Content provided in partnership with
Skin flicks 101: what porn studies profs don't get about sex - Column
Reason, May, 2003 by Cathy Young
LAST YEAR'S NEWS reports about a course at the University of California at Berkeley called "Male Sexuality" seemed like a cultural conservative's worst nightmare--or fondest dream, depending on how you look at it. The Story had everything from lurid tales of sexual depravity (including a field trip to a gay strip club) to damning evidence of academic decline (class work included such intellectual exercises as photographing your genitalia and then trying to match other students' genitals to their faces). And it was set in no less a bastion of academic radicalism than Berkeley.
Following the negative publicity, the administration suspended the student-devised, student-taught course. The class was reinstated a month later, when it was concluded that some of the most scandalous doings, such as an end-of-semester orgy, were not technically part of the course.
The controversy was but one of a series of recent scandals about sex in academe. These sex scandals do not involve shocking exposes of illicit activities, of lecherous professors preying on innocent students or undergrads holding drunken orgies in dorms and fraternity houses. They are about officially sanctioned academic activities, such as courses and conferences, that some see as cutting-edge studies of sex and sexuality and others regard as an obscene fraud.
Indeed, the academy may have edged out the art world as the center of the debate about graphic sexual content and cultural value. Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, this debate often pits those who seem opposed to any explicit discussion of sex--particularly sexual activities other than heterosexual intercourse--against those who seem to confuse exhibitionism with intellectual discourse.
Take the outcry over a 1997 conference at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York. The gathering, organized by the Women's Studies Department, was creatively tided "Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom;' and eventually led to an attempt to oust the college president, Roger W. Bowen.
The critiques of the conference by New Criterion Editor Roger Kimball and SUNY Trustee Candace de Russy dripped with disgus at the perversities celebrated there; de Russy's list of the horribles, in a March 1998 article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, included not only sadomasochism but anal sex, lesbianism, bisexuality, and female masturbation. Kimball' Wall Street Journal article, succinctly tided "A Syllabus for Sickos," lamented "a vision of sexuality totally emancipated from nature."
This may sound prudish and closed-minded, but it's difficult not to sympathize with some of Kimball's and de Russy's concerns when you read descriptions of several events at the conference. In a workshop on sex toys, the pre senter--the owner of a Manhattan boutique--explained the use of anal beads and mocked "tight assholes" by demonstrating a stilted walkin front of the room. Another panel featured a performance by a stripper who simulated sexual acts and whipped a male panelist onstage. Defenders of the conference accused its critics of trying to "police ideas;' but just what ideas were being expressed here is not entirely clear.
Besides having all the intellectual weight of a bachelor party, the new academic explorations of sexuality are ridied with double standards. While "Revolting Behavior" featured advocacy of lesbian S&M (and what critics contend was unabashed "recruitment" by its practitioners), de Russy rightly noted that "if male faculty members had invited male recruiters from heterosexual-sadomasochism groups to campus to promote participation by female college students," an outcry would have been sure to follow. Nor is it easy to imagine a male parallel to another controversial campus event, a 2000 one-day festival titled "Cuntfest" and billed as a celebration of womanhood. Quite a few of these celebrations, reportedly including some of the panels at the "Revolting Behavior" conference, degenerate into by-the-numbers male bashing.
Another much-debated academic trend is the proliferation of "porn studies." Courses on pornography can now be found at numerous schools, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Arizona, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wesleyan. In the Wesleyan course, taught by Hope Weissman, a professor of women's studies, the final project requires students to produce a pornographic work of their own--photography, fiction, or film.
Ironically, the push to legitimize porn studies has come largely from female scholars and self-identified feminists, such as Weissman and Laura Kipnis, a media studies professor at Northwestern University. This may be yet another double standard: Male academics crusading to incorporate pornography into the curriculum would have been crucified as lechers and sexists.
On the bright side, this trend represents a turn away from the "victim feminist" obsession with pornography, and sexuality itself, as male victimization of women. But that's a rather thin silver lining.
