Robert Jensen

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/11/08/18549792.php
Recording by Mike Rhodes, editor, Community Alliance newspaper, Fresno, CA
Audio at:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2008/11/08/robert_jensen.mp3

by Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood

We have nothing against voting. We plan to vote in the upcoming election. Some of our best friends are voters.

There is a finite number of ways that human bodies can be placed together sexually, and as one pornography industry veteran lamented to me at the annual trade show, “they’ve all been shot.” He sighed, pondering the challenge of creating a sexually explicit film that is unique, and mused, “After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?”

When the bottom line is threatened, corporations typically show little concern for holding the line on political principles such as freedom of expression. In capitalism, freedom is too often just another word for maximizing profits.

I met Ruth Anne Koenick at a dinner before my talk on the feminist critique of pornography at Rutgers University in 1997. I had been doing public presentations on that issue for several years, but that was the first time an institution had paid my plane fare to give a lecture. As a young professor, I was a bit nervous but also was feeling pretty self-important.

[A version of this essay was delivered to the “Struggle for Global Justice” film festival organized by the student group Azaad at the University of Texas at Austin on September 11, 2008.]

When University of Texas faculty members opened the local Austin newspaper in mid-August, many were surprised to read that that their institution was raising funds for an endowed chair to honor Charlie Wilson, described charitably by the paper as “the fun-loving, hard-living former East Texas congressman portrayed by Tom Hanks in last year’s "Charlie Wilson's War.’”

[originally published in Media Development (http://www.wacc.org.uk/wacc/publications/media_development), No. 3, 2008.]

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/11/08/18549792.php
Recording by Mike Rhodes, editor, Community Alliance newspaper, Fresno, CA
Audio at:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2008/11/08/robert_jensen.mp3

by Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood

We have nothing against voting. We plan to vote in the upcoming election. Some of our best friends are voters.

There is a finite number of ways that human bodies can be placed together sexually, and as one pornography industry veteran lamented to me at the annual trade show, “they’ve all been shot.” He sighed, pondering the challenge of creating a sexually explicit film that is unique, and mused, “After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?”

When the bottom line is threatened, corporations typically show little concern for holding the line on political principles such as freedom of expression. In capitalism, freedom is too often just another word for maximizing profits.

I met Ruth Anne Koenick at a dinner before my talk on the feminist critique of pornography at Rutgers University in 1997. I had been doing public presentations on that issue for several years, but that was the first time an institution had paid my plane fare to give a lecture. As a young professor, I was a bit nervous but also was feeling pretty self-important.

[A version of this essay was delivered to the “Struggle for Global Justice” film festival organized by the student group Azaad at the University of Texas at Austin on September 11, 2008.]

When University of Texas faculty members opened the local Austin newspaper in mid-August, many were surprised to read that that their institution was raising funds for an endowed chair to honor Charlie Wilson, described charitably by the paper as “the fun-loving, hard-living former East Texas congressman portrayed by Tom Hanks in last year’s "Charlie Wilson's War.’”

[originally published in Media Development (http://www.wacc.org.uk/wacc/publications/media_development), No. 3, 2008.]