Nothing offends us at www.adultcybermart.com except those who pass up a good deal.
from www.signonsandiego.com – At the beginning of the semester, students in a counseling course at San Diego State University were warned the class might contain R-rated material, but students said Tuesday night’s lecture pushed into NC-17.
The class featured slides of male and female genitalia and oral sex acts, among other images, said SDSU junior Brittany Hester.
One of the course’s faculty lecturers, Jeffrey Bucholtz, said, “The point of including this content was specifically to critique it. The use of these pornographic images was not to normalize it. This was not a gratuitous display of sex. It was about critiquing it and showing pornography’s harmful effects.”
Hester and another student, who asked not to be named for fear of affecting his grade, said that at the start of “Popular Culture and Counseling,” Bucholtz told the class that they would be shown material they might find shocking, and that they could look down at their desks or leave.
But Hester said she was embarrassed to get up and leave in front of her classmates. “I don’t want to have everyone be like, ‘Oh that person is a goody two-shoes,’ ” she said.
Hester and the other student said they were not warned ahead of time about Tuesday’s lecture so that they could simply skip it.
The course’s description in the 2010-11 school catalog does not address pornography or sexuality.
“Impact of popular culture on personal functioning and well-being,” the description reads. “Meaning and salience of popular culture, social construction of popular culture in society, and convergence of popular culture and counseling.”
Valerie Cook-Morales, the chair of the counseling and school psychology department, said sexuality is part of mainstream culture and that the lecture material “doesn’t surprise me.”
“The instructors were thinking about what would get students engaged in a discussion and deconstructing the communication that occurs through pornographic images,” she said. “I believe they were trying to set off that whole discourse in the context of popular culture.”
Neither Bucholtz nor co-instructor Jennifer Gusman are full-time professors at SDSU, and neither holds a doctorate. They were each paid $5,647 in 2010 for their work at the university.
Bucholtz is also director of We End Violence, a consulting and education company that works on violence prevention with men, and is an adjunct faculty member at Southwestern College, according to his biography on weendviolence.com. He earned his Master of Arts in women’s studies from SDSU in 2006.
Gusman also earned a Master of Arts in women’s studies from SDSU and another in marital and family therapy from Loma Linda University, according to her SDSU biography. She could not be reached for comment.
Hester said that after the 2½-hour class Tuesday she felt disgusted and nauseous.
She said one slide addressed the stereotype that black men have larger genitalia, and showed pictures of multiple black men’s penises. Other slides showed female genitalia, people performing oral sex, pictures from Hustler magazine and titles of pornography movies.
Bucholtz then showed a video clip of a girl interviewing for a position in the adult entertainment industry, Hester said. The man conducting the interview asked the woman to remove her clothing and bend over.
“I don’t think it was necessary for the material to be as extreme as it was, because you can get the point across without having to show pictures like that,” Hester said.
Students watched about 40 minutes of “Killing Us Softly,” a documentary about how gender is represented in advertising, before being dismissed, Hester said.
Hester plans to continue to take the class but said, “Next time when our professor says you can leave, I probably will.”