Andrew Hornung reviews 'Not a Love Story "Turning on' the profits

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M THATCHANNELA YEARS OF ENTERPRISE TALKING AHYESNORM: 1930s? "¿GET UP OFF YOUR"

NORMANT AND PRIDE iN ABOUTTHE 8 589 • BRiTiSH WORKiNG ! YOU REALLY ARE •FECKLESS MOANING'... AND. NAMBY PAMBY /GET UPOFFYOUR FOR T'ILCAVE iN Will, 7,71 ""/'' 'MARKET research shows that a woman on her knees committing fellatio is the biggest turn-on,' declares the pornographer dispassionately. 'We're producing a product that satisfies a need.' And why is it the biggest turn-on? Because it combines an image of physical stimulation with the frisson of the forbidden. These are in turn combined with an image of male mastery which contains its own 'justification': the dirty bitch needs to be punished!

'Not a Love Story' is an investigation of pornography.

Its producer, Bonnie Sher Klein, wanted to make this film for two reasons.

Pornography is a bigger industry than film and music together. And she wanted to show that the sex portrayed in pornography was a form not of love and intimacy, but hate and fear.

The film is no 'Mondo Porno flit through the filth of 42nd Street. Instead the documentary is punctuated by interviews with feminist writers and anti-pornography campaigners. It is also held together not only by the presence of the produceras-interviewer but by Linda Lee Tracey, a stripper with doubts:

The idea is to stop the viewer becoming desensitised through the steady build-up of breasts, bums, fellatio and flagellation by creating an empathy with an increasingly Bell sensitised Linda Lee. It is not completely successful here, but by the end of the film what strikes you is not Linda Lee's toughness and Isolation, but her growing compassion and sense of solidarity.

My own feelings about the film are certainly very much determined by my being a man. I was horrified at the sadism, but more by the pathetic, longing, disappointed faces of those men in the coin-op cubicles who strain to get a last good look as their coin runs out and the peep-hole closes.

One of the feminists interviewed tells us that when the Nazis invaded Poland they distributed huge quantities of pornographic material. The idea, THE Socialist Organiser science column has a predecessor, albeit a Stalinist one, in J B S Haldane's 'Science and Everyday Life' weekly column in the immediately pre-war Daily Worker. It ran from July 1938 to January 1941.

J B S Haldane FRS, Professor of Biometry at London University, was one of the most brave and brilliant scientists of his time. As a communist, Haldane was concerned to see science used for mankind's benefit, not for capital's.

He realised that much scientific knowledge is monopolised by the ruling class, and thus they gain an advantage over the says the commentator, was to isolate men - each jerking off in a room on his own. The woman wears the gag, silenced by the master in his fantasy. In reality, the 'master' fantasises in his room alone, in his cubicle, in the booth.

But things don't stay there. Applauding the porno film's gang-rape is not going to be followed by outrage on hearing of a real rape. The person who pays his pound to watch bondage is not going to protest at any of the thousand petty enslavements that make women specially oppressed.

At the beginning of the film, Linda Lee is self-confident and solitary. It's her body she's disTHE 1930s WErE I'M EMPiRE!!

CLASSES...

ARSES.... playing and she. knows what she's doing. But when she watches 'Beat the Bitch' she exclaims, 'That's my body that's being abused!' Soon the solitariness is replaced by solidarity. She knows that her display of her body affects the lives of all other women in the same society.

The value of the film does not lie in the solutions it offers, nor in the sheer shock it produces.

Its importance lies in the way it contrasts the image of women presented by men in pornography with the image of women presented by women appearing in the film itself:__the first passive and degraded, the latter mutually supporțive and creative.

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YOURHEADS!!! "UNDERNEATH THE ARCHES"

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GRACiOUS QUEEN

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