From Bad to Worse
Two years after being outgunned on a pornography panel at Yale Law School, Boston sociology professor Gail Dines is aghast at what amounts to basically Vivid Video career day.
Monday, February 11, 2008 at 9:20 PM
By FilmStew Staff
MySpace.com/StopPornCulture Photo
Combatting the glamorization of porn
Film actresses who have graduated from Yale University include Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Jodie Foster, Frances McDormand and Jennifer Connelly. But this coming Saturday, the campus is set to celebrate female performers with a much narrower emotional range as part of VIVID DAY, the penultimate event of the student organized Sex Week at Yale 2008 (February 11th-18th) . And this does not sit well with Gail Dines, a professor of sociology at Boston's Wheelock College and co-founder of the new grassroots organization Stop Porn Culture. “Two years ago, I spoke on a pornography panel at Yale Law School,” she writes in an Op-Ed piece published today in the Hartford Courant . “Of the six people invited, I was the only speaker to criticize the porn industry, with the others either being pornographers, or bar one, so pro-porn, they might as well have been industry representatives. After the panel, some students came up to me to express their
with the way the panel had been organized, and how they felt cheated out of a thoughtful dialogue.” “Now, just a couple of years later, there is no attempt by the organizers of Sex Week to even pay lip service to a feminist critique,” Dines continues, “one more sign of just how acceptable and mainstream porn has become at Yale, and in our culture… The Vivid Video Girls are the respectable face of the porn industry; their job is to make porn look like a wholesome route to stardom; they act as a recruitment tool for a mass production sweatshop industry that needs to keep replenishing its supply of female bodies.” Sex Week is hosting a porn industry debate to be broadcast live this Friday on ABC's Nightline , which will pit stars Ron Jeremy and Monique Alexander against anti-porn activists Craig Gross and Donnie Pauling. As opposed to Saturday’s tribute to the naked studio system, which begins with a speech to the School of Management at 4:30 p.m. by Vivid Video co-founder Steve Hirsch. Then, at 7:30 p.m. – and we’re not making this up – Alexander, fellow Vivid Girl Savanna Samson and one of their go-to directors will present a film and panel discussion about how a good script can heighten the effectiveness of a porno. Finally, at a 10:30 p.m. party at the on campus bar The Toad, this same trio will judge a female Yale student Vivid Girl lookalike contest and hand out complimentary DVDs to one and all. Yikes!Blog this Refresh Expand All Collapse All
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