I spent most of last week cranking out a research paper for my Law of the Press class on Miller v. California. This is a landmark Supreme Court case against Marvin Miller, a guy who distributed “obscene” pornographic materials via snail mail in California to a number of people, including some who had not asked for them. One of these people complained, and Miller was found guilty of a misdemeanor under California law.
The case came to the Supreme Court and justices were forced to define “obscenity.” A material is defined as “obscene” if “the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,” whether it “depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law” and “whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
I thought I was done dealing with obscenity, porn and the like for the day when I sat down in economics class last Wednesday, but no such luck. I had no sooner taken my seat in recitation when I learned a kid in my class got caught watching porn in lecture.
This is no joke. My 200-person class is in the basement lecture hall of West Village F, where there are front and back seating areas. Apparently one of the teaching assistants caught a kid in the back area watching porn on his or her laptop. Also, as a result of this incident, students who choose to use laptops in class have to sit in the first eight rows of the lecture hall, while the two teaching assistants closely monitor internet usage from behind. And no one’s allowed in the back.
I get where the perv-in-the-back is coming from. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Gmail are so overrated – why limit yourself to social networking during class when there’s so much porn on the internet?
Whoa, calm down guys, I’m just kidding. It’s disgusting. I can’t believe any mature, supposedly smart kid admitted to this university would even begin to think this was a good idea. I guess I never thought I’d ever hear a professor say, “Sorry kids, if you want to use a laptop, you’ve got to sit in the front because we don’t trust you not to watch porn in class.” I don’t know the circumstances in which the poor TA found this kid, but I can only hope he didn’t have his hand in his pants or anything weird(er) like that.
Everyone has their own ways of dealing with stress. Some people exercise. Others cook. Still others watch porn on their computers at the end of the day. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’re young and exploring our sexuality, and not many of us are looking to be tied down anytime soon.
If you want to watch porn, you have every right to do so. I get it – you’re young, you’re lonely, you’re not getting any anywhere else – fine. But at least have the decency to skip class and do it in the privacy of your bedroom. The classroom, no matter how big it may be, is certainly not the place for that sort of thing.
What a week. The world couldn’t have just let me read about obscenity and case precedents on it in peace. They had to put it into practice. Maybe I should have chosen something less obscene, like the Pentagon Papers case, although, even though that’s plenty interesting, I doubt it would have kept me awake during late nights in Club Snell the way reading about porn did.
To all this I say, slow down, world. Go ahead and watch porn, go ahead and have sex. Just make sure it’s not in a public place, and that the latter is consensual.
Laura Finaldi can be reached at [email protected].
