1)   Prof. Julian Hermida subscribes to a pedagogical theory known as Visual Pedagogy, which believes in the importance of developing media literacy in the college classroom. As usually, he shows videos to illustrate his ideas and to foster debate. When teaching pornography and obscenity in his Crime and Punishment class, he showed sexually explicit videos taped from Playboy TV for students to identify whether these videos are legal and what Feminist Criminologists would think about them.

 

2)   For this same class, Prof. Julian Hermida also showed a sexually explicit video depicting a man that chocked his female partner to death. Is this video obscene? Is Julian committing the crime of showing obscene material?

 

3)   The Indiana Congress in the US adopted a law that employs the feminist definition of pornography as the “sexually explicit subordination of women.” Thus, all materials that show sexually explicit subordination of women are prohibited. Is this law constitutionally valid in the US? What if Parliament in Ottawa adopted the same law? Would it be constitutionally valid in Canada?

 

4)   The book Querelle by prestigious author Jean Genet, narrates the story of a sailor on the cargo ship Le Vengeur. Querelle is also a thief, a prostitute, an opium smuggler, and a serial killer. While he technically kills for money, his real motive for murder is the sheer, liberating pleasure of it; he kills to feel alive. He views crime as the highest form of creative expression. While he is sexually drawn to other men, he is more aroused by power than by people. Sex, for him, is an act of either domination or submission rather than pleasure or love, and so his partners are objects existing for the sole purpose of enacting his sadomasochistic fantasies of power and punishment.

 

5)   In a scene from the sitcom Married with Children, Bud has sex with a rubber doll. The doll is fully naked.

 

6)   The movie Thesis, directed by Oscar-winner Alejandro Amenabar, tells the story of Angela, a university student that writes her thesis on film violence. While doing research for her thesis, Angela finds a snuff movie in which a young girl is raped, tortured, and killed. The director shows this movie in its entirety. Amenabar wants his audience to reflect on why sex and violence are so fascinating and whether it is morally correct to show violence in movies.

 

7)   Mathew McGowan, a street Hustler from Toronto, made a sexually explicit safe-sex video, where he wants to show how to have protected sex in male homosexual relations. He described the video as follows: “I want to make it very clear that the video is not obscene in my eyes. There isn’t any violence; there is no whipping or anything like this. It is very vanilla sex. It is very funny. We are laughing. In fact, there is a lot of stuff happening on this video that if you didn’t see the pictures and you only heard the soundtrack, you would think that it is just a couple of people having a good time, laughing and talking.

 

8)   The Advocate is the national gay & lesbian newsmagazine which addresses the latest issues and breaking stories shaping the lives of gay and straight America. Advocate covers important stories the mainstream press doesn’t get and inside access where outsiders can’t go.

 

9)   Kiss and Tell is a Vancouver-based performance and artist collective whose work is concerned with lesbian sexuality. They produced True Inversions a multi-media performance about lesbian sexuality. It examines the way in which sexuality is mediated by personal histories and by political, moral and educational institutions. Sex scenes are intercepted by a range of captions which use key words - masturbation, unsafe sex and censorship - to signify a diversity of meaning and perspectives. For instance, the caption "uncensored" qualified by an addendum - the criminal code section, "unsafe sex," "politically incorrect" - point to the regulation and complexity of the discursive field in which images of sex are made and looked at. The images are also periodically disrupted by keyed-in commentaries from the director and crew members who are identified by name and position.

 

10)                      Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist is a cult comic where Hothead Paisan, an over-caffeinated, media-crazed psychotic lesbian with scary hair and a fetish for guns, grenades, mallets, and sharp objects embarks on more search-and-destroy missions and preventative homicides. In this issue, there are stories about a cat yoga class, a confrontation with evangelical pro-lifers, and Hothead Paisan masquerading as a straight spritzhead.

 

 

11)                      Tom has had a sexual fantasy for a long time. One day, at home, he wrote it down on a writing pad. He described his fantasy where he raped his next-door neighbour, and was very explicit about the sexual intercourse.

 

12)                      Alejandro and Mariana –both adults- taped themselves while having sex. They invited their best friends –also adults- to watch the tape.

 

13)                      A convenience store owner carries DVDs for rent. It has a separate section for adult videos. One of these DVDs depicts explicit sado-masochist sex with scenes of crime and violence. The owner has not watched this particular video. He signed a statement from the distributor that warned him that all adult DVDs have explicit sex scenes.

14)                      The Sentient decided to accept an advertisement for a hard-core new DVD that read as follows: “Buy SEX AND VIOLENCE, the new hard-core porn DVD where explicit sex, violence, and cruelty come together.”