Sex News: "Lovelace" Star Amanda Seyfried Confused About Porn?

by Skye O’Donovan. 

I was sitting in the Virgin Atlantic lounge early yesterday morning at Heathrow, and on my way to the buffet, who should I see but Amanda Seyfried.  Upon returning to my seat to enjoy my plate of Spotted Dick, I was curious as to why the star of the recent movie “Lovelace” was at Heathrow, so started surfing around google.co.uk and discovered that she was there for the film’s London premier on August 14th. The other google results were quite a remarkable and often baffling set of links to U.K. news stories in which Amanda managed to contradict her own views on both the movie and porn in general on every website I checked out.

Read on…

Being publishers of “porn for women” we were interested in doing a short interview with Amanda, and approached her publicist when the movie was first released. No big surprise that we got no reply. We would like to extend that invitation once again to discuss not just the Lovelace movie, but also her views on the UK porn filtering/ban, and to get her own personal views on the porn topic as so much of what she said to the press appears to have been magically channeled by other folks she has talked to (more on that below).

With that in mind, let’s take a random sample of U.K. news coverage….

The Telegraph reports that Amanda thinks Women’s Porn is beautiful, “Amanda Seyfried, who plays the Seventies porn star Linda Lovelace in Lovelace, says she is a fan of certain blue movies.“Some of it’s produced in a way that’s safe and positive, like Kink, run by women in San Francisco,” she tells Mandrake at a gala screening of the film at the May Fair Hotel in London. “That’s a beautiful thing. Why not? But there’s trouble everywhere.”

Okay, Amanda. that’s a lovely sentiment, but why in the world would you single out Kink for this?  As much as I like what they do, it is a network of sites creating extreme Sado-Masochism films and is owned and operated by the VERY male Peter Acworth!  Yes, many of the directors are FemDoms and do a great job at creating compelling BDSM movies, but it’s a bit off the mark to call what they do intended specifically for the female audience or the “beautiful porn” paradigm of film making (that would be Andrew Blake).

Looking for a bit of clarification of where that statement came from, I clicked on the link to Vogue Magazine’s U.K. website and found some clues.  Vogue reports, “Despite the ill fate of Linda Lovelace, the 27-year-old believes that the industry does have the capacity to empower women – even if it does have a morally shady reputation. Seyfried stated, “Everybody should be able to freely express themselves, sexually or otherwise. There’s a place called Kink in San Francisco, which the directors, Jeffery and Rob went to, and it’s porn made by women for women and it’s wonderful. Not all women are coerced and beaten into porn. These days, the mob isn’t behind every porn production. People should be able to watch whatever they want. I don’t support violence and paedophilia or disturbing things like that, but porn’s a big genre and I don’t think it should be censored, people would watch it more and more [if it was].“

Ah, I get it!  She didn’t really know what Kink in SF does, but the directors of the film, Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein went there presumably on the recommendation of Lovelace co-star James Franco.  James is a longtime friend of Kink, has shot mainstream movies there and produced a documentary about it recently. Now it made sense to me why she said this (I think?).  I did take issue with her continuing to rattle on with all of the hot-button words “Coerced”, “Beaten”, “The Mob”, “Violence”, “Paedophilia” and “other disturbing things like that”.  In kinda-sorta trying to defend porn, Amanda managed to invoke just about every negative stereotype that exists about the adult entertainment industry!

Anyway, onward into what other interesting things Amanda might have said…

In a quote to the Huffington Post, Seyfried chimes in with her thoughts about the proposed censorship through filtering of porn in the U.K., stating “With the release of “Lovelace,” Seyfried spoke out on the UK’s recent porn ban, restricting citizens’ access to pornography. “You can’t put a ban on it,” Seyfried is quoted as saying in an interview with Bang Showbiz. “I mean, kids under age are still drinking. It just makes it that much more powerful. It’s freedom. You should be free to watch it whenever you want.” Not that Seyfried is a fan: “I’ve watched porn, yes. Enjoyed? No,” Seyfried added. “I saw some when I was 6. It was really disturbing. I was at my friend’s house and their parents weren’t around and the older brother, who, I think was 10 at the time, puts this on and I was just blown away.”

All right.  She is against filtering and censorship, but in some leap of tangental thinking, compares it to teenage drinking, reveals she watched porn when she was 6 years old, and again finds yet another thing that was “really disturbing“!  And no. She does not enjoy porn!  But what about all that beautiful porn she said she likes?

Clicking over to Ireland to see what she might have said there, the Belfast Telegraph reports, “Although Amanda enjoyed playing an adult movie star onscreen, she cannot see herself performing sex acts for a living. “Yeah, someone did ask me if I was interested in doing porn and I was like, ‘why would I do that?!’” she laughed to MTV News.”I wanted to do an interview in Playboy because I think they do great interviews, but…it’s ok!” Amanda previously revealed that one of the most challenging parts about portraying Linda Lovelace actually had nothing to do with performing sex scenes. The most frightening element in the whole situation to Amanda is the possibility of her father seeing her naked in the film.”

Isn’t there an old chestnut joke about “I only read Playboy for the interviews“?  But, I get it about the part of not wanting dad to see you naked…

Meanwhile, back in London, she gives the disclosure to The Daily Mail that her role in “Lovelace” might ruin her career: ” She’s made a name for herself as one of Hollywood’s squeaky clean rising stars after breakout performances in Mamma Mia! and Mean Girls. But Amanda Seyfried has embraced her darker side for eagerly-awaited new biopic Lovelace, posing topless in a number of newly released promotional stills for the film. Admitting that her first thought after signing on to the project was ‘this could ruin my career’, the star has now admitted that the controversial nude scenes made her feel liberated. She went on to admit that she was worried that accepting the controversial role would be career suicide for her, saying: ‘The first thing you think about is that it could ruin my career.’ The role required that Amanda go topless in a number of scenes, boldly baring all as she attempted to recreate the life of the porn star turned activist. But while she may have been concerned about the racy scenes at first, the A-lister admitted that she became unfazed by it. ‘It’s funny, because I felt liberated when I was doing it. I’m sure people that are very protective of me wouldn’t feel very comfortable with that, but it’s like, what’s the big deal?’ she said.”

Oh dear. I can sense already that Amanda is slipping down the “porn bunnyhole”.  Her boldly-baring-topless movie and photoshoot was liberating!  One can only assume that Steve Hirsch at Vivid is already poised to offer her a gazillion dollars to do some real porn if Lovelace ruins her A-List status.  The beautiful kind!

And, life imitates art once again.  In this case, at the LA Premiere of “Lovelace”, the 27-year-old Seyfried turned up the heat as she accidentally flashed some side-boob when her low cut T-back dress slipped slightly as she posed.  Costume malfunction, or intentional box office booster? Only Amanda knows for sure and she isn’t saying!

So, to summarize my take on all of this:  I find myself shaking my head in confusion and disbelief at the steady flow of contradicting and just plain clueless statements that came out of this gal’s mouth.  Amanda is a lovely and promising actress, but it’s just a shame that she is going on and on with such drivel. After all, in our society that is obsessed with Hollywood actors and hang on every word they utter, the statements she made in the U.K media left me completely dazed and confused.

Again, the publishers of sssh.com would love to have the opportunity to speak with Amanda and find out what she REALLY thinks.  After all, we are the producers of beautiful porn for women, made by women, since 1999!