Slade, who is a leading authority on pornography research, teaches "Sex in Media" once a year in addition to a busy research schedule. It is not a class about porn, he stresses.

Granted, his class, and a good chunk of his life's work, do deal with pornography. But the focus for Slade is how human sexuality is represented. He takes a sober and surgical look at the way human beings film and depict sex in the media.

Slade began writing academic articles about pornography in 1971, which made him the first to seriously study the topic. He later spent six months at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in New York City, where he studied its huge library of pornography.

He became director of the School of Telecommunications in 1990 and later stepped down to focus on research. His work from that time period includes "Pornography in America" and "Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide."

Aside from his work with sexual representation, Slade is also a "historian of technology."

His current project is a book on the black-and-white, silent and amateur pornography "stag films" produced between 1907 and 1966. The book, tentatively titled "Shades of Blue," investigates how these clandestine films depicted real sex in a time of censorship. Slade said it is difficult to even figure out who made many of the films.

"There are tons of glitches in the films. For sex to be authentic, it had to seem sort of inept," he said.

"Sex in Media" is not a place where students are watching porn, stag films or otherwise. Slade asks his students to bring in books, music or other items that break taboos. The result is lively discussion about how sex is depicted across all forms of media. Students are very aware of sexual representation, and bring media in because they are attracted or repulsed, but are fascinated by its communication, he said.

Pornography makes some people uncomfortable or angry, but Slade treats the topic as though it is economics or geology. He flatly dismisses the notion that pornography has to do with morality. "Moral judgments are not applicable. Porn tries to be marginal and ends up refreshing our culture," he said. "Real porn offends someone."

A primary value of pornography, Slade explains, is that it pushes the margins of what is culturally acceptable. He said that any culture based on information needs novelty, and porn provides that. For example, rap music was widely condemned 20 years ago, but is now a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Pornography is also a vehicle for minorities to express their ideas about sexuality. "Braver women and minorities are saying 'we want our kind of porn,'" he said. Although Slade said a case can be made for pornography being sexist, the real issue is how the genders experience it. Some women do porn to push their idea of sex into what's considered normal, he said.

However, until now, women got the short end of the stick as far as representation in pornography. "They were working hard to give the men a good time," Slade said. Now, the trend is for women to try to embrace their sexuality and push their pleasure to the forefront.

But are people who watch pornography influenced by what they see? Slade's response is that pornography does affect culture, but the causal relationship between watching porn and then imitating is not that strong. In other words, people do not watch pornography and then expect their sexual partners to act the same way as the actors.

"There is some imitation of what is in films. In R- and X-rated films people learn standards of behavior. I am more interested in the representation in R-rated films. How do they depict two people in bed? What do they say? How do they breathe? How long does it last?" Slade asked.

The effect of sexual representation on our culture, and the reciprocal relationship, can have surprising consequences. As African Americans become more affluent and the Hispanic population surges, the way Americans view sex in general will change, predicted Slade. He points to the main manufacturer of department-store dummies. The mannequins it produces now have bigger, J-Lo style butts, he said, and the clothes will follow.

Regardless of what you think about pornography, Slade argues that it is important. American culture is driven by visual media, so there is a new meritocracy that has to do with beauty and notoriety, he said. "I don't think (pornography) has much to do with religion or morality... If sexuality frightens you, then porn will frighten you."

See also ...
Porn Studies at the University

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