PROFS. PRAISE PORN

Pornography was once a topic heavily debated but rarely studied. Now, academics are beginning to find substance in the once disgraceful genre. Pornography is becoming a trendy topic intellectually, and what Time magazine has dubbed “the porn curriculum” has slowly trickled into Northwestern academics.
Students and professors alike are becoming more interested in using pornography as a tool for studying everything from history to science.
“Pornography has many uses beyond the classic one-handed one,” radio-TV-film Prof. Laura Kipnis writes in her book “Bound and Gagged.”
She writes that pornography is “profoundly and paradoxically social, but even more than that, it’s acutely historical. It’s an archive of data about both our history as a culture and our own individual histories…”
And this is exactly the idea that English lecturer Bill Savage plays off in his Spring Quarter literature class — Genius, Gender and Tradition.”
“It’s sort of like a time focus class,” Savage said. “You know, what is it like to be in a scene like Paris in the ’20s, or the Beat generation writers in New York and San Francisco in the 40s and 50s? I’m interested in the different ways that men and women depict gender and sex and art, so that inevitably led me to some stuff that can be considered pornographic.”
That’s just how the 1969 pornographic book “Memoirs of a Beatnik” by Diane Di Prima ended up on the class’s required reading list.
“The students who take this class are interested in art and how art works, in this case literary art,” Savage said. “And art and sex overlap. I don’t think that’s news to anybody."
The first time he taught this class, Savage did not require his students to read the entire book, just the sections that they would discuss. But by the next day, every single student had read every page of the book, he said.
“They mocked me for thinking that they wouldn’t want to read the dirty parts,” Savage said.
Psychology Prof. John Bailey said he uses pornography in his own classroom “once in a while.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with showing pornography (in the classroom), provided it has some purpose in the class,” Bailey said.
Bailey showed some very graphic videos in his last Human Sexuality class during Winter Quarter.
“By Northwestern standards, some can be a little explicit,” he said.
NU students didn’t seem to mind. Both Bailey and Savage said they have never received negative feedback about the intensity of the material or been approached by an uncomfortable student.
But Medill freshman Ryan Kelly, who took Bailey’s class Winter Quarter, said some points did make him uneasy.
“To see that kind of stuff in front of your face is very unreal,” he said.
In-class videos illustrated dominatrix sex and sexually transmitted infections, among other topics.
This kind of material seemed to stick with the students.
“When I was taking my exam, I was remembering those tapes more than I was remembering my notes,” Kelly said.
Professors said while they’re not “teaching” pornography, they are finding pornography an effective tool in teaching their particular subjects, be it English or psychology.
“Teaching pornography implies that there’s something in the book that we’re transmitting to our students,” Savage said. “I would say we’re studying it.”