[Image] [The Boston Globe Online][Boston.com] [Boston Globe Online / Editorials | Opinion] [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ] [Image] [Image] [Image] Porn in academe: A plus or a peril? By Cathy Young, 8/22/2001 [P] ORNOGRAPHY MAY NO longer be welcome in New York City's Times Square under the stewardship of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, but it has apparently found a new home in the groves of academe. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Richard Burt includes X-rated flicks that use Shakespearean plots in his course on modern adaptations of Shakespeare. At Wesleyan University, Hope Weissman teaches a course on porn in which one of the assignments is to create a pornographic work of one's own. Two years ago, James Atlas first reported in The New Yorker that porn studies was becoming a respectable subject at top schools, among them Columbia and Northwestern; since then, the trend has continued. Even when porn is not the explicit focus of a course, it finds its way into academic life. A controversial women's studies conference held in late 1997 at the State University of New York at New Paltz, called ''Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom,'' featured workshops on sadomasochism as well as the open distribution of pornographic materials and sex toys. Some champions of sexual freedom see these developments as a welcome alternative to the antisex, procensorship feminism that sees pornography, and maybe sexuality, as injurious to women. They are cheered by the fact that many of the new porn-friendly academics are feminists, though it is worth noting that pro-porn campus feminism often has its own biases and double standards. At events like ''Revolting Behavior,'' female sexuality is openly celebrated while maleness is the subject of vicious diatribes. Meanwhile, conservatives predictably denounce porn studies as yet another sign that our culture has become a moral swamp and that professorial elites are corrupting the young. Maybe the cheerleaders and the hand-wringers are both wrong. The pornologists may indeed take a more sensible view of their subject than Catharine MacKinnon, the feminist legal theorist who thinks that Penthouse magazine encourages men to rape and kill women. But just because X-rated movies and girlie magazines shouldn't be banned doesn't mean they should be celebrated or studied with the same gravity as Shakespeare. And at a time when surveys show that depressing numbers of college students are woefully ignorant about everything from history to literature to the true classics of cinema, a focus on pornography seems ... shall we say, misguided? In a way, pornology is the logical conclusion of a number of modern academics fads: the obsession with sex, gender, and ''the body,'' the focus on modern popular culture rather than the timeless heritage of the human mind, the insistence that all texts are equally worthy of study. Since ''cutting edge'' contemporary scholars have been reading sex into everything - including lesbian attraction in Jane Austen's ''Sense and Sensibility'' - it's hardly surprising that many of them would take a shortcut and analyze ''cultural products'' that are about sex. This is not to say sex and sexual themes in art - such as the great 18th-century novel ''Dangerous Liaisons'' by Choderlos de Laclos - should not be the subject of academic study. But most X-rated fare is a crude caricature that has few if any interesting things to say about sexuality. And much of the new sex-obsessed scholarship has very little to do with knowledge or insight into the human condition. It alternates between heavy-handed jargon (e.g., ''Sexual intercourse ... lends itself as a vehicle to every variety of investment of social affect''), pseudo-revolutionary chic (all that rhetoric about transgression of bourgeois norms) and narcissistic self-indulgence (as when academic authors or conference speakers launch into detailed discussions of their own sexual fantasies). The conservatives' mistake, meanwhile, is to assume that porn studies is sexy. Watching a sex film in class and analyzing it as a ''social script'' is unlikely to put many people in the mood; actually, it may do more than all the sermons in the world to turn people off pornography. Indeed, the porn scholars and the antiporn crusaders may have something in common - besides spending a lot of time analyzing pornography. Both want to force a public and political agenda on private pleasure and fantasy. In his 1999 essay on porn studies, James Atlas concluded that ''the quest for the provocative, the edgy, the new has got a little threadbare.'' Porn studies may not be a great moral peril; college students probably see far more pornography on their own than in the classroom. Some may see the vogue for porn on campus as a symbol of moral decay; but it may say far more about intellectual decline. Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe. This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 8/22/2001. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company. [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ] Advertisement [Image][Boston Globe Extranet] © [Click here for advertiser information] Extending our newspaperCopyright services to the web 2001 Globe Newspaper Company Return to the home page of The Globe Online