LOS ANGELES—On her marketing rounds for Lovelace, Amanda Seyfried has of course had to answer the same battery of questions about sex and porn over and over again, and like the pro she is, she's pretty much got her answers down pat. But now she’s being asked about politics, and specifically the new plan by the UK government to add mandatory opt-in filters at the ISP level.
Seyfried told a UK publication, Bang Showbiz, that she thinks it's a bad idea, arguing, “You can't put a ban on it. 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.”
All well and good. Like a proper Hollywood libertarian, she wants to let kids be kids—you know, drinking, sexting, enjoying a wee bit of porn—but then she all but makes the porn filter proponents’ argument for them by adding in the next breath, "I've watched porn, yes. Enjoyed? No. I saw some when I was six. 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."
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Actually, Seyfried was 6 years old in 1992, long before the internet, which is the main focus of the UK's new prohibitions, was around to "corrupt" her young mind. That means that whatever porn she saw back then was likely on an ancient format like a DVD disc or VHS tape, but it won't matter. The central justification for imposing the UK porn filters is that something must be done to keep porn away from young children, and that parents and other guardians are simply not interested enough in the task or up to it, requiring intervention by the government, just like it does with shops that sell porn DVDs.
Seyfried is probably unaware of all that—she's only 27, after all!—but you can bet that if her story was that her first sexual encounter happened while working as a minor on a mainstream movie, her managers would be all over it.
Lovelace opens in the United Kingdom on August 23, so expect to hear more on these conflictingly titillating subjects from its irrepressible press. It will be interesting to see if they are as obligatorily nice as their counterparts across the Pond.
