Duke freshmen who refuse to read Fun Home seem genuinely confused about what porn is

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Last week, Duke freshman Brian Grasso became perhaps the most high-profile case of a college student not doing their homework when he announced that he would not be reading Fun Home, the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, namesake of the Bechdel-Wallace Test for how women are portrayed in film.

Grasso and a handful of other committed Christians in Duke’s incoming freshman class objected to the book being included on a recommended (not required) summer reading list, as it includes sexual images and themes that he considers pornographic.

As Grasso explained in the Washington Post, he wouldn’t have objected to reading about these themes; he simply objects to being made to look at them:

My choice had nothing to do with the ideas presented. I’m not opposed to reading memoirs written by LGBTQ individuals or stories containing suicide. I’m not even opposed to reading Freud, Marx or Darwin. I know that I’ll have to grapple with ideas I don’t agree with, even ideas that I find immoral.

But in the Bible, Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29. “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” This theme is reiterated by Paul who warns, “flee from sexual immorality.”

Alison Bechdel, via Chase Elliott Clark / Flickr

Setting aside the fact that Grasso is admitting here that he is physically incapable of looking at a cartoon of a naked woman without doing so “lustfully,” I think one of his classmates should pull him aside and give him a quick rundown on what counts as porn, and what doesn’t.

Perhaps the best definition of pornography I’ve heard is “that which one loses interest in after masturbating.” If the only value a book, picture, movie or other content has to you is sexual, or “lustful” in Christian parlance, then it counts as porn. If it’s content intended for consumption with your pants on, then it isn’t. This definition isn’t too far off from Merriam-Webster’s, which defines pornography as, “movies, pictures, magazines, etc., that show or describe naked people or sex in a very open and direct way in order to cause sexual excitement,” with an emphasis on “sexual excitement.”

As Slate’s Jacob Brogan points out, that isn’t the point of Fun Home‘s depiction of female sexuality. Context matters, and Grasso is willfully ignoring it:

Sex becomes pornographic when we detach it from its living, breathing context. In Bechdel’s book, that living, breathing, context is the arc of her story, the tragic collision between her triumphs and her father’s suffering. If the drawings Grasso objects to are pornographic, it’s only because Grasso refuses to contextualize them by reading the book itself. If they’re pornographic, in other words, it’s because Grasso has made them that way, not because Bechdel has.

Even more baffling in Grasso’s article in the Post was his insinuation that he was being forced to look at porn for class when he clearly wasn’t. The book was included on an optional reading list, so if he didn’t want to read it, he didn’t have to. No one was violating his deeply-held religious belief that looking at drawings depicting lesbian sex would send him straight to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks.

But for the sake of his own personal and academic development, he may want to reconsider. Grasso writes that, “if my academic experience at Duke is full of thought-provoking stimuli other than pictures of sexual acts, it’s hard for me to believe that it will be incomplete.” Fine, but if your academic experience at Duke leaves you with a prudish and factually incorrect understanding of the difference between porn and storytelling, it will absolutely be incomplete.

In any case, here’s hoping that Grasso, in his time on campus, crosses paths with Duke junior Miriam Weeks — screen name Belle Knox — who has a much better handle on the definition of porn than he does.

from AMERICAblog News http://ift.tt/1hi2C96