2008 Woodie Awards
From under your mattress to inside the lecture hall
Pornography in the college classroom
Matt Hrodey
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This fall, instructor and Ph.D. student Katinka Hooijer will teach the first Women's Studies 599: "Women, Pornography and the Media," a night class that aims to better understand pornography through media literacy, cultural anthropology and cultural criticism.
The Center for Women's Studies, particularly Assistant Director Kathy Miller-Dillon, has welcomed Hooijer's classes, which approaches porn as artifacts of modern culture, ripe for analysis.
"Porn is a main feature in our society," she said. "Why would you not study it?"
Show and tell has become an enduring part of her classes on porn. Students bring in videos, magazines, calendars and even sex toys to show. The class discusses what values or stereotypes the items promote. One semester, a student ignited a fierce debate with a video starring a man with two penises.
Cathy Seasholes, director of the Women's Resource Center, echoed the need to witness porn before discussing it.
"I think you can't fully talk about an issue unless you can relate to it," Seasholes said. "But there's a lot that you can do to frame what's going to happen. It's contextual."
The study of pornography at UWM is in no way a revolution. A "pornography fad" in universities across the country has erupted in recent years, and UWM's methods of using adult entertainment would seem tame compared to other schools.
At Wesleyan University, a student earned an "A" for filming a fellow student masturbating; at Northwestern, professor Laura Kipnis has shown "fat porn" and "transvestite porn" to film studies courses to show its cultural impact; and at San Francisco State University, students explore the world of pornography by taking virtual tours of various web sites.
Starting in the Ethnic Studies program, Hooijer has taught classes on pornography and society since 2000. When she requested to upgrade her original class to upper-level status, most of the program's board of directors questioned its relevance to Ethnic Studies.
The class was unusual. "Hustler" was required reading. Students-male and female-had to buy issues at gas stations and bookstores. Hooijer said she wanted students to have that experience.
Hooijer's new class will examine the porn aesthetics' growing prevalence in all media, including fashion, television, popular music and advertising. Porn, according to Family Safe Media, generates more revenue in the U.S. than ABC, CBS, and NBC combined. That's $12 billion yearly, and that's driving porn into mainstream media.
"The more porn you sell, the more acceptable it becomes," Hooijer said. "And the more acceptable it is, the more you sell."
For Hooijer, the line between passive consumer and active producer is hard to draw and easy to cross. She maps a cycle of consumption.
When the porn aesthetic-the obligatory catering to male desire, the boundless sex, the idealized yet unnatural female body- becomes a daily experience, it finds expression in the consumer's life.
The aesthetic can affect a person's clothes, social habits, sexual identity and sexual relationships. Adopting it pushes porn further into the cultural mainstream, which completes the cycle by encouraging more consumption.
Does the growing porn aesthetic have to be negative?
"That's the big question. Is the use of porn liberating women or is it making them conform to a particular version of sexuality?" Hooijer said.
For Seasholes, porn treats women as commodities and objects. It promotes that perspective-a limited version of what's sexy for women.
Hooijer praises porn's opportunities for exploring sexual alternatives and its validation of sexual diversity. Many feminists distinguish porn from erotica. She becomes angry at even the mention of such a theoretical division.
"They are both representations of humans as sexual beings," Hooijer said. "We need a neutral definition of porn." Dividing porn from erotica, she said, "marginalizes women who like hardcore porn."
Some students in her porn classes have said that adult films complicate their real sexual relationships, which are inherently imperfect and more difficult. Porn created a complex.
"Suddenly," she said, "sex has to be as fast, as loud, and as pleasurable as what you see on TV."
Seasholes said that porn can make people invisible when, in a sexual encounter, a partner's experience with images and fantasy are imposed on his or her partner. The real person is clouded and somewhat ignored.
The risk of dysfunction with real partners warrants moderation Hooijer said.
"It's a condiment," she said. "It shouldn't be the main dish, [but] it has become the main dish. I think it can be a progressive cultural force if we are critical in how we use it, if we understand the social functions of it."