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ACCLAIMED
DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE PORN INDUSTRY TO BE OFFERED FREE TO COLLEGE
CAMPUSES IN RESPONSE TO MARYLAND CONTROVERSY
For Immediate Release
For further information contact Dr. Chyng Sun
(617)733-8091 | email: [log in to unmask]
April 8, 2009 -- The way filmmakers Chyng Sun and
Miguel Picker see it, the cure for bad speech is more speech. That's
exactly why they've come up with a plan to get their hard-hitting
documentary film about the porn industry screened on as many college
campuses as possible.
In response to the national controversy surrounding
the screening of a hardcore porn film at the University of Maryland this
week, Sun and Picker have cut a deal with their distributor to do exactly
what Digital Playground, the makers of the porn film in question, are
doing with their film: make it available at no charge to any campus that
wants to show it.
"This is a great opportunity for this film to
reach a wider audience," Sun, a professor of media at New York
University, said of her documentary, The Price of Pleasure.
"Especially given that male college students were our target
audience going in. We did numerous focus groups to find the right tone
and approach to speak to them."
The Media Education Foundation (MEF), one of the
nation's leading distributors of educational films on media and social
and cultural issues, has announced that it will send a free copy of Sun
and Picker's devastating expose of the porn industry to faculty and
students who are willing to screen the documentary on their campus.
MEF is asking those interested in setting up a
screening of The Price of Pleasure to visit http://www.mediaed.org/wp/price-of-pleasure-press.
Once there, they can watch
a trailer and request
a free copy of the film, on three-week loan.
"The reason we're making this film available to
screen for free is simple," said MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally.
"What's needed on this issue is more discussion, not less, and this
film is a perfect vehicle for achieving this. If faculty and students who
supported the decision to show the porn film at the University of
Maryland are serious about their defense of free speech and open debate,
they'll fight to make sure this documentary is shown as well."
The firestorm at the University of Maryland ignited
when students decided this week to screen a $10 million-dollar, 2
1/2-hour hardcore porn film called Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge,
which is being offered to campuses around the country for free by Digital
Playground as part of an innovative marketing strategy. When state
legislators tried to stop the screening, students on the College Park
campus fought back, claiming their free speech rights were being
threatened by overly moralistic politicians.
According to University of Texas journalism
professor Robert Jensen, who is featured in The Price of Pleasure,
one of the central aims of the documentary is to move the debate about
pornography beyond precisely these kinds of predictable, and distracting,
arguments about morality and free speech.
"The film tries to move the discussion beyond a
clash between a rigidly moralistic position and the irresponsibly
individualistic free-speech response we hear so often whenever the issue
of pornography comes up," Jensen said. "Instead of asking
important questions about what a relentlessly sexist and routinely racist
pornography genre says about our culture, conservatives try to assert
control and liberals try to assert independence. Complex questions about
contemporary pornography are too often derailed by a debate that never
gets past First Amendment arguments."
The
Price of Pleasure intervenes in this debate by taking a sustained and
often disturbing look at pornography itself, placing the voices of
producers, performers, industry critics, and anti-porn activists alongside
candid observations from men and women about the role pornography has
played in their lives.
Campus organizers who request a free copy of the film
will also be able to download a number of other resources, including
materials to help promote their screenings and a study guide designed
to help viewers navigate the troubling issues the documentary explores.
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Praise for the
film:
"When
we discuss pornography in my classes, we always begin with what seem to
the wrong conversations -- the actress's choices; no harm, no foul; being
pro-porn is just being pro-sex; men don't have to be rapists to like it
-- always defensive and dishonest. I've been waiting for a film that was
neither sanctimoniously scolding nor callously celebratory. And finally,
there is The Price of Pleasure -- a film to help us really
"see" what we have been looking at, and to enable us, finally,
to talk about how pornography informs our actual lives. It's powerful,
and I will use it immediately in my classes."
- Michael Kimmel | Professor of Sociology | SUNY
Stony Brook
"An
intense, powerful documentary that will open up painful but necessary
discussions about pornography's role in shaping our identities, our
relationships, and our culture."
- Rebecca
Whisnant | Associate Professor of Philosophy | Director of Women's and Gender
Studies | University of Dayton
"With
original research, footage of popular pornographic films, insights from
academic experts, interviews with sex workers and even pornographers, The
Price of Pleasure educates viewers about the prevalence and increasingly
violent content of contemporary pornography. Advocates of sexual freedom,
as well as activists committed to ending sexual exploitation against
women, find common cause in Chyng Sun's compelling argument: contemporary
pornographic films illustrate conventional, not deviant, attitudes about
women's sexuality. Viewer alert: gazing through the pornographic
worldview will turn your stomach. Eat lightly before you watch
this!"
-
Bernadette Barton | Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies
| Morehead State University | Author of Stripped: Inside the Lives of
Exotic Dancers
"Deeply
disturbing but profoundly important."
- Jean Kilbourne | Creator, Killing Us Softly 3
| Author, So Sexy So Soon
[end]
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