Over the past few weeks, newspapers and television shows have widely reported that college students are hot for porn courses on campus. Whether these reports are accurate or just misleading exaggerations, they do raise a serious question: Why should pornography be studied in an academic setting?
Cultural conservatives and their low-brow counterparts--talk-show hosts--believe porn is not a fit topic for the classroom. They would have us believe that porn is simply videos of people having sex, and hence trivial and the source of nothing more significant than classroom titters.
Right-wing feminists maintain that porn degrades and oppresses women, and that while women appear to be enjoying sex in porn, they are really being raped.
In either case, the attack on porn studies is actually less an attack on the study of sex than it is on the study of popular culture. The conservatives who bemoan the study of porn are the same people who oppose the study of film and popular culture in general.
If they had their way, students would be limited to reading from a "great books" curriculum designed in the 1930s. It would consist of a very narrow list of works written almost exclusively by white men, with a few token women and African Americans added to feign diversity.
But this is nothing more than a dream of returning to a past that never existed anyway. The study of art and literature has always involved attending to both elite and popular forms and genres.
Conservatives can't close the door on popular culture, for how can we study Shakespeare without studying Shakespeare on film? How can we understand Shakespeare's reverberation in our culture without examining his appearance in popular media like TV sitcoms, advertisements, films like "Porky's 2" and, dare I say it, even hard-core pornographic films like "A Midsummer Night's Cream"?
If Shakespeare appears in a large number of hard-core pornographic adaptations, how can we understand Shakespeare's afterlives if we don't also study them?
Also, pornography changes. Porn in 2001 looks very different from porn produced in 1968, which in turn looks very different from porn made in 1928. Therefore, porn, like all other mass-produced elements of popular culture, has a very great deal to say about our society and the cultural dynamics that structure it.
Once it becomes clear that we have to study popular culture as well as elite culture, the conservatives lose, and so they "lose it" in frothing denunciations.
