Last Wednesday evening, Shiffman room 219 was packed with students coming from classes in all different directons, from all different departments. What could be attracting such a diverse group of students, you ask? The answer is simple: pornography. More specifically, a panel lecture presented by the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project-a program started by Prof. Bernadette Brooten (NEJS) and Prof. Anita Hill (Heller). The lecture was given not only as part of the Project's programming, but also as a special learning opportunity for students in Brooten's course, "NEJS 29a: Feminist Sexual Ethics in Judaism, Christianity and Islam."

The panel was composed of Sarah Leonard, an Associate Professor of History at Simmons College, who trained as a cultural historian of gender in modern Germany; Burlin Barr, a professor of English and cinema studies at Central Connecticut State University; and Emily Rothman, an Associate Professor in the department of Community Health Studies at the Boston University School of Public Health. The three formed a graduate consortium and are teaching an interdisciplinary course together on pornography at the Massachusetts Instutute of Technology, which Brooten called "a widespread cultural phenomenon that is under-researched," as she introduced them.

While the advertisement for the panel promised "a discussion on how and why pornography has sparked such interest among feminists," there were some aspects of the lecture that did not interact with the feminist perspective. Barr's segment deviated the most from this promised theme, as he attempted to lecture about pornography in terms of its cinematic elements. Barr alluded to the idea of the mixture of emotions that consuming something taboo like pornography elicits-"shame, embarrassment, disgust ... pleasure, curiosity, connection, abandonment and loneliness." He spoke about the desires associated with viewing pornography, explaining that desire is something that is set up in the genre of pornography the same way a scene is set up in a film. He did not, however, acknowledge the popular discourse on voyeurism or the notion of "the gaze" that is so prevalent in studies of film, sexuality and gender.

Perhaps the most factual and smooth presentation was given by Rothman, an epidemiologist in violence services, who has served as the director of a battered women's shelter in Vermont. "I am a health scientist," she began, "I develop questions and try and answer them. I am not an anti-porn feminist or a pro-porn feminist. My research is about protecting people from violence." Rothman discussed a study about the effect of porn on its consumers, which concluded that after exposure to mainstream porn, which incorporates acts of physical aggression, "women felt that they were less empowered." Rothman also discussed the types of pornography that are most commonly consumed by young viewers, citing one study that found that "by the age of 18, 18 percent of boys and 10 percent of women have seen rape and sexual violence in porn," and from another study, that: "88 percent of modern porn contains physical aggression." Rothman's presentation added necessary facts and statistics based on solid, scientific research that anchored a topical discussion in quantitative evidence.

Providing a historical background to the discussion, Leonard opened her talk with the very beginnings of pornographic texts, saying that, "In the eighteenth century, there were pornographies written that were quite beautiful in depicting how women found their sexuality." She gave the audience an idea of where our modern conception of "pornography" as a genre comes from. Before pornography had its own generic classification, she said that it was librarians who had to group erotic and explicit texts together, as "they had to put these types of images and books in specific places." The genre was not completely erotic at first, and many educational materials were classified as pornography. "Pornography has had a long link with non-reproductive sexual habits dating back to the eighteenth century because women were afraid of getting pregnant [since] they could die."

Because the panel lasted roughly an hour with a twenty-minute open discussion at the end, it was unfortunate that the panelists had only fifteen minutes each to present their research. The cultural implications of pornography warrant a much more substantial space in the academic sphere than a one-time lecture-some panelists were even distracted by the time crunch, which detracted from their overall presentation. Hopefully, this panel will serve as the first of many opportunities for pornography to be explored in academia.

In the end, the panel provided the attendees with the unusual and extremely necessary opportunity to think about pornography in a legitimate and structured setting.
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