Michael J.Fox plays him in the movie version.

from www.breezejmu.org- Robert Jensen knows that sex sells. He’s just concerned about what kind of sex is selling.

Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas, focused his lecture on Monday on the pornography industry. His lecture critically outlined the prevalence of aggressive pornography in the industry.

But don’t get your hopes up.

“There will be not be any actual pornography shown,” he said.

A few dozen students and faculty in Harrison Hall breathed a sigh of relief; a few chuckled.

“He was critical of the way porn is demeaning to women,” said Katie O’Connell, a senior international affairs major. “Which isn’t an argument you usually see in more conservative critiques.”

Jensen admitted the topic would be hard to present and difficult to discuss.

“Porn is where all of the niceties of a patriarchal, white supremacist and capitalist society are stripped away,” Jensen said. “What you see is the ugly reality behind it.”

Despite this, the audience was grateful for the discussion.

“Dr. Jensen was incredibly knowledgeable on the subject and approached it with great care and sensitivity,” said Mitchell Hobza, a fifth-year English major with a minor in women’s studies.

“Particularly in regards to an audience on a college campus.”

Jensen described the porn industry like any other business model in a capitalist society: New ideas sell, while old ideas become stale.

This drive for new ideas and markets – as well as the rejection of stale ideas – translates to more graphic, hardcore and exploitative forms of pornography.

Much of the pornography on the market has done away with traditional forms of sex, focusing rather on exploitative, humiliating and dehumanizing acts toward women, Jensen said.

“Pornography is not just sex on film,” Jensen said, “but sex presented in the context of domination and subordination.”

Jensen revealed that the porn industry also embraces negative racial stereotypes.

“Those crude, racist stereotypes are all over pornography and always have been,” Jensen said.

These racial stereotypes include the animalistic portrayal of black women, Latina women as being innately sultry and the subservient Asian, based on the geisha.

“Remember that this material we’re talking about, these scenes, those are not simulated activities on film, these are real things done to real women in the world,” Jensen said. “Pornography matters because these films are being made and people are being hurt.”

Jensen also dicussed porn involving disabled participants, a genre that is specifically focused on the inequality and domination.

“What pornography does is sexualize every condition of inequality imaginable,” Jensen said.

However, some audience members had counter arguments.

The women in pornography are not put there against their will, but there are social factors, like childhood sexual abuse, that lead them into it, according to Mary Thompson, associate professor in the English department and co-coordinator of the women’s and gender studies program.

“We can safely assume it’s an act of free will – pressures, norms and limited options might motivate women’s participation in the porn industry,” said Thompson.

Jensen also said that because porn is becoming increasingly mainstream, and our culture itself is becoming more pornographic, those values prevalent in porn continually seep into popular culture.

But to Hobza, Jensen’s views were too generalized.

“I just wish he spent more time talking about women’s agency because I think that the issues of sex work and pornography are much more nebulous than we want to acknowledge sometimes,” Hobza said.

Jensen spoke as part of the Visiting Scholars program.