Silly politicians. Don’t they know the surest way to drum up interest in a pornographic movie on campus is to ban it? When a state senator threatened to strip funding from the University of Maryland over its plans to show a XXX-rated film in the student center, school officials nixed the event. But fired-up students responded on Monday by holding a free-speech demonstration that drew media coverage from as far away as Thailand and Australia.
The brouhaha is the result of a marketing strategy by porn company Digital Playground, which last summer started offering complimentary copies of Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge
Undeterred, a group of students and rogue professors held a “Pirates Screening Teach-In” on Monday night, drawing some 200 attendees. Before a 30-min. excerpt — which included two threesomes and copious shots of corset-clad blondes — students, professors, lawyers and ACLU representatives stood up to defend porn on principle. English professor Martha Nell Smith, who noted that literature from Shakespeare to Dickinson includes pornographic elements, said it’s a student’s choice whether to study erotica and “our job together to contextualize it.”
The event, which was held in a lecture hall and probably won’t endanger the university’s funding because of its educational components, helped earn the screening’s co-organizer, sophomore Malcolm Harris, an endorsement for student-body president in The Diamondback. Administrators at College Park called the rebel screening “characteristic of a vibrant educational community.” Meanwhile, another University of Maryland campus, in Baltimore County, has scheduled a screening in solidarity.
For now, Harris has withdrawn his amendment, but he says he may push for it again in coming weeks if the university doesn’t devise a clear policy on when and where it will allow porn. Could tenured positions for porn chaperones be far behind?
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