We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish news from satire. From Time.com:

With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites. At New York University, assignments for Anthropology of the Unconscious include discussing X-rated Japanese comic books. And in Cinema and the Sex Act at the University of California, Berkeley, undergrads are required to view clips from Hollywood NC-17 releases like Showgirls and underground stag reels.

It’s called the porn curriculum, and it’s quietly taking root in the ivory tower. A small but growing number of scholars are probing the aesthetic, societal and philosophical properties of smut

Read the article if you haven’t read about this kind of stuff before. Most people—and parents—have no idea how far left the universities have gone.

The article’s author apparently knows, though. Her focus isn’t about whether universities should teach courses on pornography. Instead, the big issue is whether the courses should just talk about the porn, or actually show it in class. She implies that this isn’t a difficult question: Of course they should show it!

But sadly a few people out there still haven’t yet learned to appreciate modern morality. Three paragraphs on page 2 discuss student and parent reactions to in-class porn and the idea of classes on porn, with the implication that these sheltered kids and parents from the Midwest are just squeamish, and some exposure to hard-core porn will help them become more comfortable with the subject. In the university worldview, a sense of decency is a sign of ignorance, and inurement to filth is what passes as education.

And in case you didn’t catch that implication on page 2, the first sentence on page 3 spells it out for you:

Administrators at schools that offer porn studies find themselves caught between their desire for cutting-edge scholarship and their reluctance to stir up controversy.

Curse those frightened, intolerant Midwestern prudes, slowing the progress of human knowledge and enlightenment with their ignorance and superstitious faith in an outmoded morality! If these cutting-edge scholars were given free rein and more money, just think of the discoveries and profound insights that they could develop and share with all humanity!

A mere twenty years ago, a course in pornography would have been unthinkable. If the liberals retain unchecked control of the universities, one can scarcely imagine what they’ll teach twenty years from now.