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With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites. At New York University, assignments for Anthropology of the Unconscious include discussing X-rated Japanese comic books. And in Cinema and the Sex Act at the University of California, Berkeley, undergrads are required to view clips from Hollywood NC-17 releases like Showgirls and underground stag reels...
...some theoretical tools." Like many porn scholars, Williams includes readings from Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who wrote about sexual identity, to explore how porno movies interpret desire and what that says about the human psyche. Similarly, Alex Halavais, an assistant professor of communication at SUNY Buffalo, tracks pornography's pivotal role in the development of communications systems from the telephone to the Internet, with a reading list that ranges from student blogs to the Congressional Record. And in her graduate-level class on obscenity, media-studies professor Laura Kipnis of Northwestern University examines how publications like...
Parents who foot the bill for such epiphanies often start out eyeing those courses with varying degrees of skepticism. After Matthew Schwartz told his parents he was enrolling in the cyberporn class at Buffalo last year, his mother Fran joked that he had got the school to tailor a class around his interests. His father Marvin complained, "I'm paying for you to study what?" The class delved into what causes cultures to define pornography in different ways--lessons that Schwartz, 21 and a senior, says will make him more sensitive in his planned career as a translator in Arab...
Administrators at schools that offer porn studies find themselves caught between their desire for cutting-edge scholarship and their reluctance to stir up controversy. "I wish I had more faculty doing this kind of exciting work," says David Penniman, a dean at Buffalo who oversees Halavais' cyberporn course. Penniman acknowledges that the graphic images used in the class may upset some people, but, he adds, "it's tricky for a dean or university president to try to dictate what should or shouldn't be in the syllabus." It's especially tricky at state schools where legislators help determine school funding...
Schools are seeking ways to sidestep such concerns. Iowa and Buffalo bar students under 18 from porn classes. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, Constance Penley, a film professor and porn-studies pioneer, says she tells her students that "I don't want to squelch their financial possibilities or creativity, but as a favor to me, could they not make a porn film until after they graduate?" Teaching them about porn is one thing. Training them for a career in the adult arts is another...