I guess it’s a rather naive view one might have when young, if one thinks about it at all, that education and academia are somehow ‘pure’, that they somehow map onto the ‘truth’.
The hard sciences, while there may be major disagreements over methodology and interpretation of the results, probably do have some connection to how the world actually is.
But it’s bitterly disappointing to realise how distorting, partisan, biased, corrupt and self-serving academia can be. Academia has given us Catherine Hakim, Satoshi Kanazawa, Steven Landsburg, Joelle Ruby Ryan, Laura Agustín (to name but a few), and, of course, Hugo Schwyzer:
I really do despair for young people today.
Anti-Porn Feminists 
Yes academia once more is being controlled by men for mens’ benefit. Porn studies are viewed as just an aspect of media/film studies totally devoid of any political analysis.
Porn is good and the emphasis is on how the scenes are constructed; how they are interpreted as if porn is being produced for ‘individuals’ rather than male driven and male consumed. Analysing and asking who is doing to what and why is considered ‘outdated.’ Questioning why all women are being portrayed in porn as mens’ dehumanised sexual service stations will not be tolerated by academics because students are not expected to engage in critical analysis but rather blithely accept the lies the above mentioned academics are claiming/promoting.
Selling Sex Short: The Pornographic and Sexological Construction of Women’s Sexuality in the West by Meagan Tyler has a chapter analysing how male controlled and male dominated academia has re-emerged and feminist challenges/analysis rendered ‘out of date.’ Academia openly welcomes and promotes porn because ‘it is just representation’ not the deliberate proliferation and backlash by men and their male supremacist system to maintain male domination over women. Women might have won the right to financial independence but their primary role continues to be mens’ dehumanised sexual service stations and evidence of this is all around in mens’ public spheres and spaces. Females need only walk down a street and males will subject them to male sexual harassment and catcalls because women need to be constantly reminded of their subordinate relationship to males.
Young women are being told by ‘highly valued academics’ that porn is fine and that the dominant male created view that women’s sexuality is to service men (aka prostitution sex as Kathleen barry succinctly defines it) is ‘natural’ and hence cannot be challenged or eliminated.
Read Meagan Tyler’s book and learn how the porn industry has deployed very, very clever marketing strategies to ensure ‘porn is just representation -get over it!’
Hugo Schwyzer makes me want to throw up. I would ask how this course was even allowed to run, but alas I am all too familiar with academia.
Wow, it seems that now academia has come to mean teaching women to ignore our feelings of self preservation, and that pesky little feeling that we’re humans with dignity and deserve better. Oh, and who can forget our innate knowledge that sex and violence are not synonyms!
Ah, yes. The people you disagree with are “distorting, partisan, biased, corrupt and self-serving”. Meanwhile, you’re as objective and as pure as the wind0driven snow.
The science behind anti-porn is as sketchy and partisan as anything you can name. Let’s face facts, Ploddie: you wouldn’t know scientific method if it bit you on your ass.
At least the people you berate (some of whom I agree with and some of whom I don’t) have the guts and the common courtesy to publish under their own names and have their work criticized by their peers. You, on the other hand, are an anonymous coward, sniping at people from the sidelines and distorting their work wiuth simple, bald-faced lies.
You are in no position to bewail anyone’s lack of objectivity.
Whatever, you’re just spewing more empty rhetoric.
Here comes a dude to defend his porno. What a surprise!
Oh, he’s way worse than that, if you can stomach plowing through the Agustin thread it’s rather ‘interesting’.
[…] the record, with regards to my ‘academic grooming’ post, I was talking about Hugo Schwyzer, using his “Navigating Porn” class to convince young […]