Porn on college campuses gets some naked attraction

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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This story from Inside Higher Ed is wild. Any local colleges planning to screen the skin flick?

A new pornographic film is setting off campus debates about free expression and sexism. At the University of Maryland at College Park, those debates will not be based on a public screening. An administrator there has canceled a student union screening of a hardcore pornographic movie on campus, amid pressure from state legislators who threatened to deny the institution funding if the movie was shown.

“Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” was slated to be screened at midnight Saturday at the 550-seat movie theater in Maryland’s student union. The theater’s programming committee, which consists entirely of students, approved the adult film for screening after having received a free copy from its production company, Digital Playground. The film, a pornographic homage to Disney’s popular “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy, has been distributed to a number of campuses around the country in an effort to generate publicity.

In the past few months, the XXX-rated film has been screened with administrative approval at the University of California at Los Angeles, Northwestern University and Carnegie Mellon University. With many universities seemingly willing to screen adult films, it might only be a matter of time for VR porn to debut on campus as a tech demonstration, as can be seen here – http://www.vrpornmovies.net/. Most of these screenings, however, have incorporated outside groups to provide what some call an “educational setting” for the adult film. At the UCLA screening, for instance, stars of the film answered critical and comical questions about the role of the adult entertainment industry.

Christopher Ruth, spokesman for Digital Playground, said the production company adopted a college-specific marketing technique after the original film generated so much buzz on campuses. He said a number of students groups at institutions around the country, including Carnegie Mellon, preemptively asked the company for copies of the film before they began offering it up for free to others. What has followed, he said, has been a parade of “Rocky Horror Picture Show”-like themed screenings with students dressing up as characters.

When “Pirates II” was released last fall, Ruth said he offered it to more than 100 colleges in the United States and Canada and has since received about 50 requests for the film. He noted that 15 colleges (which he wouldn’t name) are in various stages of preparing the film for screening, adding that a group at Tulane University is slated to offer the next official screening later this month.