Educational Media Reviews Online

Once restricted to plain paper-wrapped mail delivery and questionable “art house” distribution in the most dubious parts of town, pornography has rapidly spread through mainstream popular culture in the last few decades to emerge as a multi-billion dollar industry. Its surprising corporate partners include ABC, CBS, Disney, and Time-Warner. With boosts from shock disc jockeys such as Howard Stern, the growing practice of hiring professional porn actors for music videos, and the availability of celebrity-sponsored adult videogames, pornography has gained acceptance as adult entertainment.

This documentary raises legitimate questions about pornography’s impact on how people formulate their ideas about sexual relationships. Academics, college students reflecting on their earliest encounters with pornography, a wife’s response to finding her husband’s stash of erotic photographs, pornography consumers, and a variety of people who produce or star in pornographic films provide a balanced range of viewpoints on the nature of pornography.

The Free Speech Coalition, a lobbyist group for the porn industry, is successfully winning lawsuits and winning over politicians. Proponents of pornography tout its financial opportunities for women. More tellingly, a former porn actress comments that when a woman’s best job choice involves sex toys and her anatomy, there is something fundamentally wrong with the labor system. Perhaps most disturbing are the observations about the growing trend toward sadomasochism in pornography as it becomes more and more sensationalized.

The Donkey Punch bonus feature is a 2-minute presentation of a “boink” how-to article describing the benefit of knocking out a female during intercourse to enhance the male’s pleasure, along with reactions by female students and a defense by Boink (Boston, MA) magazine’s female editor.

The Chomsky on Pornography bonus feature is a 3-minute interview of Noam Chomsky in which he explains how and why he agreed to have an interview published in a 2004 issue of Hustler magazine and a definitive clarification of his anti-pornography position.

Both the audio and video quality are fine. Due to the graphic imagery and explicit language throughout the documentary, even its edited version is suitable only for college and adult audiences. (The edited version merely blurs genitals and nipples in clips from porn films and production footage.) Nevertheless, professors and community audiences may find this controversial documentary a useful springboard for a wide range of topics, including explorations of mass media’s influence on human intimacy, racist and sexist themes in popular culture, and underlying power equations in sexual relationships.