Lisa Cullen, in the latest article of TIME Magazine, writes about the recent trend of pornography courses taught in colleges.

from TIME.com:

It’s called the porn curriculum, and it’s quietly taking root in the ivory tower. A small but growing number of scholars are probing the aesthetic, societal and philosophical properties of smut in academic departments ranging from literature to film, law to technology, anthropology to women’s studies. Those specialists argue that graphic sexual imagery has become ubiquitous in society, so it’s almost irresponsible not to teach young people how to deal with it. “I was amazed by how much the students knew about pornography but how little they knew how to think about it,” says Jay Clarkson, a graduate student in communications who introduced the University of Iowa’s Pornography in Popular Culture class last fall. But although Clarkson and his peers may agree that porn studies have a place in the curriculum, they are divided over how far professors should go in teaching them. Do students really need to watch a couple copulating onscreen to understand why pornography turns people on? Or does a stimulating essay on the nature of desire provide just as much if not more insight?