When I tell my friends or family that I teach a college course on porn
in the film studies department, they always respond with an attempt at humor which inevitably ends with the phrase "for the articles, right?”' Here, the joke presents the male professor hiding his prurient interest in both the material and
the students watching it by letting loose a torrent of incomprehensible academic jargon
which forms
the "linking scene" he quickly fast forwards through to
get to the "money shot," the look on the students' faces when they are confronted with pornographic imagery. Now, I'm not saying it is impossible for a film professor to get an erotic charge out of teaching porn; but, experiencing arousal from repeatedly screening films and leading follow-up discussions which slowly reveal that few students in the class have read the course materials or even remember the details of the movie is a fairly arcane and rare
fetish: I can't even find a group devoted to it on Fetlife.
The second question I am asked is how such a course can be offered at Southern Methodist University, the
then-future
(now current) home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. In fact,
administrative impediments to the offering of my course in the far left-wing Meadows School of the Arts were non-existent. When I first taught the lass, my Chair was an internationally-known queer theorist, and my Dean was an experimental jazz pianist and composer.
The
only administrative hurdle we needed to jump was my presentation of the syllabus to the Women's and Gender Studies working committee in order to offer the course as an elective for the WGST minor and thus
recruit some of their excellent interdisciplinary students to enroll in the
course. Any concerns the working committee might
express would be a crucial expression of their right under basic faculty
self-governance to decline to include the class as an elective in their
minor. At no point did anyone challenge
my academic freedom to offer the course in our Film and Media Arts Division in Meadows.
I was fortunate to have the unqualified support of the director of the Women's and Gender Studies program, but the two-hour meeting with the WGST committee was tremendously challenging, with questions posed such as, "'These films are designed to sexually arouse the viewer. Don't you think this will create a hostile learning environment for any class discussion that follows?” In response, I suggested that we investigate or deconstruct the assumption that arousal is a hostile psychic state. A principled and indefatigable activist asked, “I work with at-risk teenage girls in the inner city. Do you think I am just supposed to tell them to embrace prostitution as empowering?" I replied, “No.” Of particular concern was the fact that we were actually going to watch pornography in class without "framing" it properly, something I initially feared meant presenting the most shocking images out of context alongside police photos and statistics about sexual violence in the manner of the old Women Against Pornography slide shows. The screening of 13 films in class seemed like a kind of overkill to one member who saw it as "an inadvertent re-objectification of women’s bodies, as Sarah Baartman was re-objectified when twentieth-century academics came to study her being put on display.”
I was fortunate to have the unqualified support of the director of the Women's and Gender Studies program, but the two-hour meeting with the WGST committee was tremendously challenging, with questions posed such as, "'These films are designed to sexually arouse the viewer. Don't you think this will create a hostile learning environment for any class discussion that follows?” In response, I suggested that we investigate or deconstruct the assumption that arousal is a hostile psychic state. A principled and indefatigable activist asked, “I work with at-risk teenage girls in the inner city. Do you think I am just supposed to tell them to embrace prostitution as empowering?" I replied, “No.” Of particular concern was the fact that we were actually going to watch pornography in class without "framing" it properly, something I initially feared meant presenting the most shocking images out of context alongside police photos and statistics about sexual violence in the manner of the old Women Against Pornography slide shows. The screening of 13 films in class seemed like a kind of overkill to one member who saw it as "an inadvertent re-objectification of women’s bodies, as Sarah Baartman was re-objectified when twentieth-century academics came to study her being put on display.”
Someone suggested that to mitigate this conception, a guest speaker involved with the rights of sex workers might be invited to counter the emphasis on guest appearances by pornography producers and performers (the only guest speaker I was able to bring
to the class was Bay Area queer porn director and performer Courtney Trouble,
who very graciously spent two hours on Skype answering students’ questions on a
wide range of topics). The possibility that many of the most informed, passionate. and articulate of such advocates might themselves be sex workers involved in some aspect of pornography did not seem to occur to this person. Another committee member confessed that they were not familiar with any of the films or books on the syllabus but was concerned that the course will "celebrate pornography and disregard the exploitation involved in its production and consumption--that the course will therefore represent sexuality as normatively exploitative rather than as an occasion for positive transformation and mutual respect." This gave me a crucial opportunity to explain that the screenings and readings were carefully curated and sequenced to stimulate just such a discussion. After similar give-and-take negotiations and tweaking of the syllabus, during which I discovered a huge generosity of spirit and commitment to freedom of inquiry among the members of the Committee, I was pleased to offer the course the following semester as part of the Women's and Gender Studies minor.
The course's ultimate title, "Feminism and the
Pornographic Moving Image," was an
effort to demarcate and make manageable the dizzying diversity and complexity of the subject at hand. After
attempting to respond with integrity and an open mind to the concerns of fellow feminist colleagues on the faculty who have spent decades fighting the good fight against forces a tall white dude
with a beard
and a PhD can scarcely imagine, much less comprehend, I was turned loose in the classroom to take this fight to the students.
Suddenly, I became aware that a number of students were as shocked and offended by the feminism on display as
they were by the
pornographic moving
images. Male university athletes who
sat courteously and quietly through Wakefield Poole's 1972 gay hardcore classic Bijou (which I screened on the first day of class) called me out passionately and repeatedly when I presented ideas underlying Betty Dodson's Bodysex Workshop and Annie Sprinkle's Sluts and Goddesses.
It was one thing to screen the videos and present these women sighing post-orgasmic gratitude to the Mother Goddess in classic hippie woo woo fashion, but to casually toss off references to the origins
of Christianity in Mediterranean fertility myths or to suggest the iconography of the Virgin Mother was
based in pre-patriarchal images of the yoni as the source of all life (which I demonstrated by showing the slide at the top of this section), some three days before Good Friday, was more shocking to students than the close ups of anal fisting or male glory hole sex on display elsewhere. I now know that the feminist recasting of the erotic experience in the light of ancient Goddess religions needs its own unit before the work of Annie, Betty, and others is screened Good thing I didn't screen Madison Young's Bride of Sin.
Almost
without exception, the students
responded to the course materials with maturity
and a very high degree of intellectual integrity.
I was troubled that
there was one
group of students, comprised of women and gay
men, who sat in front and passionately
participated in the discussion and was riveted
by the screenings, and another,
more diffuse and diverse group who
sat dispersed throughout
the room, said little
in class discussion, and could
be occasionally observed texting
and even Facebooking
during the more challenging pans of
some of the screenings.
I grew immeasurably
as a teacher and a scholar from
my interaction with each of these groups.
A bit much for some: Betty Dodson's Bodysex Workshop (left) and Annie Sprinkle's Sluts and Goddesses (right) |
Well, I eventually showed Bride of Sin in a future iteration of the course. |
The
first group, which was
comprised of several of
our very best majors in the Film department and
stellar interdisciplinary majors from Women 's
and Gender studies, engaged
with both the readings and the screenings
in a surprisingly open
and even self-revealing
manner. These students would speak frankly
of their own
experiences as sexual
beings and members of groups which had
experienced the
marginalization and contempt some of
the films exemplified, and ethers critiqued.
When we read Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton's guide to polyamory, The Ethical Slut, in conjunction with a screening of John Cameron Mitchell's sexually explicit 2006 feature Shortbus, l was prepared for
a shit storm against which
the Virgin Mother's labia
would pale in comparison. This never happened. In
fact, both the
group in front and the group
dispersed throughout the room found the book to
have been a revelation, and I could
see the light
go on as many students
made the connection between the collectively yearned-for celebratory transformative
power of sexual variety and the often-pitiful and
clumsy parody of this ideal
which animates much conventional moving-image porn. In a discussion that was an answer to the WGST committee member's question about normative respect and exploitation which unfolded in real time, a couple
of people said
things like, "Well, obviously I 'd
never do something
like this [referring
to The Ethical Slut], but
now I see why some people
do." One female student read aloud
a passage and said, 'This
is a description of
a wonderful relationship, open
or not. We could all learn from this book."
Then, in a moment for which
dozens of committee meetings could
never have prepared me, my best student
asked straight out,
"So, do you and your wife
have an open relationship?" Before I
could think, I heard my voice
saying, "Well, I'm sure some people would
find us pretty boring, but we try
to integrate our intellectual
and political commitment
to sexual
openness and diversity into our shared lives when
it's appropriate." Thanks to Christopher Ryan, co-author of Sex at Dawn, for this most helpful of get out of jail free cards.
It
was the second of these groups, comprised of less
academically-accomplished
or politically adventurous students and those
whose time was massively overbooked
by work
or sports, overwhelming heterosexual
and male, from whom I learned and grew the
most as a teacher, scholar and
person. The backwards baseball cap-wearing
male college
student, famous to all through cultural forms such as
articles in The Onion and countless
lower-end Hollywood comedies, would
be a natural comic foil to the
other characters
in our
story, the bumbling, licentious
professor and the stern,
Second Wave feminist
scolds on the Women and Gender Studies
committee. But these were the students who
were most consistently
operating outside
of their comfort zone,
yet they intrepidly soldiered
on. In my desire to
be a card-carrying militant and
stick it to the man, I front loaded
the course with material I had
calculated to shock
and offend them, from
the initial
class meeting where we watched
(the admittedly
beautiful but to them quite alienating)
Bijou. Where I had worked to keep an open
mind about the misgivings my colleagues
in Women's and Gender Studies had about the
focus and materials of my course.
and while I had been
careful to frame material likely
to be disturbing to the female
students in the course with
care and subtlety, I
realized much later
that I had callously
dismissed the discomfort of
many of the conservative
cisgender heterosexual males
and had responded to several
of them withdrawing from
the course with relief, even
glee. After fifteen weeks of seeing the
integrity and resilience of these students
in the
face of my deliberate onslaught, I came
to realize
that the repressed, licentious professor
in this story had reappeared
with a vengeance,
projecting onto a number of
his fellow
cisgender males everything that he was deeply afraid that
he remained, that he so passionately
yearned to disavow, and for which he deserved public humiliation and punishment.
So,
as Dr. Marty Klein, author of America's War on Sex, once said about sex educators in their interactions with the general public, the people I met on this amazing
journey to teach porn in the film
department became my private Rorschach
test, and
what I saw reflected back upon me deeply
changed the way I look at porn, its circulation,
and its reception by a broad and varied audience. Where I
had begun the semester
thinking that I
was bravely shepherding
a callow band of youths through terrain
that only I had mapped, I
turned in my final grades
realizing that this had
been the
most profound example of students co-creating the classroom
learning environment I had ever experienced, and for that
experience I will always be
grateful.
Note: An earlier version of this essay was delivered on the "Teaching Porn" panel at Catalyst Con in Long Beach, California in September 2012. I am
deeply indebted to the conference's organizer, Dee Dennis, my panel Chair, Lynn Comella, and fellow panelists Constance Penley
and Shira Tarrant for their encouragement and feedback.