Journal, Porn 101 is an actual fact at the University of Las Vegas. Writes the Journal: "Despite the buzz of two dozen classmates chattering while they wait for instruction to begin, three UNLV students sit silently engrossed in serious study in a second-floor classroom. Two of them are twentysomething females quietly leafing through this month's issues of Playboy and Penthouse. The third is a young man seated across the room, appearing reflective as he reads a tome that has a slang term for female genitalia in its title, one of the several collections of scholarly articles that appears on the class's reading list." Along with "Sex American Style: An Illustrated Romp Through the Golden Age of Sexuality," other texts inluded in the course are "Whores and Other Feminists" and "Pornocopia" - just some of the 40 books from which students are asked to read for Women's Studies 499: Porn in the USA, a course offered for the first time this semester at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In addition to the class's heavy reading workload, instructors also ask students to visit adult stores, view erotic art and surf the Internet for cybersex as part of their grade.
The class's proponents say this is not a questionable academic pursuit, as at least one critic alleges, or a waste of taxpayer money at a publicly funded university.
"There's an initial `You're teaching what?' followed by a very pregnant moment of silence when I tell people what I'm teaching," said Michele Berger, one of the class's two instructors. "But I'm proud of this class." The course, cross-listed as a sociology class, is unusual not just in its subject, but also because it is taught by more than one person. Berger, a 31-year-old political science professor, is teaming with Cheryl Radeloff, a 32-year-old doctoral candidate in the university's sociology department.
"We want students to think about porn differently," Radeloff said. "We want them to evaluate it, to be able to deconstruct it and see the problems with it." Berger adds, "They should discover that there's more than one way to think about porn."
One of the administrators who signed off on the class says Berger and Radeloff's teamwork and teaching methods represent the very best of women's studies scholarship.
"They don't think about pornography the same way the ordinary citizen would," said Ellen Rose, director of UNLV's women's studies program.
"They're taking a subject that most people would have a very puritanical knee-jerk reaction to and really examining it in an interdisciplinary manner that incorpor- ates legal theory, social theory, queer theory and literary theory." Queer theory is a reinterpretation of academic studies from a homosexual viewpoint.
After attending two sessions of Porn in the USA, the idea of the class loses its gleam of controversy. For Berger and Radeloff don't actually teach pornography. They teach methods of critical thinking about the issues surrounding pornography, such as feminism, power, violence, art, entertainment, censorship and oppression.
In their attempt to instruct students in this deeper comprehension of pornography and its effect on American culture, the teachers also introduce the class to the different debates that have plagued pornography in the past 200 years.
Traditionally, women's studies classes are lopsided in their sex ratio; as one might expect, they're heavily populated by females. This is not the case for Porn in the USA, where male students make up about one-third of the class.
"It's different than what I expected," said Bojo Ackah, a 21-year-old communication major. He says he thought there would be more visual materials in the course, such as adult films, and less reading. Ackah believes the course's greatest strength is its diversity of perspectives.
"Of course I've seen porn in 7-Eleven, but I've never really had a chance to sit in a room and hear what people have to say about S and M," he said.
Although Berger and Radeloff have not screened anything along the lines of "Debbie Does Dallas" or "Behind the Green Door" yet, they haven't ruled out the idea of trying this before the semester ends. The class did watch clips from "I Am Curious (Yellow)," the racy 1967 Swedish art film that sparked a 1968 federal court battle when the first copy of the film to enter the country was confiscated by U.S. Customs Service officials, who declared it obscene.
The teachers decided they didn't want to concentrate primarily on adult film, but instead explore all types of media that have been called pornography, from 1920s recordings of blues singer Bessie Smith, to comedian Lenny Bruce's monologues, to early 20th century Tijuana Bibles featuring cartoon characters in explicit poses.
And even though students complain about the amount of reading (most students didn't envision excerpts from D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce when they signed up for a porn class), the first comment most make about the course is about its ability to challenge them with a new experience.
On the first day of class, each student was given a bag filled with items such as condoms, rap recordings with graphic lyrics, sex education pamphlets, adult videotapes and birth control pills. Next, each had to be classified as either pornography, erotica, obscene material or educational materials.
"It really made me stop and think," said Sean McClenahan, a 20-year-old political science and broadcast journalism double-major who says the class has challenged his assumptions.
After Berger earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan two years ago, she came to UNLV in January 1999. The idea for the class was borne over a two-hour conversation she had with Radeloff.
"We thought there's so many discourses that are tied to pornography: legal history, political science, gender, philosophy, media studies and queer theory," Radeloff said. "But no one's ever put all of them together this way." She believes the class's main concentration is in teaching thinking skills and interpretation of texts.
Instructors say they've had nothing but support from the UNLV faculty and administration
