by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS Staff Writer
(March 11, 2008) Misbehaving on campus has reached an all-time low. This year’s “Sex Week” at Yale University, a raunchy week-long celebration of porn, sex toys and amorality, made headlines when a porn-movie screening in the law school auditorium went terribly wrong.
“The featured pornography was a series of trailer-type clips, chosen by director Paul Thomas, from among his own films,” writes Presca Ahn in the Yale Daily News. “The Sex Week team, however, didn’t preview all the footage Thomas chose. This is why, partway through the showing, graphic rape fantasies began to play onscreen.”
The footage contained violent sexual degradation of a woman who was labeled as “deserving” of the treatment.
“Damage control came quickly,” Ahn explained. “After a panicked powwow out in the hall, the Sex Week organizers stopped the screening and moved directly into the scheduled Q & A.”
Ahn, who is the Amy Rossborough Fellowship Coordinator of the Yale Women’s Center, was not pleased. When she demanded to know why such a film was shown, an organizer of the event apologized to Ahn, saying that the team had had a tiring week and if the organizers had vetted the film, they would never have allowed the rape scenes to be played.
“I could only think this Sex Week organizer had completely missed the point,” Ahn wrote. “The lesson of the Sex Week pornography screening is not that the Sex Week organizers should have edited out the rape footage. The lesson is that editing jobs are necessary to make pornography – even the ‘high quality’ ‘mainstream’ pornography touted by (Thomas) . . . look inoffensive.”
It was just another part of a week-long celebration that glamorized pornography, she said. In fact, the screening itself was followed by a dance party where students were invited by e-mail to “dress as a porn star, party like a porn star, with the porn stars.” The e-mail promised free porn DVD’s and the chance for 40 “lucky Yalies” to pre-game with Fuqqt pornstars.
“In porn, sex is not a normal, healthy part of normal, healthy lives,” Ahn writes. “It’s fetishized, exaggerated or embellished. Porn isn’t honest. We need to talk honestly about it: It hurts women.”
The problem is that the “anything goes” sexual mentality on campus these days is making it difficult for voices such as Ahn’s to be heard.
L. Brent Bozell III, president and founder of the Media Research Center, writing about the Yale event, asks the pertinent question, “When does the concept of ‘inappropriate’ porn arrive with this crowd? Everyone wants to be ‘cavalier,’ because anything less makes you Jerry Falwell.”
This cavalier attitude also applies to the guilty porn producer. According to the Yale Daily News, when one of the Sex Week coordinators was heard apologizing for the episode, the pornographer’s response “insinuated that he was a prude and just needed to watch more porn.”
The Yale story broke about the same time Newsweek published an article entitled “Campus Sexpert” which applauds student-run porn publications such as Yale’s SWAY, Harvard’s H-Bomb and Boston University’s Boink.
“ . . . (E)nterprising students no longer see a distinction between their bedroom behavior and their publishing activities,” writes Newsweek’s Jennie Yabroff. “Rather than something to destroy upon graduation, they may even consider their magazines, blogs and columns as resume builders.”
Celebrating the coarsening of attitudes toward pornography among the nation’s youth is as unwise as it is unhealthy, and led Bozell to ask the question, “Where are the grownups? Isn’t there a one questioning his return on the annual $45,000 investment in ‘education’? Where are the administrators? Is there anyone at Yale who can provide students with a more rational voice than a hardcore pornographer? This whole controversy gives off a whiff of the inmates running the asylum.”
In this age of on-campus liberalism, expecting the Ivy League to reflect traditional values is “to dabble in fantasy,” Bozell writes. “But it’s a sad cultural signpost when it’s considered a prudish traditional value to object to films that seek to encourage men to build fantasy scenarios around violent sexual assault.”
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