Temple University offers porn studies course: ‘the other sex ed’

Temple University students are eager to discuss porn.

Professor Jennifer Pollitt — the assistant director of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the Philadelphia institution — said the student cap for her new porn studies course shot up from 25 to 40, with many more on the waitlist for the popular class.

The course, “Social Perspectives and Digital Pornography: The Other Sex Ed,” seeks to allow students to discuss sexuality, intimacy, power dynamics and the impacts of the porn industry in an academic space.

Pollitt said the goal of the course is to use porn as a jumping-off point for students to talk about important issues — and to do away with the thought that porn can only be “good or bad,” she told Business Insider.

“I hope my students leave recognizing how valuable it is to research and to study pornography across all disciplines and to figure out what we can learn,” she said.

In a press release about the course, the university explained that watching porn is not actually a part of the curriculum, rather, it challenges students to discuss the influence pornography has had on society.

While no porn made it to the coursework, the students did watch TED Talks on the topic, as well as the Netflix documentary “MoneyShot: The Pornhub Story.”

Third-year undergrad student Evelyn Andromeda said she was surprised and didn’t know what to expect from the course.

“We’ve talked about how porn focuses on different minority groups — whether that’s racialized porn, disability porn, gay porn, trans porn and how porn can build narratives around these identities that can be both liberating and crushing at the same time,” she told Insider.

She added that there were also many discussions on the history of photography and how it eventually led to the modern porn industry.

Pollitt markets the course as a place where students can discuss things that they “sometimes don’t even discuss with their closest friends,” including topics that have become controversial amid the current culture wars on sex and gender.

The porn class was launched this semester as an expansion of Pollitt’s sexuality education course, another first-of-its-kind class exploring the gender gap in education.