“The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships” is a direct-to-video film that was made in 2008 and intended, obviously, as a means of stimulating conversations in college classes on sociology, sex, and gender. And it is provocative in the sense that it’s sure to provoke classroom debate, or even a bedroom debate if a husband and wife or significant others watch this together. But the questions raised during the course of the narrative seem to be answered rather quickly or superficially.

The price of pleasure? Watch one Diane Sawyer clip excerpted here and you get a quick answer: $13 billion a year. That’s how much money the porn industry generates, and money talks. The head of the Free Speech Coalition, the porn industry’s lobbyist group formed in 1991, says on camera that the lawmakers he approaches are usually apprehensive at first. But “when you explain to them the size and scope of the business” . . . .

Uh, yeah. We get it. Those who have money have power, and those who have power can exert influence on legislators, as the Free Speech Coalition has done so far. Their biggest “achievement” thus far? The defeat of a measure that would have made virtual child pornography (that is, CGI child porn) illegal. But there’s no discussion of child pornography or fetishism to speak of, so these factoids just float in the space of 57 minutes like spy satellites. And “The Price of Pleasure” has a curiously voyeuristic feel to it as a result.

There doesn’t seem to be enough research and revelation here to make it anything more, as when the would-be provocative voiceover asks, “How did this industry, once considered seedy, become part of the cultural and economic mainstream?” All you have to do is follow the money trail, and it leads to the Internet, where an estimated 420 million pages of porn are online, and where young people now get their first exposure to erotic images.

In the old days it used to be topless indigenous women in the pages of National Geographic, where at least you got a little culture with your boobfest. Or else it was an illicitly purchased copy of Playboy, where you got some fascinating interviews with pop culture icons and political heavyweights along with pictures of the women who looked nothing at all like the ones you saw on the street, at church, or at school. The fact that they had staples in their navels made them even more exotic. But “The Price of Pleasure” really doesn’t go too deeply into the idea of pornography as something that might be traced to a base and basic instinct.

We get two male teens talking about porn and three females talking about it, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. And what about the title? Substituting “pleasure” for “pornography” seems less euphemistic than it does a tacit acknowledgment that pornography is tied to pleasure. But Aristotle thought more about the concept of pleasure than the filmmakers did.

“How did this industry . . . become part of the cultural and economic mainstream?” It’s complicated, and I’m not sure that “The Price of Pleasure” suggests just how complicated or how gradual the shift has been . . . or even if there’s BEEN a shift. That in itself is subject to debate.

What we get here is a round-up of straw men: People like Howard Stern, who talk about porn and interview porn stars on-air, and therefore helped to usher it into the mainstream; references to porn as a basic guy thing in such films as “Superbad” of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”; rap and hip-hop artists glorifying hos and bitches and porn-style sex in songs and videos; advertising that depicts images of suggested sex with women enjoying the role of objectified sex object; and the prevalence now of pole-dancing classes and articles on how women can use sex to spice up their marriages or please their men. In other words, the usual suspects.

Here too, there’s not much in the way of original research and no consideration, really, for what’s been a gradual development of these porn “fronts.”