New York filmmaker Chyng Sun was first introduced to pornography on her first visit to the U.S. when she was 30 years old. In 2005 she decided to make a film showcasing what exactly turns us on.
On Tuesday, the hour-long documentary “The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships” will be screened at the journalism school. Associate journalism professor Debra Merskin will introduce the film, fielding questions and trying to put the film’s information into the context of media industries that benefit from the exploitation of women and men who are sex workers.
In response to the national controversy surrounding the screening of a hardcore porn film at the University of Maryland in early April, filmmakers Sun and Miguel Picker cut a deal with their distributor to make “The Price of Pleasure” available at no charge to any campus that wants to show it. This film examines how pornography affects sexuality and relationships.
“Pornography is used in so many ways, from sexual abuse to a couple ‘spicing up’ their sex lives. Could it be that the porn medium itself is innocent and it all depends on how people use the porn?” Sun asked, explaining her reasons for making the film.
Associate journalism professor Carl Bybee heard about the film from the Media Education Foundation. “Given my work on the commercialization of childhood and the hyper-sexualization of marketing to children,” Bybee said, “I thought this would be an important documentary for screening on our campus due to its relevance as the border between advertising and pornography blur.”
Bybee said it is also important to address the continuing debate over the relationship between pornography and sexual politics.
“I hope that the screening of the film will contribute to a discussion as well as to action on and off campus about how 50 years after the so-called women’s rights movement was launched, the struggle for social justice around issues of gender, race, class and identity and the role played by the media in these struggles is still very much in progress,” Bybee said.
For Carol Stabile, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the documentary points to the change in the way porn films have been distributed throughout the past few decades.
“Before the tape revolutionized the porn industry, you could only go to a theater to watch, or sneak into the back of a video store,” Stabile said. “It was much less accessible then.”
Sun and Picker said the film examines the unprecedented role that commercial pornography now occupies in U.S. popular culture.
“To us, pornography presents an opportunity to examine the roots of the problems we are facing – patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy – in their most blatant, naked and rawest forms,” Sun said. “When this exploitation can stir and stimulate our most irrational and uncensored sexual core, we know how deep we have internalized and naturalized such inequality.”
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