Westminster College in Utah will offer a course on “hard core pornography” in the 2022-2023 academic year, with students being expected to watch pornographic films as part of their studies.
“Hard core pornography is as American as apple pie and more popular than Sunday night football,” reads the private liberal arts college’s website. The course description also suggests that pornography can “challenge sexual and gender norms.”
The course is a 300-level Film Studies credit for undergraduates, and describes pornography as a “radical art form.” According to the course’s description, students will be expected to watch pornographic films and discuss the sexualization of race, class, and gender.
The course was cross-offered in the Gender Studies department.
While no professor is officially listed for the course on Westminster’s website, a spokesperson for the college told KSLTV that it “occasionally offers elective courses like this as an opportunity to analyze social issues.”
“Westminster College occasionally offers elective courses like this as an opportunity to analyze social issues. As part of this analysis, Westminster College and universities across the county often examine potentially offensive topics like pornography to further understand their pervasiveness and impact. Descriptions of these courses, while alarming to some readers, help students decide if they wish to engage in serious investigation of controversial subjects,” the spokesperson continued.
Across the United States and Canada, there has been increasing overlaps between academia and the sex industry in recent years.
In December of 2021, the University of Toronto came under fire after an associate professor posted materials from his ‘porn studies’ syllabus to Twitter.
In the Twitter posts, Dr. Patrick Keilty outlined the weekly materials for the undergraduate course, which included such titles as “Cum Guzzling Anal Nurse Whore” by Lorelei Lee, where she argues that women in the sex trade are not exploited, and that the idea that poor women enter the trade out of economic need is a “gendered sexual myth.”
In another work from the syllabus, “Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans” by trans-identified male Andrea Long Chu, the author argues that sissification porn is “a kind of centrifuge for distilling femaleness to its barest essentials – an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”
Many porn studies scholars encourage the normalization of pornography, premising their argument on claims that it reduces incidents of sex crimes. But decades of research produced in a range of countries have long established a correlation between porn consumption and increased rates of sexual violence.
A 2020 study from Australia about intimate partner violence found pornography being used as “manual” to determine which types of abuse female victims would be subjected to. Many women also said they were forced to watch pornography to groom them or coerce them into abusive sex acts.
Health experts in the UK have similarly reported that children as young as 11 are learning about sex from pornography, with many believing intimate acts should be violent as a result of that exposure. A 2019 study commissioned by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), found that more than half (51%) of 11 to 13 years old reported that they had seen pornography at some point. Of those, nearly half (41%) — admitted pornography made them have less respect of the opposite sex.
Counseling expert and child safeguarding advocate Michael Sheath blamed pornography for an escalation in child sexual abuse. Sheath works extensively with pedophiles, and stated his belief that pornography exacerbates pedophilic interest in some men.
“There is a school of thought that these men we work with were already interested in children and went off to look for it – that they are born pedophiles. But that’s not my thoughts. I think a lot of the men we work with go down what I call a potentially escalating pathway.”
“Mainstream pornography sites are changing the thresholds of what is normal and I think it’s dangerous. Of course most people can watch extreme porn and walk away but I don’t see those people. What we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous,” he added.
In 2020, a Financial Times report revealed that Cornell University — an Ivy League college and tax-exempt entity — had been investing in Pornhub, whose parent company MindGeek has been embroiled in controversy and legal disputes for monetizing the sex trafficking and rape of children.
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