Looking for an excuse to check porn?

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Here is a lofty excuse that can help you save the blushes the next time you are caught surfing smut: I am doing research.

At least that’s what a bunch of porn enthusiasts seems to be telling their family members and friends ever since the launch of ‘Porn Studies’ an academic journal from the venerable 200-year-old British publishing group, Taylor & Francis.

The fledgling journal, which is into its fifth month of existence, publishes articles by researchers, criminologists and gender studies experts’ analyising and grading online pornographic videos on the basis of its content and sexual acts such as vaginal and anal intercourse, fellatio, use of condom and sex toys, depictions of coercion and portrayal of gender among other things. 

So you can read articles with titles like School Girls and Soccer Moms: A content analysis of free ‘teen’ and ‘MILF’ (of course you know what it means, the uninitiated, check Urban Dictionary) online pornography; Positionality and Pornography, Internationalising Porn Studies and Porn and Sex Education and Porn as Sex Education. 

In case if you intend to read the stuff just for titillation (most of it now comes with a subscription fee) then you are likely to be disappointed. (Unless what turns you on is sociological analysis based on Marxian and Foucaultian theory.)

Porn Studies, which attributes its birth to the easy availability of online pornography and the growing interest shown by mainstream media in covering it, has already triggered a global outrage among anti-porn activists with its editors Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, professors at Middlesex and Sunderland University, drawing flak for their “pro-porn” stance.

Interestingly, academic obsession with sex is not something new. Leading American Universities such as Wesleyan, New York, San Francisco State, California-Berkeley, Chapman, Massachusetts-Amherst and Northwestern, have all made their own contribution towards smut, decades ago.

The “Sexuality in Media” studies class at Arizona State University, required students to view X-rated movies such as ‘Deep Throat’, ‘Insatiable’ and ‘Dirty Debutantes’ as a part of their academic work, which culminated with a field trip to the nearest adult stores and campus visits by porn stars. A journal in Porn Studies is only a logical extension of this trend.

Under attack, the editors of the journal have sought to defend their taboo busting venture as a “labour of love” and as a “scholarly” enterprise whose time has arrived. Perhaps, what really makes so many people uncomfortable about Porn Studies could be how it also spits at the delusions and hypocrisy of a polite society.