BUSINESS WIRE, 2/11/08 - Vivid Entertainment, the world's leading adult film studio, plays a big role in Sex Week at Yale on the Ivy League campus. Organizers of the event have declared Saturday, February 16 as "VIVID DAY" .

Sex Week at Yale 2008 runs from February 11-18, during which time the campus will be buzzing more than usual about "love, sex, intimacy, and relationships." A press release from SWAY notes, "On Yale's storied campus, populated by some of the brightest young men and women on the planet, many students still haven't figured out how to ask someone on a date. Others might even believe that coitus interruptus is a form of safe sex. Sex Week at Yale comes to the rescue!"

The event "will mark the first time Sex Week at Yale has devoted a full day of the week to an adult entertainment company. Vivid is best known for its beautiful contract actresses, or Vivid Girls. Vivid co-chairman Steven Hirsch has been credited as almost single handedly moving the adult business into the mainstream." SWAY says the Vivid presence will help in its mission of "getting beyond the awkwardness, discomfort and taboo of conventional sex education programs and to get students talking about sex openly and realistically. SWAY presents these serious topics in an entertaining and provocative manner." It is the third bi-annual SWAY, which its founders say "has become renowned as a collegiate awareness program for its ability to capture students' attention and willingness to tackle difficult issues head-on."

On Friday, February, 15, Vivid Girl Monique Alexander teams up with porn icon Ron Jeremy to debate Craig Gross and Donnie Pauling in what's being billed as "The Great Porn Debate" moderated and televised by Nightline ABC, with host Martin Bashir. Gross is a minister with an anti-porn mission and Pauling is a former porn producer who started the XXXChurch. It takes place at 8:30 pm at the LoRicco Ballroom (and seating is limited).

Saturday Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, will lecture to graduate students at the Yale School of Management on "The Business of Pornography: How Vivid Made it Mainstream" at 4:30pm. He will chart how the adult industry has developed and where it is headed. At 7:30 pm in the Yale Law School Auditorium Vivid Girl Savanna Samson and Ms. Alexander along with adult film director Paul Thomas (better known as "PT"), present "The Story in X Rated Films/Sex and Context," along with a film screening and Q&A with students on how a well constructed script can heighten the eroticism of an adult film. Finally, at 10:30 pm SWAY the "Skull & Boned Party" at The TOAD. A Vivid DVD will be given to each guest and there will be a contest called "Who Looks Most Like a Vivid Girl" to be judged by PT, Monique Savanna.

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Central Ohio Students Study Pornography

NBC 4, 5/16/05 - College courses examining porn -- it's a growing trend on campuses across the nation and Central Ohio is no exception.

The following is a transcript of David Wayne's report, shown on NBC 4 on May 16, 2006.

David Wayne: The hallowed halls of higher learning, and a serious examination of porn. Visiting professor Jennifer Shaw offered a course last quarter taking a historical look at pornography, all approved by her department chair.

Linda Mizejewski, The Ohio State University Women's Study Department Chair: We need to study the issues around porn. We need to study its history, its social effects and its implications for social policy

Wayne: These students took the class.

Margo Roberts, student: Because before I just thought, "Pornography, that's the woman's choice," but the more we started to learn about it, I realized there are so many different sides to the argument. Is it good for a woman or bad?

Wayne: A primary question up for debate on each and every campus, where porn is studied in some form or fashion. How far should the professors go in the classroom? Should explicit movies, manuscripts or magazines be included? In some cases they study violent porn, like the now-infamous movie, Deep Throat. At Ohio State, that was only discussed, not shown. But other graphic art was, including photos like these from Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic collection.

Nicole Radcliff, student: With Mapplethorpe, she told us, "These are graphic. You don't have to look at these if you would like to leave," and she was very professional about it.

Wayne: The syllabus also included graphic literary works, like The 120 Days of Sodom, and artwork, like this canvas painting from 1863, titled Olympia. Plus, National Geographic. That's right, the magazine known for artful photography. It may not be porn in the traditional sense, but images like these of minorities around the globe can be perceived as primitive.

Radcliff: Again, when you see a photo of people who are white, you see them fully clothed and with technology, just kind of reinforcing that dichotomy between primitive and civilized.

Wayne: In a sense, the rise in porn studies at universities seems to parallel the rise in accessible porn, especially on the Internet.

Mizejewski: I think porn is a social, legal, and feminist issue. Because of that, I think we are going to see more of it in different kinds of college courses.

Wayne: Sex and the syllabus, a once forbidden topic, now out in the open and up for debate.

Porn Studies at Vanderbilt University and UCLA

The GW Hatchet, 4/9/06 - More and more college professors are looking at pornography. Some of them are even watching it with their students.

But it's not the latest student-teacher sex scandal - it's an emerging phenomenon in academia and one that some say has an important future in university curriculums.

A growing number of professors are examining the historical, technological and legal implications of pornography. And - despite resistance from some quarters - they aren't shy about including primary sources in the syllabus.

"I don't actually want to shock anyone," said Katherine B. Crawford, who teaches Pornography and Prostitution in History at Vanderbilt University. "The premise of the class is that pornography has a long and complicated history."

Crawford explained that material she assigns to students is carefully selected to promote an understanding of the larger historical problems surrounding gender and politics. She said she has tried to teach the class without showing any pornography but found it less effective. "It was a less visceral experience for students," she said.

Not everyone who is in favor or examining pornography as an academic subject feels the need to screen it in class though.

"Pornography is readily available at this point," said Dr. Paul Abramson of the University of California at Los Angeles who teaches a course called Sex and the Law. "It doesn't serve any intellectual purpose to show it."

Abramson focuses on the civil, criminal and constitutional aspects of obscenity. The screening of a documentary on the controversial 1970's adult film Deep Throat is strictly optional, though he said showing adult movies might be appropriate for film or cultural studies.

Opponents of pornography in the classroom say these kinds of courses are crowding out traditional literature and diverting public funds from more important subjects.

"Why spend thousands of dollars on a college campus on what you could get at an adult bookstore," said Mal Kline, executive director of the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Academia.

Porn Studies at American Universities

Time Magazine, 3/26/06 - 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.

It's called the porn curriculum, and it's quietly taking root in the ivory tower. A small but growing number of scholars are probing the aesthetic, societal and philosophical properties of smut in academic departments ranging from literature to film, law to technology, anthropology to women's studies. Those specialists argue that graphic sexual imagery has become ubiquitous in society, so it's almost irresponsible not to teach young people how to deal with it. "I was amazed by how much the students knew about pornography but how little they knew how to think about it," says Jay Clarkson, a graduate student in communications who introduced the University of Iowa's Pornography in Popular Culture class last fall. But although Clarkson and his peers may agree that porn studies have a place in the curriculum, they are divided over how far professors should go in teaching them. Do students really need to watch a couple copulating onscreen to understand why pornography turns people on? Or does a stimulating essay on the nature of desire provide just as much if not more insight?

Linda Williams, a film professor at Berkeley, lines up on the side of showing rather than simply telling. While researching feminist reactions to porn in the early '90s, she grew fascinated by the choreography of dirty movies and began teaching a trailblazing course about porno films. "I'm quite critical of pornography," she says. "I'm not trying to teach people to accept the existence of it. As with any tradition of moving-image culture, we need to take it seriously. We need to try and come at it with 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 Hustler can define class stratification in the U.S.--by discussing the work of the 16th century satirist François Rabelais as well as skin magazines.

But some scholars disagree about the need to present porn in class. In Sex and the Law, a senior seminar given by Paul Abramson, a psychology professor at UCLA, the screening of Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the making of the notorious '70s porno film, is optional. Porn is "so pervasive in our culture, most students have already seen it," Abramson explains. Showing it "seems unnecessary." Likewise, Catherine Sherwood-Puzello, who covers pornography in her human-sexuality class at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, the home of sex pioneer Alfred Kinsey's institute, displays Michelangelo's David and Playboy covers in her class but "no X-rated movies," she says. "Those are not a good way to explain porn," which she believes is best taught with the same dispassion with which one would teach a course on statistics.

Advocates of bringing porn into the classroom insist that studying porn without watching it misses the point. Kipnis screens Saló or 120 Days of Sodom, by the Italian avant-garde filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, in her obscenity class. The film, updated from the novel by the Marquis de Sade, is set in fascist Italy and depicts a tribunal of powerful men and their sexual torture of teenagers. She says students who had previously espoused staunchly liberal views about freedom of expression often find themselves disgusted and horrified by what they see. "University students are often too cool, too hip to understand why other people get perturbed," Kipnis says. "Showing a film like this allows them to react and then to take a step back and analyze their reaction with the critical tools you give them."

Students agree that watching skin flicks in a classroom--as opposed to, say, a dorm room--can offer new perspectives. Lindsey Reich, 21, a senior majoring in anthropology at N.Y.U., thought herself fairly progressive when she signed up for Professor Don Kulick's sexuality-and-gender course last year. Then he screened a film featuring the porn star Annie Sprinkle having sex with a transgendered man and another showing female ejaculation. To her surprise, Reich was shocked. "I realized I do have my biases about what is a man and what is a woman--I mean, I grew up in the Midwest--and it made me want to explore these stereotypes and get past them," she says. "Those films did that better than any academic book."

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 countries. "It turned out to be about societal norms--not fluff at all," says his mother.

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. After Clarkson's course appeared in the catalog at the University of Iowa, a state politician threatened to withdraw school funding. (He dropped his efforts only after he learned that lessons wouldn't involve explicit visuals.)

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.

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