Autobiography of a Meme

Time for a break from all of this electoral heavyosity.

Once upon a time, I was active in an old news group called alt.sex.movies. Long story. Between the Brandy Alexandre flame wars and the invasion of the spammers, we all moved to a new group called rec.arts.movies.erotica, or, familiarly “RAME.” (And yes, I am one of the founders and a contributor to the FAQ — where I used to be known as “ZENO.”)

At the time, there was a young journalist, a fellow who’d one day be called (by Salon), “The Matt Drudge of Porn” named Luke Ford. He sort of obsessively hung around, posting any and every controversy, scrap of news, etcetera on his website.

This rather consummated itself in a book that Ford wrote, entitled A History of X – 100 Years of Sex in Film (Promethius Books, 1999).

During that time, he interviewed me extensively on the phone, and, among other things, I made an offhand remark that culminated in the “Linda Syndrome” of fame and legend. Sort of the same thing that happened to legendary science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon when he inadvertently coined “Sturgeon’s Law,” responding to a panel question at a science fiction convention in the 1950s, “But isn’t ninety percent of science fiction crud?”

“Ninety percent of everything is crud,” quoth Sturgeon, attempting to make a point about ignoring mediocrity in favor of the good stuff. Sturgeon’s Law was born, and shows up in all sorts of odd places, like the Oxford English Dictionary. (Google it and see.)

Luke Ford was asking me about Traci Lords, and Miki Garcia, and other ex-porn stars turned anti-porn. I called it, as I had for several years, “Linda Lovelace Syndrome,” adding, that once, to explain the meaning: or “conversion syndrome” or “Paul on the Road to Damascus.”

I wasn’t making a judgment, understand. I believe that they believe that all those awful things happened and they were exploited against their wills and whatever it takes for the human psyche to cope with the bridge.

Indian Temple Art

There is a vast gulf (not as large now, and shrinking, perhaps) between the world of commercial pornography and a normal life with a house and kids and the PTA, etcetera. (Some do both, but it’s rare.)

Some very few remain in the business. Most transition through (and don’t end up stuck living there for a decade, like I did). But there is that “secret” life, now, and the one who’s “out of the biz” (as it’s referred to, as in “Whatever happened to Maraschino Cheri?” and the reply, “Oh, she’s out of the biz.”) , well, that person has to figure out how to cope with that yawning chasm.

Most pretend nothing ever happened, and keep their mouths shut. Others become “symbols” of how awful porn is, because we Americans LOVE our sinners. The professional sinner (reformed, of course) is an ancient and honorable profession — the reformed gang member, the reformed drug addict, the reformed rock star, the reformed prisoner who found Jesus in the slammer, etcetera. (i.e. Chuck Colson.) It’s the hole card that George W. Bush played: “I used to be a drunken no-account, but I found Jesus, and now vote for me for president.”

Don’t laugh. It worked.

At any event, there were enough ex-porn stars turned Anti-porn “exhibit A” for the faithful that I called it “Linda Lovelace Syndrome.”

Luke liked it and promptly mis-transcribed it.

The meme had been trapped in the wild, and was now an insect in amber, captured in 12 point Garamond for all time. The meme was now an exhibit in the great hall of books. But, it was a wily meme, and plotted its escape from the bonds of print.

Thus did the little snowball begin rolling down the hill.

It appeared in Ford’s book as “Linda Syndrome.” Page 45 in the hardcover:

Lovelace became an archetype for what writer Hart Williams calls “Linda Syndrome” — porn stars who seek acceptance from “overground” society by disavowing their porn past.

And then the plagiarism began.

Luke eventually posted the same phrase, expanded about double on his site in his bio of Linda Lovelace:

Lovelace became an archetype for what writer Hart Williams calls “Linda Syndrome” — porn stars who seek acceptance from “overground” society by disavowing their porn past. Hart also labels it “Conversion Syndrome” or “Paul On The Road To Damascus.” Sufferers from Linda Syndrome include Angel Kelly and Samantha Fox.

The piece is reprinted in toto on “The Official Linda Lovelace Tribute Site” LindaLovelace.com.

But now, freed from its cage, the meme decided to take flight. It showed up on Wikipedia:

Linda Syndrome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Linda Syndrome is a phrase used largely within the pornography community to describe adult film stars who allegedly seek acceptance in society by repudiating their past career.

The term was coined by Hart Williams, who also refers to it as “Conversion Syndrome” or “Paul On The Road To Damascus.”

The Linda Syndrome is named after porn star Linda Lovelace (Linda Boreman) of the porn cult classic, Deep Throat, who began attacking the industry and espousing alleged wrongs against it via biographies and lectures. Boreman gave testimony to the 1986 U.S. Congressional hearings known as the Meese Commission on Pornography during the Ronald Reagan era.

Adult film stars who “fall victim” to the Linda Syndrome are viewed almost without exception in the industry as hypocrites and traitors against the industry, in which they tend to leave no friends behind.

It’s been rephrased, expanded and distorted in what seems a slight way, but actually skews the meaning quite a bit. And editorializing has been added.

Now, as the person who coined “Linda [Lovelace] Syndrome,” I can tell you that that trope — “who also refers to it as ‘Conversion Syndrome’ or ‘Paul On The Road To Damascus‘ ” — is already starting to warp out of true.

This is the nature of a thought in the media whirlpool: like a drop of ink in water, it begins to deform and then to diffuse. The deformation process has already begun. Somebody pulled this one out of their derriere: “Adult film stars who “fall victim” to the Linda Syndrome are viewed almost without exception in the industry as hypocrites and traitors against the industry, in which they tend to leave no friends behind.“

Uh, where did THAT one come from?

Nice sort of fantasy, but not good reportage. The reaction within the industry is more complex and nuanced. But I can tell you from long experience that those who have the least experience of the porn business generally evince the greatest expertise in what goes on in the fantasy factories of the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood. Projection, I think Freud calls it.

So, a casual phrase tossed off during a phone call has now entered the pop culture mainstream via Wikipedia.  The diffusion begins. And you ought to note that for many years, I referred to it as “Linda Lovelace Syndrome,” to the amusement but NOT the conversational usage of my friends in the biz.

To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only one who ever used it. But, having a citation, the media began to diffuse the 1999 meme when Linda Borman, a/k/a “Linda Lovelace” died in a car accident in Colorado in 2002. The Telegraph (UK) reported:

Linda Lovelace

Last Updated: 10:06PM BST 23 Apr 2002

LINDA LOVELACE, who has died aged 53, was the star of Deep Throat (1972), the pornographic film which challenged the American obscenity laws and became the first of its kind to be shown in mainstream cinemas; she later wrote a book, Ordeal, about her experiences and became an outspoken opponent of the porn industry.

Linda Lovelace was introduced to the world of adult entertainment in 1970 when she was living with her parents in Florida and recovering from a car accident. After meeting Chuck Traynor, who was to become her husband and manager, she was introduced to the seedy world of “skin flicks”, and appeared in a few sex “shorts” before Deep Throat.

OK. Well and good. But then, later on, this:

With the publication of Ordeal she returned to the public eye. Although she passed a lie detector test and there was no doubt about the degradation she was forced to undergo (Chuck Traynor’s idea of a film with a dog was not, as she put it, Lassie Come Home), she found herself subject to abuse from anti-censorship groups.

They coined the term “Linda Syndrome”, referring to porn stars who seek acceptance from society by disavowing their past.

We now have the authority of a major British newspaper behind the escaped meme.

Huh? I must shamefully confess that I never met Linda Lovelace. I’ve met Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes and Annette Haven, Russ Meyers, and the late Henri Pachard, who died, the new AVN tells me, last month, on September 29, et al, etcetera, ad infinitum. I even knew Jerry Damiano, who passed away last week, and made “Deep Throat.” And I know a lot of insider stories about “Throat.” But Lovelace was long gone from the biz by the time I arrived in the late 1970s. Now, however, my mutant meme seems eternally linked to her.

What’s odd is that I remember precisely what I was doing when I said it. I was out in my workshop in the garage, because that’s where I smoked, back when I smoked. I had a long telephone extension cord, and was looking at my collection of nuts, bolts, cotter pins and locking washers in their neat little plastic boxes.

But I never met Linda Lovelace. Honest Injun.

So, then UPI has Joe Bob Briggs write up Lovelace’s obit over on this side of the Atlantic, categorizing it as “Odd News.” Ha ha, right? Had it been a third rate actor in a fifth rate sitcom there wouldn’t have been the implicit insult of trivializing the death of a celebrity. Celebrity is celebrity and death is death. “Deep Throat” director Gerard Damiano’s passing was noted with giggles and jokes by The Daily Show last week. The tittering is more to do with the audience’s hangups about … you know … S-E-X (whispered) … than about Damiano, whose death should be thought of, as John Donne noted,  in Meditation XVII:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Anyway, the meme was on the loose, broken free of the laboratory. The UPI obituary:

Linda Lovelace dies in car crash
By JOE BOB BRIGGS
Published: April 23, 2002 at 5:45 PM

NEW YORK, April 23 (UPI) — Everything about the life of Linda Lovelace, who died Monday at age 53, was so, so sad.

She had been a prostitute, a drug abuser, and the star of some of the raunchiest porn movies ever made, back when the Mafia filmed them secretly in ratty New York apartments.

She stretched her 15 minutes of fame to 30 by converting to feminism and condemning pornography as “legalized rape,” but there was never much conviction in anything she said or published. And yet there was a softness to her, and a gullibility, and a desperate desire to be loved and accepted, making her seem more like a confused girl from Yonkers than the leader of the porn revolution….

OK. She wasn’t THE leader. She wasn’t A leader. But her narrative had been as shamelessly exploited in life as Briggs was waxing it allegedly eloquently (but not, alas, factually) in her obituary. Further down in the story, came the meme [emphasis added]:

So given the growing Hollywood fascination with all things sordid, we may see her story told one more time. Until then, she’ll mostly be remembered as the “How did she do it?” girl among the people who saw the film, and the “Bad men made me do it” girl among feminists and Christian crusaders. The porn industry has coined its own term, “The Linda Syndrome,” to describe porn stars, like Angel Kelly and Samantha Fox, who become stars and then disavow their porn past and embrace feminism.

The same writeup appeared in Brigg’s syndicated column, “Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In.”

You’re sharp and eagle-eyed, dear reader. Where do you suppose that specific “borrowing” came from?

Take a moment. The answer is in the parenthetical note following the asterisk below. *

(* It’s the old high school term paper trick of copying the Encyclopedia and changing the words around so it isn’t “plagiarism.” The practice is so universal throughout the writing community that it is pointless to comment here.)

“The Linda Syndrome” was too tempting to cut and paste, and rapidly replicated itself via the internet.

No longer was it “Deep Throat,” but, increasingly, “The Lawnmower Man.”

But, with each iteration, the drop of ink has spread further in the water. From “one person IN the porn industry,” the thought has shortened to the ENTIRE porn industry. A writer for the Globe and Mail (Canada) put it precisely, if inelegantly:

Posted on 23/08/03

The porn queen’s sad epiphany

The Globe and Mail (Canada)
by LYNN CROSBIE

When Linda Lovelace, a woman best known for carnal abilities that rivalled Saracen the Sword Swallower’s, published Ordeal, her third autobiography, in 1980, she triggered the coining of a phrase in porn circles known as “The Linda Syndrome.”

Odd phrase, that: “… she triggered the coining of a phrase in porn circles known as ‘The Linda Syndrome’.” I would then, I presume, be the ‘triggeree’? The ‘triggerator’? Were I writing in my female persona as ‘Blakely St. James’ I would be a ‘triggeratrix’ or, perhaps, a ‘triggeratrice.’

Words that the language would probably best be without.

But the phrase itself has now shifted from “Linda Syndrome” to “The Linda Syndrome.” The meme was now out of control. From a sentence spoken on a telephone to cotter pins and locknuts, suddenly the entire porn industry was now abuzz with The Linda Syndrome. Shortopedia confirms this evolving meme as the ink disperses in the water glass:

Linda Syndrome is a phrase used largely within the pornography community to describe adult film stars who seek acceptance in society by repudiating their past career. …more on Wikipedia about “Linda Syndrome”

And now, The Linda Syndrome begins to acquire a narrative, suggesting the MOTIVATIONS behind its coinage and circulation. From Feministing, “The Charge of Rape, the Force of Myth” (reprinted from Common Dreams) [emphasis added]:

Nobody in the adult film business bought her act. They were appalled. She had, in their minds, repudiated her past in order to gain acceptance from the 200 million Americans who had not seen her movies. In fact, the porn industry uses the term “Linda Syndrome” to refer to former porn stars who disavow their careers.

[this source sucks, no pun intended, but I couldn't find an adequate bio that wasn't a porn site]

And, from this demeaning “insider” term used by the entire porn industry, the meme begins to acquire new and ominous characteristics:

Reshaping America’s sexual landscape

… While Lovelace was in turn embraced by pro-sexuality and anti-porn feminists, porn insiders dismissed her accusations and coined “Linda Syndrome” to refer to traitorous stars that disavowed their pornographic pasts. Lovelace, for her part, described her relationship with feminism as one of disappointment …

Yes, the meme had not only broken the bounds of its inky prison, but was now morphing into a powerful, savage and dark force in the wild. Now, it was not industry wide, but only “insiders” knew the great and terrible secret of The Linda Syndrome. (The Porn Illuminati, one extrapolates, or perhaps even the ever-secretive Coldwater Cats.)

My creation has escaped the laboratory, and I can only pray that it doesn’t harm anyone, or drown a guy named “Hans.”

I don’t know if it’s afraid of fire or not.

I unwittingly unleashed it, but it now belongs to the world, and I am powerless in its thrall.

And it seems to be getting more maelevolent. From “sparklematrix” at the eponymous site:

sparklematrix
on May 12, 2007 at 1:06 pm

Yes delphyne and then if they do come forward (thinking Linda Boreman here for example) Al Goldstein (and many others) had this to say about her: “Good riddance to trash…. Her book Ordeal was a lying piece of sh*t”

In fact, the porn industry uses the term “Linda Syndrome” to refer to former porn stars who speak up.

But, it has found a home in common parlance, shorn of the negativity, in Rock Criticism [emphasis added]:

… Lacing the album every step of the way is Wendy Smith.

Wendy’s presence in the group seemed peripheral to many early fans, an example of Linda Syndrome, it was thought, though she was a welcome sight for lascivious college boys as Prefab Sprout made their way on the small gig scene in 1984 and 1985. The pleasing softness of her voice provided some ballast to the grainy stridency of the McAloon vocal sound and echoes the current use of the device by Steely Dan, particularly on their 2003 album Everything Must Go.

So, there IS hope for the meme in the wild, one supposes. It might choose to NOT be evil. Only time will tell. Here, from a European Linda Lovelace biography:

Did you know that Linda Lovelace . . .

… had a cat by the name of Adolf Hitler?

… was even in Frank Sinatra’s living room? Sinatra owned a copy of the film and showed it to his guests. rumour has it that among them were such people as the Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and Sammy Davis Jr.

… was the reason the term “Linda Syndrome” was coined? It means the denial of having had a career in porn after having ended it.

And I no longer refer to it as “Linda Lovelace Syndrome,” even though I did for a decade and more before that fateful interview in front of the cotter pins and locking washers. I am forced to succumb to the weight popular opinion on its usage and call it by its new proper name: “Linda Syndrome,” or, more formally, “The Linda Syndrome” for special occasions and gala festivities.

Vox populi, vox dei and all that jazz.

And somehow, I am inextricably linked with a woman I never met.

The inkstain spreads in the water. What form it shall finally take, only the Great Invisible Sky Beings know.

It has been through three discrete iterations: from “Linda Lovelace Syndrome,” a coping mechanism, to “Linda Syndrome,” an industry-wide term for the phenomenon, to, at last, “The Linda Syndrome,” a term of disparagement used by industry “insiders.” How much it will further mutate, no one can say.

Now multiply that meme by all the drift in all the “facts” floating out there in the mediasphere: it’s the old birthday party game of “telephone.”

Even the meme “Deep Throat” has a whole history filtered through Watergate and diffused through popular culture that has nothing to do with the original movie starring Linda Lovelace — but is far more widely referenced. Still, one hopes that we’ve learned this much, hopefully, at least:

Sturgeon was right: 90% of everything is crap. (Or, maybe, 95%?)

Courage.

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