't want to have sex with? Even men they loved? It must be clear that, under this definition, most of the decently married bedrooms across America are settings for nightly rape.”

Nona: Yeah. True. Yes. 

Sarah: This quote could be written today by somebody with slightly different wording and I feel like it would strike people as equally revelatory. 

Nona: Well, exactly. I think when Me Too happened there was this real moment of appreciating these types of feminists who, at this point, have been disgraced because of their anti-porn attitudes. We'll get to that later, why that is, and also, they were just like, generally espousing an extremely dark truth, but I think there was sort of a Renaissance of some of these women during Me Too because it was like, yeah, you're really sort of fucking saying it. You're just putting it out there.

Sarah: Well and it feels like you can agree about what the problem is and disagree about what the solution is. 

Nona: Exactly. And I think that a lot of the solutions of these women were sort of just like men are evil. You know? I think a lot of women felt like, “Well, wait a second. I love men.”

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: Another very important book came out in 1974. Our favorite, Andrea Dworkin, she came out with Woman Hating. I want to read something she wrote that I think was presumably in response to the female Deep Throat fans who were like, “This sexually liberated me” or even just women who really appreciated the gains of the sexual revolution. 

Sarah: Yeah. So as a Deep Throat fan, she's talking to me and I bet she's maybe not angry, but disappointed. 

Nona: Yeah. Hold onto your hats. “Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore. Profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat. Corporate blood sucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question sell cunt. Racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt, or yellow cunt, or red cunt, or Hispanic cunt, or Jewish cunt, has her legs splayed for any man's pleasure. Violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex. The new pornography is left wing and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the left has gone to die. The left cannot have its horrors and its politics too.” So she was basically just like, “Oh great. Okay. When sex is involved then none of your other values matter. Okay, cool.” Some of these porn movies were very baldly capitalist. I mean, they were just trying to make money in harnessing the most universal fantasy of young men basically and a lot of these narratives were racist and aggressive in many ways. So I get it, but fundamentally she's also shaming other women for possibly liking porn. 

Sarah: And it's like, okay, Andrea. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I'm working on it.

Nona: No, seriously. We're just doing our best. I mean, she became kind of like the face of the anti-porn movement, which was very convenient for a lot of people, for first amendment opponents, for misogynists who didn't like feminism, because she really was out there and angry in many ways.

Sarah: Yeah. I'm sure she did not give generic copy to anybody covering anything she ever did.

Nona: She just was very prone to hyperbole. That can be very effective and that can also just be super easy to make fun of and denigrate. So here we have Robin Morgan, we have Andrea Dworkin, we have Susan Brown Miller, we have a lot of women who are sort of feeling like the most important topic and direction that feminism needs to go in is sort of defensive, like protecting women from men's worst impulses. That can be rape. That can be domestic violence. That can be what we see in porn. Moving on. We eventually see the formation of the group that would eventually become Women Against Pornography or W.A.P.

Sarah: It’s a different acronym now. 

Nona: I know. When I saw that when I was writing my book, I was just like, oh my God. Thank you so much, Cardi and Megan thee Stallion, for revising what that means to us.

Sarah: And forever outing Ben Shapiro is someone who has never aroused his own way.

Nona: Oh my God. Classic tweet. So within a couple of years the group became official. One of the main pastimes of theirs was giving Times Square tours of the peep shows and sex shows. They would blend in with all the other vendors on the street being like, “Take my tour. take this tour!”

Sarah: I mean, I feel like my understanding of this is a little bit weak. Like, a peep show was essentially… you would go in, you would have an individual little booth, I assume, most of the time and you would put in money and then a woman would, I don't know, get naked or do something sexy.

Nona: Yeah. Well, I think there were live peep shows like that. You could also pay to see a slideshow essentially. So this tour was like bringing people from middle America into these booths to show them what they were actually talking about, to show them the porn that would outrage them for probably not feminist reasons to be honest with you. Probably, like, puritan reasons. 

Sarah: Right. 

Nona: The underlying point was propagating the idea that porn caused violence rather than just reflected violence. 

Sarah: Right. 

Nona: Bringing people in these booths and being like, “Well, of course, if you see this aren't you gonna become a violent person?”

Sarah: Gosh. 

Nona: So, okay. We're in the late seventies. It's 1979. There's this big moment for the anti-porn movement again on our favorite place, Times Square. There's like 5,000 people there. The most famous feminists in the country are there. It's like Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug was there, like major players. This was a mainstream protest and by this time women of color are sort of getting engaged. I feel like at first this was like a white woman's thing, but then Alice Walker and Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins, like, they were all chiming in. This was like a wide-ranging movement of anti-porn. By the end of the seventies, this was really the focus of the feminist movement. If you were from Mars and went to the archives and read about feminism during this time, you would've thought that this was the major issue that people cared about. 

Sarah: Maybe the key difference, or one of the key differences, between the way I feel about porn, which is sometimes I've enjoyed it and sometimes I've dramatically unenjoyed it, I think that it can be made ethically. I think that there's a lot more incentive for it to be made unethically. I think that in a society whereas a woman you are actively encouraged from birth to hide what you actually want from everyone including yourself, it's hard to access what you actually want to do sexually. In an economic situation where it is effectively impossible for many people to find jobs that compensate them in a way that gives them any quality of life, you can say, well, do you have the freedom to choose sex work if it is your only viable option? I don't know. I think it's possible to feel conflicted about the conditions in which porn is made and in which sex work is carried out and still see these things as things that can be good for everybody and should be able to be good for everybody, but that that becomes impossible when you look at porn and think “This is not an effect of things being fucked up. This is making them dramatically more fucked up.” Like, is that the difference between where I am and where they're coming from?

Nona: Yeah. I think they were trying to say life imitates art rather than art imitates life and I think a lot of feminists were looking on at this and being like, “Sure. A lot of porn is misogynist. We live in a misogynist culture. Movies are misogynist. TV is misogynist. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: Rock and roll is misogynist, even though a lot of women like it. 

Sarah: We're forced to like a lot of things that hate us. That's kind of a theme. 

Nona: Absolutely. And yet there are a lot of women who are enjoying porn and enjoying sex and so I think yes, porn can be misogynist, but that all of this indictment of porn and determining of what's good for women versus what's bad for women and what's sexuality versus what's sensuality and what's erotica and what's pornography, all it's doing is just making women feel bad about their own desires because what if they desire what you're saying is bad?

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: We have to bring it back full circle to Linda Lovelace. 

Sarah: Hi Linda. 

Nona: Hi Linda. So at this point she has disavowed her stage name. Her real name is Linda Boreman. She's become a born-again Christian like everybody else. This was like a real thing in the seventies and eighties. People really became born again Christians, but this is like the cusp of the Reagan revolution and it's really starting. So Linda, she came out with a book called Ordeal in 1980 that really painstakingly described her time in porn and her relationship with Chuck Traynor who was a producer on Deep Throat and it's truly heartbreaking. Well, she accused trainer of physical and psychological abuse and making her engage in sex acts she didn't want to engage in. She alleges that he forced her into acting in Deep Throat against her will and literally had a gun to her head on set, which sounds terrifying. I mean, some people dispute that particular detail, but I don't think anybody disputes that he was just an enormously controlling and abusive partner. People started pointing out that in the movie you can even see bruises on her legs.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: The anti-porn movement, of course, recruits her and brings her on talk shows and stuff like that. She and Gloria Steinem went on a late-night show to talk about this. I actually think I'm going to send you the clip of this. This would be great to play. 

*Show Recording* 

“How did Linda Lovelace and Gloria Steinem join forces? How did the two of you get together?’

‘I saw Linda on the Phil Donahue show and she was being questioned by Phil, who I think is usually a more sensitive questioner than he was this time and by the audience with enormous disbelief.’

‘And I still find it very hard to believe that you have become a changed person.’

‘Is there something about the way you were raised in your view that made you vulnerable to this?’

‘What did lead you to become a hostage if we could now ask the question?’ Doesn't it go back beyond that to your childhood, that you were a susceptible person?

‘But see now what you're doing. You’re doing what– what made me so angry.’

‘No. But again, Gloria.’ 

‘Ya know? Because we don't say to the hostages in Iran ‘What in your background led you to… to… to be in the embassy.’

‘The situations are not nearly comparable, Gloria.’

‘They are. It's force.”

Nona: It's like, on one hand I think it's very clear that Gloria Steinem is using Linda for this cause that she may or may not have been aligned with before, but also this host is such a victim blaming piece of shit. It's still very clear that people think that if you're in an abusive relationship, it's your fault, or if you decided to be in porn, you have no right to complain. I feel very torn when I see something like this cuz I'm just like, ugh, Linda, you were clearly not treated right bute also you're being used as a pawn in a feminist movement and before you were used as a pawn in another misogynist movement. So I just feel like she was really caught between two worlds in this really shitty way. 

Sarah: And having read Ordeal years and years ago… I mean, it's an absolutely harrowing book and the impression I remember coming away from it with, – and this is just my interpretation – is that her marriage Chuck Trainer was incredibly abusive that he, according to her, broke her down psychologically, forced her into sex work…

Nona: Yes. 

Sarah: …Organized a gang rape at one point in order to break down her will and that then when they were making Deep Throat, it seems like it was actually a relatively better time in the sense that he wasn't around as much and that they could create excuses for him to have to run imaginary errands. 

Nona: Yeah, I think that actually the Deep Throat experience was maybe more of an ambiguous experience than her relationship with Chuck in general, which sounds just completely horrific. 

Sarah: And I don't know, looking at that now I feel like even if he didn't have a gun to her head the whole time making the movie or part of the time, even if that's not literally the case, I think that that's true, right? In the sense that you can do something and be part of this cultural moment and get all this praise for this thing that you're saying at the time, “I love this. I love my life. I love making these movies. La la la,” and then time passes, and you get outside of the trauma and the need to survive the relationship and you're like, “I didn't choose that for myself at all.” You know? 

Nona: Well, absolutely. Yeah. Later in her life, she was just very broke. She couldn't get a job because of everything that had gone down, and she actually went back to porn, which nobody will ever know truly how she felt about that, but I think what she said in interviews was sort of like, “Listen, this is how I can make money and at least now I'm in control of it.” And then she just died in a car accident way too young. 

Sarah: Right. She was in her early fifties, right? 

Nona: And it does make it sort of like a more complicated experience to watch Deep Throat, for sure.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: So anyway, Ordeal comes out in 1980. This is the absolute height of the anti-porn movement. It's a very mainstream movement. I think a lot of people in America are aware of it. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's all happening. We had a nice guy as president, and we swore never to do it again.

Nona: Seriously. And this was very dismaying for a lot of feminists, including my mom, Ellen Willis, who actually coined the term “pro-sex feminism.”

Sarah: Thank you, Nona’s mom. 

Nona: Yeah, I guess now it's technically sex positive feminism, but that was a clear precursor. Like, my mom and her friends were the same women in those consciousness raising sessions like ten years before who really had sort of utopian ideas about what the sexual revolution could look like with a feminist lens. Now all of a sudden there's this anti-porn movement that they just totally don't relate to and nobody's listening to them where they're sort of saying one can criticize sexual exploitation without just wholesale rejecting the real and true and palpable advances of the sexual revolution. Like, for a lot of these women the sexual revolution and the beginning of feminism were sort of inextricable and it was just like a supremely exhilarating moment for them and here are these women being like, “You're playing yourself if you're even talking to men.”

Sarah: Which also really sucks. Like, to, as an adult, be told this thing that you think you like you don't actually and I realize I've just been saying this whole time that women are so relentlessly gaslit by society that it's hard to tell what we actually do want to do, but sometimes we really do know. It is possible. 

Nona: And even if we don't know, we should have this right to explore without both conservatives and supposed feminists yelling at us.

Sarah: Right. Like, you don't have to take a strange erotic journey, but if you want to, you really should. 

Nona: Exactly. And I think a lot of the pro-sex feminists were very disturbed by the unlikely alliance with conservatives like Jerry Falwell and all these total assholes who used to be feminist enemy number one and now all of a sudden they're joining forces with Andrea Dwarkin and these anti-porn feminists.

Sarah: Jerry Falwell who, in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, managed to, as a character, make Jim Bakker look sympathetic. 

Nona: Uh huh. Uh huh. Exactly. I mean, my mother was not the only pro-sex feminist. We also have Gayle Rubin. We also have Carole Vance. We have Susie Bright. We have all these people who sort of started to react to this anti-porn movement. So there was sort of like this reaction of these pro-sex feminists that culminated in a very famous conference called the Barnard Conference on Sexuality in 1982, which I really do see as the climax of what we're calling the sex wars or the porn wars or whatever you want to call them where these feminists really came face to face and really duked it out. And again, it sort of sounds dry. Like, here's this conference at Barnard, but there actually was a lot of drama. 

Sarah: It’s the moistest of the seven sister schools. 

Nona: Well, I feel like Barnard itself could have used a little bit more moistness because during this time they were kind of a stick in the mud when these pro-sex feminists were trying to organize this conference.

So, okay. This conference was organized by Carol Vance, and it was sort of like this moment to push back on this very pervasive anti-porn narrative and not just anti-porn, but kind of like anti-BDSM, anti-heterosexuality in general. This is why people call this time the sex wars sometimes because it encompasses more debates than just pornography, but at the conference a lot of attention was to porn. This conference was very controversial even before it began. WAP and other anti-porn groups were calling to complain about it and the day before the conference, Barnard officials confiscated like 1500 copies of the pamphlet that was going to be handed out, like, the program. 

Sarah: Why? Because it was obscene? 

Nona: This is why I'm saying they're not the moistest. They could have been cool, but they didn’t.

Sarah: They're the chicken breast that's been in the oven too long. 

Nona: Yeah. 

Sarah: Somebody should have put some foil over Barnard.

Nona: Yeah, but the conference ultimately went on as planned. On the day of, WAP was picketing the conference. Lots of news outlets covered it. It was like a real event in New York City. 

Sarah: And I bet it was fun for mainstream media to be like, “Look at these feminists fighting with each other. They can't get anything right.” 

Nona: Exactly. It was catnip for the media. And then there was this tension between the white pro-sex feminists and the women of color. There's this sense that they were sort of retrospectively invited into this debate that they had not set the terms for at all.

Sarah: Well that never happens now.

Nona: We've really licked that problem. And these women were sympathetic to the goals of sexual liberation. Like, they weren't like bad fits for this argument, but they tried to point out that there were other cultural factors that made it difficult for women of color to totally embrace sexual freedom. Ya know? And it was awkward because it was sort of just “Okay, so you're just inviting us to have this debate that up until five months ago you didn't care to include us in.” So like, the anti-porn feminist at this point… I mean, frankly they doubled down. After the early eighties, like, this is sort of the legislating pornography era with Catharine MacKinnon getting involved and attempting to pass local ordinances against pornography, like, actually trying to legislate pornography and this is when I really think the anti-porn feminists fuck up. I think a lot of people were offended and jarred by this. I mean, they just kept losing case after case. There were no victories for them, and it made them look like total prudes. It just made them look like censorship activists. 

Sarah: Which is not a cute look.

Nona: Which is not a cute look and I think it was a lot less sympathetic than just saying, “Hey, this pornography is damaging to women, or it depicts violence against women.” In some ways it was a good wake up call for some people, but once you start legislating it a lot of people were like, “Whoa, you guys are going too far.” 

Sarah: Well, it reminds me of the temperance movement and my understanding is that in the late 19th century, kind of pre-suffrage, the ways for women to be listened to in a public sphere and have political agency, you could be a temperance activist and you could try and get rid of alcohol or you could do seances and be a spiritualist and channel ghosts and then people would listen to you kind of by listening to the ghosts. So neither of these seem like great options and it feels like another way of, knowingly or not, finding a way to do something in the public sphere that happens to align with the desires of politically conservative people who you agree about basically nothing else with. 

Nona: Well, yeah. Exactly. I mean, I think the temperance movement is a really good metaphor that I think people actually used at the time. Why don't you try to get to the root of the problem and not make people feel bad or shamed about entertainment that's of course laden with misogyny, but it is ultimately entertainment and it's not going to solve the problem.

Sarah: And it’s cutting off other women from having a smart cocktail or watching a sexy movie if that's what they need at the end of the day.

Nona: So feminists were out here attempting to pass amendments to civil rights laws that would recognize pornography as a violation of the civil rights of women as a forum of sex discrimination. They attempted to pass – and by ‘they’ I mean Katherine McKinnon was really prominent, but there was like a whole fleet of feminist lawyers try to do this.

They attempted to pass an amendment to Minneapolis's civil rights law in 1983 and then two city councils passed the law, but the mayor vetoed it both times. So, similar laws were passed in Indianapolis; in Cambridge, Massachusetts; in Bellingham, Washington. Like, these were local fights happening on local city councils. These local fights really bleed into why they even had a Meese Commission in the first place. 

Sarah: It's time for this beautiful tributary to flow into the river Reagan that we always end up at again. 

Nona: Oh yeah. The Meese Report is just like classic, peak Reagan. Here we are in the mid-eighties. It's named after Attorney General, Edwin Meese, and it found that the link between porn consumption and violence held water. “Found” is a loose term because it was based almost exclusively on testimony and the studies they did use were just pretty willfully misinterpreted according to the academics who made these studies. These academics were sort of like, “Wait, you're misapplying my data.” Like, it was widely criticized by anybody who knew anything about this topic. Like, it was really a very moralistic and conservative document and people knew that even at the time. For instance, the link between porn consumption and violence, what they said was like, “It requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence.” They admitted that they couldn't really find it in the evidence and yet they concluded that “We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions that are plainly justified by our own common sense.” 

Sarah: Oh my God. I love it when you get this legal or government document that's written in sort of highfalutin government ease and is essentially saying “We've decided to just proceed thinking what we thought already with no justification. Goodbye.” 

Nona: WAP, of course, as you mentioned at the top of the hour, was instrumental in putting this together. Andrea Dworkin testified. Linda Lovelace spoke at these hearings. She said very memorably, “Virtually every time someone watches that movie,” meaning Deep Throat, “They're watching me being raped.” Again, I'm just like, ugh, awful. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like that can be true. Like, I don't disagree with her. Right? I don't think she's wrong. I don't think she's lying. I just think you can't hang your policy for the entire country on that. 

Nona: Yeah, of course. But also, the Meese commission, they're not your friends. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Nona: Ronald Reagan does not give a fuck about you, Linda Lovelace.

Sarah: Ronald Reagan is nobody's friend. If Ronald Reagan were a flavor of ice cream, he would be praline and dick. 

Nona: But you know, so this Meese Commission came out in 1986. There was a crackdown, a performative crackdown, on porn for a while. There were some obscenity trials, which again were hard to prosecute because of this three-pronged community standards criteria.

Sarah: And did this affect – this happened to Harry Reems, right? Did he get screwed by this?

Nona: Yes. Harry Reems, he was found guilty of acting in Deep Throat. They gave Linda Lovelace immunity. They gave the director, Gerard Damiano, immunity, and Harry Reems was just hung out to dry and made an example of. 

Sarah: Jeez.

Nona: Basically Harry Reems was arrested in 1974. It really dragged on. And then by the time he was convicted in April, 1976 – and of course an election was going on and by the fall there was a new president, Carter – so his conviction was overturned on appeal a year later in 1977.

Sarah: Hmm. Good old Carter. 

Nona: So thankfully Harry Reems did not go to prison, but his entire life was destroyed. He was just like a pariah, and at one point just descended into drug use and homelessness and then he moved to Park City, Utah and turned around his life and became a born again Christian and became a real estate mogul. So it's a happy ending, but I think he really went through a very dark time all because of these fucking idiots.

Sarah: Yeah. It feels like the social forces surrounding the movie are just, I don't know. I don't want to come off as too biased of a Deep Throat apologist. If you see it as fruit of the poison tree, then I really can't disagree with that, but it feels like society is the problem.

Nona: Oh. And also it was just made an example of because it was so popular. Obviously.

Sarah: Right. 

Nona: If you were going to pick out the most “harmful” porn of the time, it wouldn't be Deep Throat. You know what I mean? It was kind of just vanilla comparatively. So, the years between the Meese Commission and the so-called third wave of the nineties was really a pretty quiet time for feminism, and I think that was I guess partly about the Reagan years, but also partly because the sex wars, the porn wars, whatever you want to call it just did so much damage to the feminist movement. It was really just kind of devastating. 

Sarah: You know, on the right there's this fantasy, I guess, that the left is this highly organized militia of radical lefties and we're storming the schools and we're going to steal your kids and what always strikes me as highly ironic is how the right, and particularly the Christian right, has been engaged very openly for decades in a shameless culture war, right? Like, the first generation of essentially millennials who grew up being homeschooled in this big homeschooling movement are called the Joshua generation because the idea is that they're going to rise up and take control of culture and it has been working. Like, it's working. They're doing it. You know, I think everything is projection and so this idea that leftists are a coordinated force… it's like no, we're not. All we do is fight with each other. 

Nona: Well, exactly. 

Sarah: Maybe the question then is can you have a political movement with less infighting without surrendering to essentially a top-down hierarchy, which I think is why the right is able to do that. But I mean, as somebody who's given a lot of time, a lot of thought, a lot of love to this topic, what do you feel it is informing you of in this moment today? What do you feel you're able to recognize about trying to build a better world and what it takes from understanding what happened in this story?

Nona: Of course you have to call out misogyny and violence and fight against it, but ultimately if you're going to be an effective feminist activist or any type of activist, you have to offer people a more pleasurable, exciting world rather than a smaller world. I think ultimately none of that stuff will be effectively addressed unless we offer an exciting and encouraging alternative rather than just being like, “This stuff is bad, and you should have less sex and you should have less casual sex and you should watch less porn.” It's like, give me a vision that I can get behind. Going back to the consciousness raising sessions, those women in those living rooms in 1968 and 1969, they had imagination, man. That's what I love about them. They were like, “We've got to have sex because we want it. Here are our fantasies and let's talk about them” rather than just “Ugh, being straight sucks. Are the straights, okay? Ugh, porn sucks. It's disgusting. Ugh.” Yes, that's true, but you can't stop there. The people who had a very exhilarating imagination about what's possible, like, they're the true heroes of this story. You know?

Sarah: Maybe every big topic and social change comes back to the ability to imagine bigger. I mean, just believing in a world where you can make porn ethically, where you can have pleasurable sex readily available to you, where you can be confident about what you want even if that's not possible for you now, like, believing that you can get there. I think it also comes down to people being able to imagine joy for themselves and individually conceiving of themselves as being deserving of pleasure. That feels important too. 

Nona: Oh yeah. It’s so important and I think that is so much harder than just having defensive politics all the time. And of course you can critique where desire comes from. Like, of course society shapes desire and sometimes we collaborate with our own oppression within our desire. Yes. So, we can talk about that while still not making people feel that they have to have these impossible standards and expectations and they have to denounce all the men in their lives and they have to force themselves to be more queer or more creative with sex or dictate what they should be doing. That's just never worked, and it will continue not to work. 

Sarah: Something in the world today is going to give you pleasure and my wish for you is that you find it. 

Nona: That’s beautiful.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much to Nona Willis Aronowitz. If you want to learn more about this, you can read her book, Bad Sex, which will be out very soon. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, who makes all of this possible. We'll see you in two weeks.