Especially for Parents
News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
February 2006
On The Road…
The Sex Workers’ Art Show Tour is hitting the road again and there’s a good chance that the show will be hosted by a college in your area. Indeed, some of the most prestigious colleges in the nations are welcoming - again - this troupe. It seems, these days, as though the educational system, to the great detriment of our society, is almost just as intent on normalizing the sex industries as the pornographers are themselves.
“The show,” according to the Sex Workers’ Art Show website, “includes people from all areas of the sex industry: strippers, prostitutes, dommes, film stars, phone sex operators, internet models, etc. It smashes traditional stereotypes and moves beyond ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ into a fuller articulation of the complicated ways sex workers experience their jobs and their lives.” The goal is “to dispel the myth that they [the sex workers] are anything short of artists, innovators and geniuses.” Sigh.
Interestingly, more than half of the places that the Sex Workers’ Art Show will visit during their tour are colleges and universities. Among these hosting schools is The College of William and Mary, the second oldest college in the nation, attended by Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. George Washington served as its chancellor from 1788 until he died in 1799. Others include Rutgers University, UCLA, Wesleyan University, and the University of Texas.
According to a February 15, 2006, report in the Daily Nexus, UC Santa Barbara’s student newspaper, the UCSB Women’s Center “has been planning the show since mid-November, and is using part of its $6,000 annual programming budget to produce the event. Other campus departments have lent help in sponsoring the art show, including the Art Studio Dept., the College of Creative Studies, the Sociology Dept. and the Queer Theories Reading Group in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.”
A January 26, 2006, story in the same student paper mentions that the Women’s Center “is asking for a $1.25 lock-in fee increase that would enable it to continue offering services to students, faculty and staff…If passed, both undergraduate and graduate students would have to pay a total of $3 per quarter, per student to the Women’s Center, which currently receives a lock-in fee of $1.75 per student, per quarter.” So, all students - or, in most cases, their parents and taxpayers - pay for such sponsorships. And, UC Santa Barbara is not the only college providing funds for the Sex Workers’ Art Show event.
Funding such events is not uncommon in the higher education environment of today. Institutions of higher learning have become notorious for their porn studies and sexualized classes. A January 9, 2006, Agape Press article described some of the entries on the most recent of the Young America’s Foundation yearly listing of “the country's most bizarre and politically correct college courses.”
Among these, according to the Agape Press article, are such offerings as “the John Hopkins University course called "Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll in Ancient Egypt," in which students view slideshows depicting ancient Egyptian women "fixing their hair," "having intercourse," and "vomiting on each other" and "at Princeton University -- one of the most prestigious universities in the country -- students examine in one course the culture production of early modern women. They examine prostitutes, cross-dressing, and same-sex eroticism during the Renaissance period." However, these types of courses - and worse - have been gaining ground in academia since the late 1990’s and are old news now, just like the growth in student produced pornography magazines is.
It’s not surprising that such picture heavy and text light publications enjoy a certain degree of popularity on campus, considering the results of a recent Pew Charitable Trusts study. On January 20, 2006, MSNBC.com offered an Associated Press report describing the findings.
According to the report, “most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.” It seems to me to be a sign of the times that such tasks are even considered to be complex, but I digress. It was found that “more than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees, or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school. The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.”
So, while parents and taxpayers are paying tens-of-thousands of dollars per year to send these young people to these institutions of higher learning, where they can study pornography and sexual deviance through history and money is spent to sponsor such things as The Sex Workers’ Art Show and pornography stars as guest speakers, many are not learning enough reading, writing and math skills to perform basic functions and tasks in society. Sounds to me like there’s a whole lot of young people who are solidly on the road to nowhere, despite the ever-increasing amount of money pumped into their so-called education.
It seems as though public education is on the road to ruin, with literacy levels statistically shown to be continuing to drop. Can you imagine a Sex Workers’ Art Show taking place at a public college with George Washington at its helm, our founding fathers taking pride in public burlesques and the glorification of ‘sex work’? Of course not. But, there is a difference between then and now, and that difference lies in the fact that our founding fathers were far better educated than are our modern era students, as our current society certainly reflects and will continue to reflect until we get on the road to true education again.