Some questions on this topic: I just completed teaching a course on B movies, and for the last class assigned Andrew Ross's excellent article on intellectuals and pornography. Many of the students asked why I had chosen not to show any porn films in the class (especially as I was happy to show films such as Last House on the Left, etc, in which women are routinely tortured, etc.). One of the students mentioned that in a sociology course he had been shown Not A Love Story, which I derided as a p.c. way of getting porn as a text/topic into the classroom while making sure no one enjoyed themselves. But I also said, quite honestly, that I would simply be too uncomfortable, on many levels --to the point of being un-pedagogically correct -- in screening porn. Somehow, violence is "analysable" in the instructional space of the classroom whereas, at least for me, audiovisual representations of sex are not. I'm wondering, with the proliferation of academic writing on porn these days, if any of the authors of such texts screen porn for their students, and if so (or if not) why and how? I assume there is quite a gap between the "instructional" and the "textual/professional/theoretical" here, which interests me greatly. I am also wondering why and how we persist in claiming that "shocking" and "disturbing" are somehow positive attributes of "aesthetic" objects (or actions) when we would probably find "shocking" or "disturbing" table manners, behavior on airplanes, etc. to be of little if any value. --James Schamus