In the mid-seventies, the same years that Royalle was acting in movies such as “Carnal Haven” and “Easy Alice,” a rising contingent of feminists was busy shaping the theory that, as the writer and activist Robin Morgan put it, “Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.” (Kamensky points out that this line would be quoted, approvingly, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by the California congressman Bob Dornan—one of those moments which alerted sex-positive feminists to the overlap between right-wing repression and the new anti-porn movement.) Susan Brownmiller, in her influential 1975 book, “Against Our Will,” wrote that “pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda”—and compared it to antisemitic caricatures during the Holocaust.
The new movement detected no silliness—sincere, insincere, whatever—in any porn, and nothing defensible. It was this argument that all porn is misogyny—queer or straight, homemade or big-budget, rough or tender, elaborate B.D.S.M. orgy or unaccessorized vanilla coupling—that put Royalle off. That and the idea that all women who acted in adult films had been railroaded into it. Royalle hadn’t always loved her choices, but she’d been the one to make them. She wrote a letter to Ms. (which declined to publish it) demanding to know why the publication seemed to “want nothing to do with a woman who’s been directly associated with the adult film industry unless she has a horror story to tell.”
But when it came to criticizing the actual, existing adult-film industry—sure, she could do it with the best of them, and with a lot more inside knowledge than most. “The world of pornography, from the simulated quickies to the higher budget feature films,” she wrote, “is not at all concerned with what people have learned from women’s or men’s liberation, and in fact still bases its success on all the old traditional oppressive male attitudes toward sex.” The answer, she believed, wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.