At midnight Friday, more than 500 students packed Hoff Theater for a campus showing of Deep Throat — a 1970’s pornographic film featuring Linda Lovelace who learns the only way to be sexually satisfied is to stimulate her misplaced clitoris in the back of her throat. The movie was advertised by the Hoff as being shown for educational purposes, and we admit we were skeptical the showing and subsequent academic activities would turn out to be just a spectacle under the guise of academia.
But last night, we were proven mostly wrong when about 150 students attended and participated in a panel discussion with three female scholars who discussed the philosophy and morals of the porn industry after the audience watched a documentary, Inside Deep Throat, about the significance of the film. This was a far greater ratio of students than we expected to turn out for the academic side of the pornographic screening, especially considering the drastic disintegration of a panel last year with Porn Star Ron Jeremy and a feminist that quickly became a way for college guys to holler questions at Jeremy about how many women he had actually slept with or how well endowed he was.
Though the film grossed out, shocked and horrified some members of the audience Friday, there is no doubt Deep Throat is historically and socially significant for a number of reasons. It was the highest grossing film of all time, bringing in $600 million after only $25,000 was spent on production. It brought pornographic films to the mainstream theaters and caused an uproar that led 23 states to ban the film at one point. Some laud it as a film that drew attention to the importance of the clitoris for female stimulation, while others said it brought rape to the public eye after the actress who played Lovelace said the movie’s producer, her boyfriend at the time, forced her to perform unwillingly in that film and others, sometimes at gunpoint.
Though 150 is only a portion of the 530 who packed the theater Friday, it is a far more significant portion than we thought a pornography could turn out for an academic debate. Staff at the Hoff should be congratulated for sparking productive conversation among students about something that could have easily turned out to be an immature disaster. Open dialogue about any topic at a public university should always be encouraged and the Hoff should explore showing more films about controversial topics — The Passion of the Christ, Malcolm X, Fahrenheit 9/11, Jungle Fever — that could generate these types of discussions exploring topics like race, religion and politics more frequently.
