Unfortunately, it is totally “woke” and oh, so self-important.
Check this out:
“She said her goal in creating the course was to use digital pornography as a jumping-off point to talk about race, ability, and the patriarchy.”
37 thoughts on “Temple University now offers a porn-studies course”
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Wow, we’ve really spiraled here. But for those of you who haven’t clicked (like me 5 minutes ago), I think the greater point is being missed. The professor isn’t the Andrea Dworkinoid she-manatee I was expecting, she’s actually on the “would” side of the Hit That line, though usual photoshop caveats apply.
That’s a Rod Serling-sized twist.
Since you used “woke” as a pejorative could you give your definition of the word? Ryan Newman, Ron DeSantis’s general counsel, said the term referred to “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Surely that isn’t what you mean and are against?
Oh god. Fuckin’ really? Jesus fucking christ, what the fuck is wrong with this world?
When used as a pejorative it means “an overzealous, obsessive, hyper-sensitive, sanctimonious and condescending attitude about perceived injustice.”
So, they wore out “SJW” and needed a new word to condemn people seeking to do right. Isn’t there a saying about knowing who people are by their enemies?
The self-righteousness of your comment illustrates exactly why conservatives have turned “WOKE” into an insult.
You begin the discussion with the logical flaw of “begging the question,” meaning that you assume that what you want (or more accurately, what the woke want) is “to do right,” therefore forcing the conclusion that opposing it must be wrong in some way – sexist, racist, whatever. Conservatives would argue that they are the ones seeking to do right, and that they are actually condemning wolves who really seek to do evil in the sheep’s clothing of “justice.”
As someone who is neither liberal not conservative, I would argue that what people want is either “change” or “status quo,” and I would not bias either option with the tag of “doing right.” To my thinking, the claim to be doing “right” really means “doing what I want.” It’s a pretext used to cover up acting in one’s self-interest or the interest of one’s tribe, much like “state’s rights.” In the real world, people rarely seek to do what is “right”; they seek what they want, or what their tribe wants. I’ll be impressed with the words of people in pursuit of “right” or “justice” when they argue passionately for a cause that results in significant harm to them personally, but believe it still must be done because it is simply the right thing to do.
One cannot automatically conclude that reparations are “right” and opposing them is wrong. One cannot automatically assume that it is “right” to make biological women compete in sports against biological males. The “woke” automatically make these assumptions and leave no room for debate, thus telling a majority of Americans that they are racist or sexist or transphobic for taking an opposite position that just seems like common sense.
🙏🏻
I agree the term “right” is often tribal, but most people supporting the two things listed are often arguing that there is systemic failure and there is. I noticed conservatives brush the concept away by saying “woke” and don’t actually address the fundamentals of the failure.
The problem is, people don’t address the fundamental issue here and brush it over. Reparations: is anyone going to argue that African Americans and Native Americans WEREN’T historically done wrong? The problem is, the way conservatives frame as well is as if the European settlers were doing them some favor by wiping out their land, killing them off, and putting them into slavery. Pick an attribute, any attribute of a person and put a group of those people at the lowest totem pole on society for a few hundred years as less than human. The same exact result would happen to anyone in that scenario, because it’s a system issue.
Now how you address it? That’s a different issue. I’m not sure if you can go back hundreds of years to compensate based on ancestral damage. Do we go back to Napolean? The Crusades? Islam Conquest? I can argue that is a discussion to be had, but conservatives don’t say that. What they do say is, “get over it, you REALLY don’t have it that bad, everyone is born the same and the system doesn’t matter – see I’m a doctor and I grew up white and my parents paid for education and didn’t have to grow up a slum – all I did was study and obey the law.”
That’s the shortsighted view that’s given. I have contempt for people who pretend how they would react given this set of hardship that someone else must go through as a consequence of systemic failure. The same for transgendered folks – testosterone builds muscle and improves success rates in athletics. That’s a problem in a binary system, but at the same time the system only allows for the binary – and even then steroid abusers even break that over time.
That’s a systemic failure, but it’s perpetually excused away by others that haven’t been persecuted. What is the “right” solution to these things? I don’t know. But the conservative view is to pretend there isn’t a failure of the system in the first place.
Of course reparations are never going to happen on a national basis, so the argument is moot, but here’s how it would work: my tax dollars would go to pay for it. Some of it would go to families that have never been affected by slavery. Yet three of my eight great-grandparents were born into slavery! (Russia ended slavery about the same time as the USA.) Craziest thing I ever heard of. What liberals fail to understand is that the government doesn’t pay reparations, I do, with my tax dollars.
On the other hand, if there is a way to seize wealth from families that profited from slavery and redistribute it to the descendants of slaves, I would be all in
In the case of women’s sports, there is certainly a systemic failure, but it’s actually the opposite of what progressives contend. Here’s how transgender females affect my life. My mixed doubles partner in senior racket sports is a transgender female. Compared to the biological women we play against, she is about eight inches taller, has a massive reach advantage, can hit the ball approximately twice as hard, and is much faster. The biological women we play against argue that there is absolutely a systemic failure in letting her play, and it reflects societal misogyny. These are women who had no sports programs when they were young. If they wanted to play tennis or golf, they had to make the men’s team. Other sports were not available at all. They have scratched and clawed for five or six decades to create an environment where there was an even playing field, only to have to go back to once again playing against against larger, more muscular players.
If the high sheriffs of pickleball and tennis rule against transgender females, I am totally fucked. Instead of being part of a stellar team, I go back to the mediocrity I deserve – and yet the position I advocate is to ban my partner. And frankly, any position to the contrary makes no sense to me at all. As I told Roger, it’s a case of these people actually wanting to do wrong, not right, harming millions of women to accommodate a tiny subset of society.
Wow. I had no idea my comment was self righteous. To me it seemed factual. I never see the term SJW any more, but woke is all over the place, almost exclusively in a perjorative sense. I think Ron DeSantis never STOPS saying it.
And if you think that what the Republican Party wants is right in the sense of good, you have rocks in your head. That too is just a fact, unless you want to start playing games with the idea of good and bad. The right no longer cares about objective reality, for a start. Trump is currently their leading candidate for president. They pay only lip service to the idea that massacres of school children are a tragedy. What more do you want?
You had no idea that it was self-righteous to declare your personal preference to be the “right” one? I have a hard time believing that, given that it is the actual definition of self-righteous! The naivete of liberals about their self-righteousness is exactly what has made “woke” a pejorative. Once you assume your moral superiority, everyone who opposes you becomes evil.
What you declare to be “seeking to do right” could just as easily be considered by others of equal sincerity and intelligence to be “seeking to do wrong” or just “tending to one’s self interest.” It isn’t right because you say it’s right. If you make the a priori assumption that it’s right, you are sure to conclude that anyone with an opposite opinion must be morally flawed in some way (racist, sexist, etc.) Your conclusion is forced by your assumption.
If you were to change your original statement to “seeking to make change,” instead of “seeking to do right,” therefore avoiding the fallacy of “begging the question,” I would have no quibble with your original comment. That edit would leave open for discussion whether that change is “good” or “bad,” and allows you to address the opposition without calling them transphobic, racist, sexist … etc.
As to the other matter, there is no defense for the current Republican party. It appears to be lost forever. It has been swallowed up by humbugs and by reckless, irresponsible, fact-denying nutbaggery.
But conservative principles are right in many areas, in my opinion, and liberals are totally and obviously wrong about many things that they assert to be dogmatic. (I once heard Ben Affleck declare that criticism of Islam was “racist,” and heard a TV panel of MSNBC types agree with him. WTF?)
It’s hilarious to the point of sad how this professor is so enamored by her own bullshit, she really thinks college kids are lining up for a class on online porn because they “really, really want to talk about” how it effects larger societal issues.
Well, we’ll see what happens since this is the first semester, but the article does point out: Before the class even began, the student cap rose from 25 to 40 because of the demand.
It’s not the “what,” it’s the “why.” The class is going to be extraordinarily popular, at least this first semester when it’s still something of an unknown novelty.
But to think it’s the potential discussion of profound social issues that’s driving enrollment here? C’mon now.
Yes, you might be right. That’s why I pointed out this is the first semester it’s been offered. However, I expect at least some of those who signed up heard what the professor said about the course before signing up and it’s also possible she’ll modify the course going forward. I’d tend to agree there won’t be a lot of interest going forward if the course is totally as she described it.
‘Woke’ mostly means ‘inclusive.’
Inclusive to who? And exclusionary to who? The issue with “woke” are the ones defining it. The real argument is not whether “woke” is a good thing or bad but the definition of inclusive. Universities will be inclusive when it comes to race but not when it comes to ideology. Women’s sports will be inclusive to transgenders but not to the women who get trounced. Liberals see the world in terms of race and sexual orientation. Nothing else seems to matter to them for so called “diversity” or “inclusivity”. But then again, they are selective when it comes to race as they certainly seem to care more about blacks than any other race. And they care more about Muslims than any other religion even though there are billions of Muslims in the world. The entire ideology seems kind of arbitrary or self serving.
The usual nonsense ….
Normally I ignore your comments because I regard you as a complete phony/troll, but I do have a point to make here.
Were it true that it was only liberals who saw the world in terms of race or sexual orientation (or gender if I can alter it slightly) that would be a valid point, why is anybody bringing it up?
The obvious problem with that though is that it isn’t liberals who bring this up, it’s racists and sexists, both overt racists and sexists and unconscious racists and sexists.
So, this is why there sadly needs to be overt action at the systemic level to counter this existing racism and sexism.
When it comes to ‘ideology’ or ‘ideas’ more generally which may not fit into any ideological perspective at all, I don’t necessarily disagree, but the claim that right wing ideology is suppressed in universities is false right wing victimhood. The real problem in university academia is with new ideas, as status quo bias is a fairly pervasive problem, especially, ironically enough in the harder sciences.
A good example of that is actually contained in what a lot of people think is an example of ‘good’ intellectualism. Carl Sagan popularizing the quotation “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If you think about it, it actually makes no sense because there is no such thing as ‘extraordinary evidence’? There is only ordinary evidence, at least mostly. All that quote really does is enable the status quo.
A good example of that is that, until recently anyway, there was no ‘extraordinary evidence’ of global warming. Whenever an extreme weather event occured people would find an example from 100 or so years ago and say ‘see it happened before, this isn’t extraordinary evidence.’ Had Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence’ (which actually does make sense) that would have been fine, and there is plenty of extra ordinary evidence that shows the reality of global warming.
Of course, there is now actually extraodinary evidence of global warming that backs up the reality of global warming even more, like high humidity in Death Valley and thunder and tornadoes in areas where it had been impossible for them to happen previously.
But, I digress.
Racists and sexists are just are flavors of -ists that hide under the bed with the boogeyman. Liberals and conservatives talk past each other. Both in university and the “real world”. Left wing ideology certainly is pervasive on college campuses, because a college campus is the closest thing to left wing utopia in our society. Of course they want to emulate it in the work place. Everyone equal, starting from nothing, competing with one another for the adoration and adoration of academic bureaucrats. Bureaucrats who have no fear of losing their job and are able to pontificate on how the world should be rather than how it is. They are the masters of their domain and if you step out of line, they will punish you. Students who go along and play along, get glowing letters of accommodation and some get taken in and nurtured and developed to one day join the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, others, simply want to get through the day, Ace their chemistry class, get their “stupid” degree, so they can go out and compete where they aren’t restricted by their adherence to a faux society, but where they are rewarded for a capitalistic individualism, where the people who make the money make the rules. If you’re an academic, why would you like capitalism? You’re not getting compensated for your intelligence, nor your ability to shepherd the blind sheep of the masses who hang on your every word. People will always choose the ideology that best suits their abilities. But then you have individuals here who refuse to admit that, like Figaro, Nature Birther, and playground, who are part of the machine, don’t realize they are part of the machine, and actually believe they have the moral high ground. They are foot soldiers in the ideology war. You and I both know this. I may not agree with you, or even like you but I get who you are and why. I respect it even. But soldiers get trolling because they lack the ability to comprehend.
When I was a student at SUNY Albany in the late 80s, I discovered a trove of pornography at the college library, and it was all thanks to Ed Meese’s war on porn. I am referring to the Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography aka the Meese Report. The report included an Appendix with numerous examples of the pornography studied by the commission. While there were no photos or videos in the appendix, there were graphic descriptions of pornographic movies and photos. There were also excerpts of pornographic novels (believe it or not, those used to be a thing). Less than a decade later, obscenity prosecutions all but disappeared as porn moved from adult bookstores and theaters to the Internet.
I would have loved it if I had been appointed to that commission and/or was hired as a staffer. Imagine being paid to watch porn all day. I never had precisely that experience, but I did once have a job where I had an occasion where I needed to surf porn sites at work. I worked for a small law firm that specialized in employment law. We had a married couple as clients that had both been sexually harassed at work. They worked for a car dealership in CT where the sales manager was (if you believed our clients) a disgusting pig. When they started dating, the manager started singing songs over the intercoms about how promiscuous the wife was and how she regularly “f*cked (N-words).” After she got pregnant, he started singing, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then (the husband) pushing a black baby in a carriage.” The manager also liked to describe his sex life in graphic detail, including his visits to a professional dominatrix. He told our client that there was a dungeon in central CT that both put on live BDSM shows and also had professional dominatrixes on staff that you could pay to dominate you.
I was instructed to find that dungeon. I began my search on Google. All my searches led to pornographic websites. While searching. I had a moment of clarity. I was at work, looking at porn, but I was actually working, not goofing off. I had no luck with Google, but as it happened, I was using my own AOL account to get online because our three lawyer firm didn’t have broadband Internet yet. I ended up finding the dungeon by searching profiles of people on AOL that were into BDSM and also in CT and then IMing them to ask if they knew anything about the dungeon I was looking for. One kinky gentleman was able to give me both the name of the dungeon and the town where it was located. I found the website that belonged to the Dungeon and printed out a price list for the various services they offered. My bosses then (good naturally) sexually harassed me by offering to send me into the dungeon “undercover” and paying the $200 so that I could be whipped. I declined.
The other really interesting thing about the case was who the husband was. He was the great-nephew of Joseph Bonanno, the head of the Bonanno crime family, and the man who Mario Puzo used as inspiration for Vito Corleone. Now, I have never made a practice of harassing coworkers, but if I were going to start, I would not start with the great-nephew of the Godfather. I think that the manager was quite lucky that our clients called lawyers instead of asking for help from their family.
Hey Michael, thanks for reminding me of Meese’s war on porn. I had forgotten all that, mainly remembering his war on bongs. For a while, you could still buy your pipe, but you had to sign your name to a statement that you would only use it for tobacco. Well, you had to sign *a* name. I always signed “Edwin Meese III”.
Complaining that a university level porn class uses porn to talk about real shit instead of just putting up some movies and saying, “Have at it” is a wierd complaint.
… which is why I made no such complaint, and would expect no such thing. The problem with this teacher’s approach is that it basically has nothing to do with porn. It’s just her inserting her all-purpose, generic agenda. Whatever porn teaches us about race or the patriarchy is the same set of lessons that anything would teach us. The same lessons can be derived from studying mainstream films, brand marketing, and just about anything else you can name, possibly excepting breakfast cereals.
To me, the one really worthwhile point she makes is that porn is the new sex ed. It’s often how people first encounter sex, and may be the way young people learn the mechanics. In my youth, there was no sex ed at all. We were taught about sex by our parents with the aid of some sanitized pamphlets – in theory that is, if they could get to the matter before our classmates usurped the honor. In the next generation there was a certain amount of education in schools, and this may be where some children first learned about sex. In the most recent generations, it seems likely that children first learn about sex from the internet. The issue that would interest me there is how that trend affects those generations differently (if indeed it does), and what effect it has on behavior, in and out of the bedroom.
The real scholarly approach to porn is to study its impact on society rather than how it reflects society. In the past 30 years, porn has been completely mainstreamed. Before the internet, porn was difficult and uncomfortable to obtain and often very expensive. To see it, one generally had to go to raunchy bookstores or run-down theaters, usually in sketchy urban neighborhoods. Those that frequented such places were generally viewed as perverts. It was almost impossible for children to obtain it.
Today anyone of any age can obtain porn for free in the comfort of home on the internet. Even highly specialized fetishes can be found with a simple Google search. It has been mainstreamed and is being destigmatized. Children can see it as soon as they have their own phone.
Religious people must find this satanic, but even setting aside the question of whether the mainstreaming of porn is immoral, we might ask what impact this has on society? What impact does this have on the people who watch it frequently? What impact does this have on the economy? What impact does this have on the people who perform in porn? What are the ethical issues raised by this change? Does the mainstreaming of porn cause people to have unrealistic (or unworthy) expectations about sex? Does the easy accessibility of porn require legislative action? How should we talk to our children about it, and at what age? Does the easy accessibility of porn change what people actually do with their partners? (I have read that anal sex becomes ever more commonplace. If that is true, is that a direct result of the mainstreaming of porn? Does that matter?)
And of course, a scholar might also study the internal issues about how porn itself has changed over the years, irrespective of the accessibility issue. One might even consider the philosophical issue of porn’s definition. For example, is Other Crap a porn site? Some people think so.
There are many ways that a scholar may approach the subject. It could be in the psychology department, the sociology department, the business department, even the film studies department. (Before the Lumieres or Edison, Muybridge was creating brief nude figure studies. Was this porn? It probably would have been considered such in Muybridge’s time.)
Just leave sex ed to the Catholic Church…and its clergy.
This is one of the key themes of my novel. (PLUG!)
That’s exactly how I received sex ed. I attended a Catholic elementary, St. Barnabas, from first grade through eighth. In 7th grade, the school started teaching us sex ed. First, the 7th grade was split, with all the girls going to one room and the boys the other. The girls got to watch films about their changing bodies, while the boys got to be educated by Father Biglin. First, he told us that it was OK to curse, but only during these lessons. But he also figured we boys would be too shy to ask questions publicly, so he had us write questions anonymously on index cards which were then shuffled. Our sex ed classes consisted of Father Biglin going through each card and answering the questions. Questions included: What is a blow job? What is an around the world? What is a 69? What is French? What is Greek? Do you need lube for anal sex? OK, I made up that last one. lol He answered all the questions, but the majority of his answers began with “I have no experience with (the sex act) but I’ve heard…” For the record, Father Biglin was a good and kind man. I have never heard of any accusations of misconduct aimed at him.
Ironically, I probably learned more about sex from those classes with Father Biglin than I did in high school. The only sex ed instruction at the Bronx High School of Science (a public school) was in a 1-semester hygiene class in my junior year. I was already 17 when I took that class. I had lost my virginity the year before. Bronx Science probably had a lot fewer pregnant students than other NYC high schools. If you think sex ed can help reduce teen pregnancies, you probably shouldn’t wait to teach it until students have reached the age of consent in NY, 17. But I have been told on many occasions that it is a waste of time to use logic to argue against a policy put in place by the NYC Dept. of Education.
I grew up directly across the street from Van Cortlandt Park. Van Cortlandt Park is basically more than a thousand acres of woods. It was not uncommon to come across discarded nudie mags. I have heard such finds called “hedge porn,” and I think that is an excellent name for that. I bought my first nudie mag when I was 14. I picked it off the rack in a candy store and handed the guy money and he put in a bag for me. I don’t think I ever had anyone refuse to sell porn to me. But I was the oldest of 5 kids and my younger siblings had a game they liked to play: Who can find Mike’s nudie mags? One of them would find a magazine I had hidden and my mom would rip it up and throw it in the garbage. Personally, I think those magazines should have been recycled. They should have been left in park bushes to be found by new kids.
More seriously, I think the ease with which young kids can access porn, sometimes really disturbing porn, is a real problem. I think that adults have the right to access porn, but we need more safeguards to protect kids. When I was a teacher in the oughts, I often had issues using a school computer. Some of the sites the software said I couldn’t visit included the Washington Post (an editorial about the alleged torture of imprisoned terrorists), the U.S. Supreme Court (an opinion about indecent content on TV) and the NY Times (I forget the story.) But guess what? The kids had no trouble accessing porn on those machines.
My niece is a 16-year-old high school junior and a straight-A student. She is also a gifted athlete. She hasn’t started dating, but any boy she does date will almost certainly have already consumed at least one metric shit-ton of porn in his short life. I can’t help but worry about her. I’m her godfather. Being an atheist, I was a little surprised to be my sister’s pick, but I was honored. Fortunately, the priest never asked me if I believed in God.
I worry about what some boy might expect from her. I worry more because of her personality. She is very shy and very much a rule follower. When she was 8 years old, I got her an EZ Bake oven. That summer, my other sister and I were visiting them in CA. My sister suggested we bake something in the EZ Bake oven. My niece replied, “Aunt Sheila, the box says you need to be 9 years old and I’m only 8! She sounded very much like Hermione but without an English accent. I really don’t think she would want to watch porn. But I could be wrong. I had a student at that age in my honor’s class that dropped out of school because she got pregnant. Really sweet, really smart kid.
The Catholic baptismal ceremony is weird.
It asks these questions of the parents:
And yet there is no comparable interrogation for the godparents. As you found out, an atheist can sneak through without lying, even though church law does specify some requirements for the role:
I am sorry if I am asking dumb questions here, but A) An 8 year old got pregnant? And B) There are honors classes for 8 year olds?
Both of those things would be startling to me, and at least one of them would be appalling. But it is late where I am, and perhaps I have misread your post badly.
The honors student was the same age that my niece is today, 16. Thinking about it now, she dropped out of school in 2006, around the same time my niece was born. That means my former student’s child is only a few months younger than my niece.
It’s really awful to contemplate, but the record for the youngest mother to give birth is five years, seven months, and 21 days. That happened in 1939 in Peru. I do know a girl that lost her virginity at age 8. Her uncle began raping her when she was 8-years-old, and the abuse continued until she finally told her mother when she was 16. I met her when she was 17 when she came up to me at a restaurant and asked me to take her home with me to have sex. I didn’t know about the abuse, but in retrospect, it did explain why this really pretty girl would proposition a chubby 39-year-old she didn’t know. She was an incredibly sweet and loving young woman with a pit of darkness and anger inside her. After she turned 18, I let her move in with me. I was able to get her into therapy and back into school. Fortunately, I had stopped teaching by then since it would have been awkward to date a high school student when I was a high school teacher, even if the girl was 18. It was still awkward. My mother didn’t approve of the relationship, and believe it or not, neither did the girl’s mother. Imagine that. A bi-polar Puerto Rican lesbian didn’t approve of a nearly 40-year-old guy dating her teenage daughter.
Wow. I have lived such a sheltered life. I would never have undertaken what you did for this young woman.That was an noble thing to do.
Thanks Roger. I have to say though that you are the first person to call me noble for that relationship. lol
Also – 69 days til Orgasm Day: nice.
you had me at “digital pornography”
‘Woke’ mostly means ‘inclusive.’ There is nothing wrong with that. That might be some excess, but that’s also to be expected whenever people try to shift the paradigm.
I agree that there is nothing wrong with being inclusive. I also think that encouraging diversity is a good thing. But I have real problems with the way many university DEI programs operate. Take for example Stanford Law School DEI Dean Jenny Martinez, who responded to left-wing protesters disrupting a talk by a conservative federal judge by taking his microphone and giving a 10-minute prepared speech attacking the judge.
Woke has become something of an all inclusive term for everything conservatives don’t like about the left. But it isn’t just conservative that have a problem with “woke.” Columbia professor and NY Times columnist John McWhorter self identifies as “center-left.” His book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, was a NY Times best seller in 2021. The biggest problem I have with adherents to the Woke religion is where they place the Overton Window. The Overton Window refers to the range of generally acceptable political and societal beliefs. But to many of the Woke, certain opinions are just so harmful that they may not be expressed. Take for example the backlash against J.K. Rowling for her opinions on trans issues. “Dress however you please. “Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. “Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?” Was this opinion really worthy of cancellation? I don’t think so. But the only reason she wasn’t canceled was that she was so rich that the twitter mobs couldn’t cancel her. Generally speaking, I don’t think people should lose their jobs for holding unpopular opinions.
Wtf did you expect from a porn studies curriculum at an accredited University? Does an informed deep dive into any industry’s impact on our world now require weighing whether it meets this bizarre fascist “woke” worldview?
It’s ok to think critically about things, even if we like porn & boobies & stuff.