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The University of Maryland caved to pressure Thursday and decided not to screen a big-budget porno flick that's been making the rounds on college campuses. The plan had been to show Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge, a $10 million transformation of Pirates of the Caribbean from G to XXX, in the student union on Saturday. But administrators backed down after State Sen. Andrew Harris proposed a budget amendment this week that any public university that screened a pornographic film would lose state funding. For UMD, that would mean a loss of about $424 million for next year, according to the Washington Post. Harris' argument:
"Occasional viewing of porn is more dangerous than occasionally lighting up a cigarette. If the movie is being shown for educational reasons, someone should be presenting the dangers too. Porn breaks up lives."
That seems extreme to say the least. Like many of the colleges that have already screened the film, UMD planned to tack on to the screening an educational portion: a talk by a Planned Parenthood rep on safe sex. If Harris' problem is that he'd rather the post-porno discussion focus more specifically on the porn industry, I'm with him—a generic "safe sex" talk seems not quite up to the task of helping students unpack the money shots they just witnessed. Still, the public viewing would at least get people in a room together, talking about sex and maybe—hopefully—even dipping into the sort of difficult, analytical discussion of sexuality and exploitation that colleges should promote.
Other colleges have gone through with screening the film. At UCLA in December, religious student groups protested by holding a prayer vigil outside the theater, but about 650 students stayed for the discussion portion after the screening. At UC-Davis, the biggest hitch in showing the film this week was that there wasn't room in the 500-seat theater for all the students who wanted to watch. A speaker from the campus Gender and Sexuality Commission spoke before the movie. Better that than students watching porn in their dorm rooms, no?