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Dear Sirs:
I am the instructor for Psychology 1703-Human Sexuality, which was one of the courses maligned and vilified in the article by Luisa M. Lara entitled “Focusing on the Physical: Sex-related courses at Harvard ignore our humanity” published in the February 19th, 2004 issue of The Harvard Salient. The information that is presented about my course is so lacking in context as to render it, at best, deliberately misleading. To begin, I quote from the caption, “Course offerings on human sexuality, such as the popular Psychology 1703, ignore important aspects of forming a caring, nurturing relationship in favor of degrading displays like ‘porn day.’” Towards the end of her article Miss Lara writes, “Harvard is doing a moral disservice to its students by showing graphic sexual intercourse.” I wonder where Miss Lara gets her information that I show such images in class. It is certainly not from anything I said, either in class or to her as background for her article, nor is it from any of the teaching staff or the hundreds of students who have taken my class to date. The reality is that on “pornography day” I show a PBS documentary from the Frontline series called “American Porn” as part of a broader and carefully-balanced objective discussion of the topic in general. Ann Hodges of the Houston Chronicle wrote, “‘American Porn’ is a candid, adults-only report on a multibillion-dollar business that’s come out of dark alleys and seedy shops to settle in America’s living rooms. Frontline gets down with the dirty in this enlightening survey of people who produce porn, big corporations (like General Motors and AT&T) that distribute it, and Justice Department lawyers who have fought it in the courts....‘American Porn’ is strong stuff, but Frontline walks that thin edge with restraint sufficient to validate its serious look at a problem as depressing as it is unlikely to go away.” Miss Lara writes, “But it seems that a series of courses offered at Harvard focusing on sex and sexual interaction of the genders fail to aim at this goal.” I think the goal to which she refers is, in her own words, “Would not then the goal of institutions of higher learning focus on the aspects that make us human-subjects which distinguish us from our non-human counterparts?” I wonder if before writing this article Miss Lara even took a glance at my course information sheet and reading list which were distributed in class and have been posted on the course website since before classes began? (Professor Rodriguez proceeds to provide us with the entire course description as found on the syllabus, which, if you so care, can be found at www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~psy1703/syllabus.) Miss Lara also presents material out of context in this article. She writes, “On the first day of class, the professor of Psychology 1703: Human Sexuality addressed his students with the request that they shout out all the terms they knew for the words penis, vagina, and sex [although I actually said “sexual intercourse” not “sex,” and I also included words for breasts in the exercise.]” She neglects to mention that at the end of this exercise I engaged the students in a discussion of why it was important and useful to do such a thing. These reasons included: helping the class become less nervous and more comfortable discussing sex and sexuality, sensitizing the students to the range of slang words routinely used by others in the class, and disarming some of the power of these same slang words by bringing them out into the open. Further, this was on the second day of class, not the first, although this is a small point to be sure. Finally, the “clip of a rape scene” she describes as “typical material” was from the Academy-Award winning film “The Accused” and it appeared in a owerful and well-respected documentary entitled “Dreamworlds 2” about the disturbing portrayals of sex and female sexuality in popular culture and music videos. This video was carefully introduced and its potentially disturbing imagery was made explicitly clear to my students in the class before the one in which it was shown, at the beginning of the class in which it was shown, by warning messages in the documentary video itself, and by myself again when I stopped the video right before the scenes in question began, to give one last warning regarding the nature and emotional power of the footage. At each stage, students were encouraged to choose not to view the scenes, should they care to or need to. Students were also directed multiple times (both verbally, in class-wide e-mails, and on the course website) to sources of support should anything course-related ever become too challenging, confusing, or distressing for them. —Michael R. Rodriguez Lecturer on Psychology Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Adams House Dear Mr. Rodriguez, Let me first congratulate you on your recent “ascent” to the position of co-Faculty Adviser of the H Bomb. For that, and for having written this letter, your admirable concern for the quality of student publications at Harvard is beyond doubt. It was the cause of great sorrow to me to learn that you found your course “maligned and vilified” by my article. I assure you that I intended no such thing. What I did intend was to draw attention to your wreckless and undignified presentation of sexual issues under the guise “of uncovering myths, half-truths, factual errors, and distortions” about sexuality. If this is a matter of vilification, it is not I, but the gratuitous material in your course that vilifies itself. It still escapes me how your penchant for explicit material will do anything to help anyone “be better able to view and appreciate sexuality as a normal, integral, and joyful part of being human.” It had never occurred to me that graphic depictions of rape would have such a beneficial effect. (But of course who am I to disagree with the Academy?) As part of your defense, you make it clear that you do not show pornography in your class. In fairness, you are right about this. But, then again perhaps not. In fact, you do show pornography, however couched, in the course of the documentary “American Porn,” which, as you point out, was shown on PBS. Once again, far be it from me to question the programming decisions of PBS, but is there any need to get “down and dirty” when talking about porn? There is no great need to delve into explicit descriptions and presentations of pornography in order to talk about it (and the documentary, despite its seemingly innocuous classification, does present explicit content). If anything, I think that that is precisely what I would want to avoid. Frankly, I find much of the material in your course to be disgusting, though perhaps what I really need is to have my understanding of sexuality reconstructed by your course. I think that this strikes at the root of our disagreement. You seem to be under the assumption that, when considering sexuality, being explicit and avoiding refinement—shouting euphemisms for sexual intercourse, genitalia and (as you so helpfully elaborated) breasts—is the proper approach. You are of the opinion that this method will help students “become less confused, apologetic, defensive, or shameful about [their] own sexual feelings, attractions, desires, and needs.” If your defense is that the vision of your class really is to provide a feel-good forum for students to hear about sex via edgy multimedia, then our disagreement is reduced to my apparent squemishness. So I apologize for my childish insistence that sexuality be approached with the utmost dignity and restraint. I honestly never realized the tremendous value in abandoning my taboos. I greatly look forward to the day when I too can be free of my tendencies to shy away from explicit and shameless presentations of sexuality. —Luisa M. Lara, Staff Writer |