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Review of The Media Education Foundation's Open Lens Media Production Documentary
The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality & Relationships
While The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality & Relationships provides a compelling argument, from a leftist perspective, that culturally pervasive pornography is detrimental to interpersonal sexual relationships - and, in fact, attributes Internet pornography's boom in popularity, as well as its most corrosive effects, to the nature of capitalism - this fifty-five-minute documentary is less than completely persuasive. Its reasonable arguments are, nonetheless, rooted in a clearly evident prudish mind-set; its case studies, while individually sincere and convincing, are skewed toward supporting this relatively narrow-minded and conservative perspective on sexuality; and it offers no workable solutions. It merely wants to make the case that US culture is inundated with pornography and that porn is bad for you. The DVD provides both an "unedited version" that contains a lot of explicit hardcore images and an "edited version," suitable for classroom viewing, in which these images are blurred. Featuring numerous interviews with ordinary people, usually young adults, and commentary from media scholars Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, economist Robert Wolff, psychologist Ana Bridges, popular culture scholars Ariel Levy and Pamela Paul, performer-turned-author Sarah Katherine Lewis, and porn industry professionals John Stagliano, Joanna Angel, and Earnest Greene, the documentary intersperses its sometimes disturbing and violent pornographic imagery with subtitled talking heads, and is thus both traditional in format yet visually interesting. Showing this documentary in a classroom setting is almost sure to provoke a lively discussion.
Noting that the Internet has contributed to the "skyrocketing production and consumption of pornography"- 420 million pages of porn are available on line, nine hundred million porn videos are rented every year, and thirteen thousand new ones are released annually- this documentary...