SALT LAKE CITY, UT – A rather odd class is being offered to students at Westminster College in the upcoming summer term that is meant to study pornography, which has some folks in Utah particularly disturbed over the college affording such a course.
The class in question is “GNDR-300O: Porn,” which falls under the college’s “Gender Studies Courses.” While Westminster College’s website detailing their undergraduate courses have since removed the course description of GNDR-300O: Porn, an archive of the webpage offers a peculiar course description where it reveals students will “watch pornographic films together.”
“Hardcore pornography is as American as apple pie and more popular than Sunday night football. Our approach to this billion-dollar industry is as both a cultural phenomenon that reflects and reinforces sexual inequalities (but holds the potential to challenge sexual and gender norms) and as an art form that requires serious contemplation. We will watch pornographic films together and discuss the sexualization of race, class, and gender and as an experimental, radical art form.”
Considering how this course description alleges that pornography is somehow “as American as apple pie,” suggesting an almost romanticization of the medium in conjunction with outwardly saying that students are going to be watching porn together in class, some locals aren’t exactly thrilled with the offered course.
A Change.org petition has been making the rounds demanding the school officials pull the plug on the course, expressing a general disgust over the idea that students and school staff will have a class dedicated to consuming pornography.
A portion of the petition reads, “In these classes, young students and teachers watch pornography together in a classroom. This creates an unsafe environment for students and faculty and normalizes pornography in culture. These are not Utah values and these classes have no part in the Utah education system.”
When news outlet ABC4 reached out to Westminster College chief marketing officer Sheila Rapazzo Yorkin for comment on the class, she admitted to having had recently fielded a myriad of calls over the class after college-themed news outlet Campus Reform broke a story on April 19th about the obscene course.
In Yorkin’s statement on the matter, she claimed that the college “occasionally offers elective courses like this as an opportunity to analyze social issues,” adding that numerous other colleges “across the county often examine potentially offensive topics like pornography to further understand their pervasiveness and impact.”
Yorkin understands that the course description can be “alarming to some readers,” but stressed that such an explicit description is necessary in order to “help students decide if they wish to engage in serious investigation of controversial subjects.”
Eileen Chanza Torres, who is slated to teach the GNDR-300O: Porn course this summer, wanted to point out that there are no minors who are being enrolled in the class and that she doesn’t want the course availability to be misconstrued with being “an attack on conservativism or religious practice.”
The official stance from the college is that the course is not meant to suggest if or why pornography is good, nor is it a course on how to produce pornography, but rather it’s allegedly meant to explore the impact the medium has on society.
Connor Boyack, the Utah-based author behind the conservative Tuttle Twins series of children’s book, remarked that the field of study this class falls under – that being Gender Studies – is “inherently idiotic,” citing that said degrees hardly have any real world applications in terms of careers.
“There are plenty of people working at Starbucks who have not found a way to monetize their ‘education’ with such a degree.”
This piece was written by Gregory Hoyt on April 22, 2022. It originally appeared in RedVoiceMedia.com and is used by permission.
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