Male students can argue that banning access to porn is a limit on their free expression. But I’d prefer to fight for the freedom of women to feel safe
You’re young, as hot as you’re probably ever going to get, and there’s a party on every night with people as young and as bright and as hot as you. And you want to stay in your room and masturbate to internet porn? Really?
This week Melbourne University’s Ormond College blocked access to porn websites on its Wi-Fi network,
stating
the genre does not allow people at a “formative stage of life” to develop a “healthy sexuality”.
Some students have argued not all pornography is demeaning (it’s even educational!), and to deny students the ability to watch porn in their rooms is to clamp down on freedom of expression.
But I reckon there are other freedoms that are more worth fighting for.
The college’s master – theologian and ethicist Dr Rufus Black – argued in a newsletter to the college’s 400 students that pornography was exploitative, objectifies women and “presents women primarily as sex objects who are a means to the end of male pleasure”.
As an administrator, there are certain things you don’t want happening at your college: you don’t want a Skype-style sex scandal of the sort that dogged the ADF, you don’t want the “rape culture” that characterises a number of US colleges and you don’t want a repeat of what happened at Ormond in 1991 – where female students made a complaint of sexual assault against the master, and accused the college of being blind to issues of sex and safety on campus.
To stop or discourage the behaviour that you don’t want, you need to start with an ideal. For Black, that ideal is that students shouldn’t sit in their rooms watching stuff that objectifies women, and in some cases, depicts violence towards women.
In extensive research I did for a magazine article (and later a book) on Australian colleges, I interviewed many students of
Sydney
university colleges.
Many young men and women I spoke to reported environments that were subtly, and not so subtly, anti-women.
One student wondered if the set of circumstances in her college would fall under the definition of domestic violence – students urinated on her door after parties, banged on her door in the middle of the night and cat-called her as she crossed the quadrangle. There were thresholds of the dining room at certain times of the day that she didn’t like to cross because a group of guys would hiss at her. There were lots of times and lots of places in the college – her home – where she did not feel safe.
Others talked about O-week humiliations: the “sex-exercises” where fresher girls had to do push-ups over a guy, or shave their head, or drink until they were sick.
When I went to a Melbourne university co-ed college in the 1990s, women were called “fur”. First year students were freshmen and second year and above were called “gentlemen”. It didn’t matter that half these “gentlemen” were women, and that the college administration had banned – or at least strongly discouraged – the use of those terms. Students were in thrall to traditions and traditions dictated that terms left over from the start of the 20th century remained in use.
Students didn’t have to watch porn to objectify women – this objectification was already buried deep within the colleges’ DNA.
To start to unravel and destroy the objectification of women is the great task of college administrators here and in the US, where one Columbia student
carried her mattress to graduation
to protest the handling of her sexual assault case.
Many students who go to Ormond – and colleges like it – move onto positions of power and influence in society. Tony Abbott is a former student of St John’s at Sydney uni and Gough Whitlam went to St Paul’s. Famous alumni of Ormond include Sir Robert Menzies and Greg Hunt.
To have women enter the world having learned to accept a degraded position in it, alongside men who accept women being degraded – whether that is through the pornography they watch on campus, or the words used to described women in college parlance – is dangerous. We should not allow this acceptance to be internalised in the ruling class.
In its own way college life can be a utopia, distinct from the “real world” – a time and space apart. This can be incredible: wiling away the days spent on the lawns, reading a book, or putting on a play that fails, singing in choir or joining the Fabians, staying up late at night drinking port and talking about post-structuralism (if that floats your boat).
But a utopia can go both ways: freedom
from
something or freedom to
do something. You can be free
to
spend a whole semester reading Ulysses in the sunny parts of the quadrangle, to walk around in your academic gown over your pyjamas, to drink all night and not face too many consequences in the morning.
But we should also be able to argue for freedom
from
posters around the college that objectify women (Pimps and Prostitute themed-balls, for example), and
“pro-rape” Facebook pages
set up by college students.
The reasons behind the porn ban are sound: in order to create a space where young women can thrive, you attempt to remove the conditions where they may be degraded. And if young women thrive, young men thrive as well.
After all, you have the rest of your life to watch porn on the internet. You’ll eventually (hopefully) move into a flat and live on your own. You may come home at night from your job at the investment bank and have long, lonely hours to fill and high speed broadband to help you fill it.
But now? Log off. There are parties to be had, connections to be made and people – real life people! – to meet who will blow your mind and change your life more than any porn site.
Brigid Delaney is the author of Wild Things (Harper Collins), a novel set at a fictional university college.
