Can Porn Be Educational?

Last week, Maryland state Senator Andrew P. Harris (R) proposed an amendment to the state budget denying all funding to public universities that screened a XXX-rated film on campus, unless the film was part of an academic course. Harris's proposal was in response to the planned screening of Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge, an extremely high-budget adult movie ($10 million--the highest ever for an adult film) that has already been screened at several universities across the country, including UCLA, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon.

The vice-president of student affairs at Maryland canceled the screening, which would have been accompanied by a presentation from Planned Parenthood about safe sex practices, after the uproar led by Harris. In protest, a student group screened the film in a lecture hall and turned the event into a discussion of First Amendment rights and the effect of pornography on society. The university allowed, but did not condone, this event and insisted it carry some educational value. Watch excerpts from the event below:



Now, the student-planned event was obviously a success--but the originally-planned event should never have been canceled in the first place, and I think it's safe to say, for several reasons, that Sen. Harris was bluffing when he introduced his proposal.

First and foremost, Sen. Harris's attempt violates the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, which holds, in Kathleen M. Sullivan's words: "that government may not grant a benefit on the condition that the beneficiary surrender a constitutional right, even if the government may withhold that benefit altogether" (102 Harv. L. Rev. 1415). As we are about to see, and as you may already have guessed, the constitutional right in this case is the First Amendment.

It's easy to argue that the originally-planned event could have passed the Miller Test for having (at least) political and scientific value. But, with the presentation from Planned Parenthood and the chosen venue of a student union, the full-length screening would have been just as legal. This story provides a contrast to seedier porn venues, indicating that context is key when judging obscenity. One thing the community gets from screening an adult film on a university campus that it probably didn't get at an old Times Square theater is the opportunity for criticism and debate. From the Baltimore Sun article: "Showing a movie like this opens up a discussion, a discourse on sexuality and gender roles, and for them to stifle that discourse from happening is amazing," said Christopher Ruth (a spokesman for Digital Playground, the film's production company). Yes, pornography can be violent and demeaning to women, as Linda Clement argues (and there's actually some contention about this; see A Feminist Defense of Pornography), but a great way to address these issues is by critiquing the films in an academic setting. This is another example of that great "radical thought" of libertarianism: if the original speech is dangerous, the danger can be mitigated by more speech. That's just what happened at last year's "Who Wants to be a Porn Star" lecture, and it's what wound up happening at the student-planned event at UMCP (Sorry for the lame link; I guess no one at the DI found that lecture newsworthy).

On a more basic level, I wonder where the state interest is here. Yes, UMCP is a public (and therefore taxpayer-funded) university, but no taxpayer dollars would have been used for the screening. The film was provided for free by the producers as part of their marketing, and ticket sales would have covered any other costs. So, it's not actually "about the use of taxpayer dollars," as Sen. Harris would like everyone to believe. If a public university is not using tax money or student fees for a controversial event, they should be no more subject to government scrutiny than a private university would be.

A state legislature's attempt to censor speech on a university campus almost always challenges intellectual freedom, and as a result it is almost always unacceptable. At the risk of sounding elitist, I think that one of the most productive spaces to hold "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open" debate is a public university, where diversity of opinion is often seen as an integral part of our quest for knowledge.