The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Pirates II: The Student’s Revenge

Did Andy Harris of the Maryland State Senate accept a briefcase of cash from the porn lobby? It sure seems like it, because with his fanatic assault on a non-crisis, he’s succeeded in forcing hardcore porno out of the university and back into the dorm room, where it belongs, while generating huge amounts of publicity for porn in general and Digital Playground in specific. Had Maryland legislators not stepped in, it’s all too likely that students at the University of Maryland might have seen porn on a big screen with a safe-sex presentation beforehand and a discussion of equality and sexual pleasure over a piece of pie and a cup of decaf afterwards. As it is, thank God, porn on college campuses, at least in Maryland, will have to be enjoyed in dorm rooms by students drinking tequila body shots, as a prelude to the illicit trysts that so many college students long for. Hail Maryland!

But let me back up here for one damn minute.

A little less than week ago, you might have run across it in the Baltimore Sun, if you were in, you know, Baltimore, and bothered to look for that sort of thing. At the University of Maryland, College Park, this weekend was supposed to see a screening of the Digital Playground film Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, the $10-million-dollar sequel to their legendary Pirates. Pirates II had been scheduled at the Student Union’s Hoff Theatre, a school facility that shows a variety of flicks for student entertainment.

Why did a college theatre schedule a porn movie? According to a story in the Baltimore Sun, the program coordinator for the theater said “she thought Pirates II would be a good alternative to drinking or other dangerous activities . . .’We thought this would be something fun for the students to do, especially since we’re getting close to the end of the semester . . .We’re a college movie theater and we thought it would bring out the students.”

That it did — or would have, had the always publicity-savvy Digital Playground not sent a press release to 800,000 news sources trumpeting the screening. The film was screening that same weekend at the University of California, Davis (go Aggies!), but that didn’t seem to wig anyone out. That porn is freely available anywhere with a broadband connection or a mailing address didn’t seem to be important. That watching a porn movie in a group can spur important debate about such things as pleasure, gender, politics, censorship and the whole cutlass vs. saber debate when fighting skeletons — none of that really mattered. What mattered is that this was porn, and college students look, to some Maryland legislators, like people young enough not to have constitutional rights. The film had been approved by the Student Union, and generally the University (like most colleges) doesn’t exercise close supervision of what such venues are showing. In short, nobody seemed to care until somebody decided to care.

Maryland Senator Andrew P. Harris, a Republican and a Knight of Columbus, was not amused by the situation. He and other legislators found out about the screening through Digital Playground’s press release via the many news sources, including the Baltimore Sun, that covered it. In a debate on the Senate floor, Harris suggested denying state funding to any college that shows a porn film outside of a classroom setting. Maryland Senate President Mike Miller said “That’s really not what Maryland residents send their young students to college campus for, to view pornography,” and called it a misuse of state funds, although the studio had offered the film for free and therefore no University funds would have been used.

The University administration met with Senate representatives and agreed to step in and pull the film. The result? A back-pages story in the Baltimore Sun became front-page news in The Seattle Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post, and, of course, AVN, among others. There was even a debate live on CNN between Digital Playground publicist Adella O’Neal and Republican State Senator Harris. The debate was moderated by CNN’s own resident ultraconservative lunatic Mike Galanos, who said porn is worse than crack cocaine and ruins lives. Senator Harris’s Wikipedia entry now quotes Harris as saying “X-rated belly dancers and pirates have no place in a public university,” which is an achievement in and of itself — any time the press can get a State Senator to comment on piracy in a collegiate setting, an angel gets its wings. But is Harris, an anesthesiologist who got his M.D. from Johns Hopkins, saying he thinks all the pirates should be hoarded by private universities?

I don’t begrudge Senator Harris his position, nor do I question O’Neal’s statement that “We are thrilled that our film has sparked a very important debate about censorship.” They’d have to be crazy not to be! This is publicist’s gold! The only thing better for generating national headlines would be if the Maryland Senate actually introduces legislation withholding public funds from Universities that show porn movies off-hours — because then it’ll really start the debate in earnest about whether in-class porn movies are covered. For fuck’s sake, did Senator Harris take a class in how to get publicity for his most hated enemies?

Making the lunacy of this debate even clearer is the fact that the Student Union had hoped to have Planned Parenthood come in and give a safe sex presentation before the film. This brings me to the most obvious disconnect in Senator Harris’s assault on reason: what does the esteemed Senator think college students do when they’re not going out to porn movies, play cribbage? Does he honestly think that preventing the Student Union from showing Pirates II has resulted in a net loss of market share for that film and a net gain for Harry and the Hendersons — or does he think maybe, just maybe, students just frickin’ bought a copy and watched it in their dorm rooms, presumably with illicit liquor being consumed?

From the Republican side, the debate seems to be focused on the idea that college students are teenagers — therefore, children. Senator Harris thinks that college should protect students from debauchery. But today’s college students have access to more debauchery than ever before. And when I went to school, twenty years ago, there was debauchery around every corner. Sex was a major ingredient in my collegiate experience, and those for whom it wasn’t frequent spent lots of time looking for it. Porn was mildly outré back then — now, it’s more mild and less outré. College students are not children, and they shouldn’t be denied access to the ingredients of an adult lifestyle, at their own option.

More importantly, they can’t be denied that access — constitutionally or rationally. Therefore, denying them the right to do so in public, especially under extra-legal pressure and the threat of spurious legislation, seems to violate not only the freedom of speech but the freedom of assembly. More importantly, what has really been achieved? That porn is now viewed privately, without safe sex info and with vodka instead of popcorn?

College students are adults; a college student union is a venue where adults congregate. It should be subject to the same rules as any other venue — not randomly-assigned ones made up on-the-fly by legislators without the burden of constitutionality.

Thomas Roche blogs about muff pistols and H.P. Lovecraft at ThomasRoche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 7 April 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.