Academic porn (and sex) studies

[RonTheLogician]

Hey Danny,

Today I ran across a coincidence which I think will much interest you!

You've basically said that you're giving up the long, hard, debt-heavy road to a professional medical career as a pathologist and looking to stay in the porn industry - in whatever role - for the indefinite future. That being so, I wanted to bring your attention to relevant academic material germane to such a career.

Scholars started studying porn seriously at the start of the 1990s, with quite a bit of momentum in place by the dawn of the present century. In looking to document that for you, I discovered that one of the pioneers was no one less than ASU's own Professor Peter Lehman, since 2005 the Director of ASU's Center for Film and Media Research! Find his ASU Web page here.

His first experience in teaching about porn films at ASU were tumultuous, as you can explore by reading the first page of an article from 2006 here, in which he and fellow porn cinema scholar Prof. Linda Williams were interviewed.

It seems that Prof. Lehman attracted the ire of Phoenix-area rabble-rousers after he was mentioned in a 2001 Boston Globe article about the academic study of porn. A copy syndicated by a San Franscisco paper appears here.

Additional supposed reaction to Lehman's work in teaching about this film genre also appears here, on the website of a screwy advocacy group of supernatural believers, who no doubt are appalled that porn even exists - let alone is now seriously studied by academics.

Lehman is the author of many scholarly works in several areas of film studies, including as the editor of Pornography: Film and Culture, issued by Rutgers University Press (2006). Preview this work here. (Aside: Apropos of my earlier remarks about porn and comedy, one chapter in this book is titled Never Laugh at a Man With His Pants Down: The Affective Dynamics of Comedy and Porn, text starting here.) Rutgers profiles the book at length here, and Amazon sells it, with used copies going for $3.50+. Sorry, no e-book version.

I wonder if FTV Rob knows Lehman, don't you?

Lehman and the media school at ASU he created a year earlier is also the subject of an entire 2006 New York Times article here. In it, he explains that We're in a period of massive change and uncertainty. We need a new kind of person in this industry who understands that entertainment and technology are converging, and who is fluent in the concepts and the language of both, which is why ASU is now granting an "EnterTech certificate" under his auspices. Maybe this is something which interests you - or FTV Rob!

In this brave new world of EnterTech, perhaps very long before advances in biology let you have sex with a partner equipped two penises, cost reductions in digital FX will get you do that on screen anyway at an affordable price! Or how about this - imagine digitally cloning your body and having sex with yourself! (If the idea of "twincest" grosses you out, we'll have the script tell a story in which an obsessive lesbian lover gets plastic surgery so that she looks exactly like you - not so very far off the theme of 1992's Single White Female?)