The Huffington Post--Hugh Hefner long ago shocked people nationally and sought to make them think in new ways by personally philosophizing about sex, love, and pornography in the pages of Playboy. Now an academic philosopher shocks some folks in Arkansas by keeping the tradition alive, but in a very different way. Jacob M. Held is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at The University of Central Arkansas. I got to talk with him recently about his innovative philosophy class on porn.

Tom: Hi Jake. I know you've done lots of work on issues in pop culture and philosophy. You co-edited a book on James Bond, you'll soon set one loose on Dr. Seuss, and you've also written on South Park, The Beatles, and many other topics of general interest, but your new focus really intrigues me. How did you move from Dr. Seuss to pornography?

Jake: I'm interested in anything that gets me thinking. But in particular, I'd just been working on issues related to obscenity law for a book on Pornography and Philosophy when I was offered a chance to teach in my university's honors college. To turn issues about obscenity into a full semester course I needed to broaden the scope, so I moved into pornography itself as a philosophical issue. There's a lot there beyond mere freedom of speech - issues over civil rights, sexual violence, exploitation, women in media, gender, etc.

Tom: So you actually taught a college course on porn? Could you find a classroom big enough?

Jake: Yes. And yes. Honestly, going through the process of offering the course reinforced why this topic needs to be explored more openly. For example, I had to interview all potential students and get them to sign a waiver before they could be admitted to the course. I had several meetings about content, books, and so forth. And the interesting thing is, it was all because of the sexual nature of the content. I've taught on torture and war, but no question was ever raised about student exposure to violence. So the care with which I had to approach this course illustrates the oddity of our discordant treatments of violence and sex, where the former is allowed in the curriculum to an almost unlimited degree, but the latter is nearly taboo, even though both are arguably obscene in the strict sense of the word.

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