Today Oregon State University officials responded to the controversy surrounding OSU’s Modern Sex conference, where sex expert Tristan Taormino’s invitation to give the “Claiming Your Sexual Power” keynote lecture was rescinded, apparently because the money to pay her travel expenses and honorarium would have come out of a general fee fund partially supported by taxpayer dollars and because her involvement as a pornographer thus seemed somehow inappropriate.
“The funding for the speaker in question was coming entirely from Educational and General funds, what we call E&G funds, which are public taxpayer funds allocated to the university by the state legislature and the governor,” said OSU spokesman Todd Simmons, Interim Vice President for University Relations and Marketing, when I called today to get the university’s perspective on the controversy. “It didn’t represent, in this case, any student fee funds, so all of the costs of bringing in Tristan were expected to be borne by E&G funds, ie. taxpayer funds, and that was the crux of the problem.”
As Simmons explains it, Taormino — a respected sex educator and author and a popular speaker on the college lecture circuit, as well as an award-winning director of explicit adult films — would have been welcome to speak at the conference had the conference organizers planned to fund her speaking fee out of their own student fee-driven budget and not out of the E&G funds, or if Taormino was appearing as an unpaid speaker. While Taormino and the blogosphere have been portraying this as an anti-porn act of censorship from the university, it may actually have been more about a misunderstanding on the part of the conference’s organizers about which pools of available money were appropriate to use to bring controversial speakers to campus.
“I think, particularly now as budgets tighten, it’s incumbent on all of us to be careful about how we’re spending taxpayer monies, and to not call into question the institution or the actions of those who are funding us with allowing that money to be spent on things that people might rightfully criticize for being inappropriate uses of that money,” says Simmons.
Fair enough. But the university’s handling of Taormino’s speaking engagement raises a lot of other questions, and Simmons is forthright about the university’s concerns about Taormino and specifically about her identity and reputation as a pornographer, which raises another question: If they’re going to balk at bringing a pornographer to campus, what kinds of other speakers are getting taxpayer money?
“It’s not entirely unusual,” says Simmons. “We do have other people who speak on campus who were brought in through public taxpayer dollars, but they tend to be academic speakers, tend to be scientists or others from academia. They particularly tend not to be pornographers or people who have significant business interest in creating and selling and distributing pornography. That was the ultimate deciding factor in this matter. It certainly wasn’t her work as an author or as a sex advice columnist, it was the fact that on her website there are really graphic sexual depictions, there are banner ads for online pay-per-view pornography, and so I think the student affairs leadership here made a sound decision that they could not approve using taxpayer funds for a speaker coming from that perspective.”
If that sounds like shaky ground to you, you’re not alone. The blogosphere lit up today with the news (Taormino’s keeping a running tab on related press coverage on her blog) and The Portland Mercury reports today that student groups are circulating a petition to reinvite Taormino and fund her honorarium with student fees using a different pool of money. It’s actually a plan that Simmons seems to endorse.
“Typically student organizations would apply to student government for the use of student fee funds that are separate from the E&G funds,” Simmons explains. “Student government is the administrator of student activity fees, which are collected by the university but then turned over to the student government to administer and determine how those funds are spent. This is not an insubstantial amount of money: We’re talking several million dollars that they have control over and parcel out to student organizations in the form of budgets based on proposals that the organizations make to them. So, for instance, let’s say that the Pride Center, a recognized student organization, had a $20,000 budget from student activity fees that had been appropriated by student government. They could then spend that money as they see fit on allowable expenses, and bringing in speakers would certainly be an allowable expense. So if they made the determination as a student organization to use their student fee monies for Tristan or any other controversial speaker, that would be within their right and purview to do, and as a matter of fact they often do. We have all variety of controversial speakers on campus on a very regular basis.”
Taormino has previously spoken at more than 75 college campuses, mostly without incident, including university Sex Week events and other lectures. In 2009 students at Princeton successfully defended her when criticism about bringing her to campus was raised. But a more appropriate comparison might be made to the saga of the film Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge and a near mutiny from the Maryland statehouse after the the University of Maryland had planned to screen the film on campus.
“In this situation we need to differentiate public universities from private universities,” says Simmons. “We’re a public, land-grant university, which makes us very different from places like Harvard or Yale or some of the other campuses she’s spoken at, where only private fees would have been involved. And, I suspect, at the public campuses where she’s spoken we’re talking about student activity fees that have been used to bring her in, not taxpayer monies. As I understand it there are other sex educators who are speaking at the Modern Sex conference and that’s not the issue, the fact that people might be speaking about sex or sex education or even pornography. It was, I think, specifically her very public involvement as a pornography maker and somebody who describes herself as a pornographer that was the rub for the university, given that taxpayer dollars would have been used to bring her here.”
Even at that, the distinctions in this case are murky at best: Another planned lecture at the Modern Sex conference is Tobi Hill-Meyer’s “Porn as a Feminist Tool” (Hill-Meyer won the Emerging Filmmaker award for her film Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Woman Porn Project at the 2010 Feminist Porn Awards, where Taormino was honored as Trailblazer of the Year and was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award). And irony abounds elsewhere on the schedule: For example, OSU honors graduate and certified sexologist Veronica Monet is scheduled to present Your Sexual Bill of Rights, in which Monet “challenges you to reflect on the personal as well as political implications of a society where sexual orientation and sexual behavior are variously controlled by government.” For full conference schedule, visit www.OregonState.edu/WomensCenter.
Charlie Glickman, resident sex educator at San Francisco’s pioneering sex shop Good Vibrations (winner of the 2011 AVN Award for Best Retail Chain), had been scheduled to present Act Like a Man: Sexuality and Masculinity in the 21st Century as the closing lecture at the Modern Sex conference and has now been asked to give it as the keynote in Taormino’s place. He’ll also lead a two-hour breakout session on… wait for it… Sexuality, Shame, and Sex Positivity.
“What is it about creating sexually explicit movies that automatically disqualifies a person as a speaker?” Glickman asked, when I called him to find out if he’s being paid an honorarium for his appearance at the conference (he is, though he wasn’t clear on which particular pool of money he was being paid out of).
“The question that I have for them is why is it okay to talk about it but not okay to be somebody who makes it, given that it is a legal product,” says Glickman. “This is an attitude that comes up around sexuality studies frequently, where many academic institutions are fine talking about people as long they’re not talking with people. So you can study people who do S&M or who are queer or who are sex workers, but if you identify as one of those people then somehow your objectivity is compromised and you can’t speak on the topic, even though somebody who is a parent and wants to talk about the politics of motherhood, or somebody who has had an eating disorder and wants to talk about the pyschology of eating disorders, somehow that doesn’t inherently disqualify them as a speaker. It’s only on the topic of sexuality where we ever hear anybody say, “Well, you do this, therefore you’re not qualified to speak about it.”
After our phone conversation and while I was working on this story, Glickman posted his own blog entry, essentially a revised version of his answers to my questions, so instead of transcribing everything here I’ll direct you to his post — Oregon State U Shuts Tristan Taormino Out — and close with this:
“We have seen enough times when legislators and anti-sex voters get in an uproar when they think that public funds have been used inappropriately,” says Glickman. “As an example, Margaret Brooks, who is a Rhode Island-based professor, wrote an article last year excoriating university Sex Weeks as sex education events. This is a time when universities are struggling for funding and I do understand that they’re wanting to be very very careful. Do I think that this was justified? No. But I can understand the argument about the use of taxpayer money even though I disagree with the conclusion that they drew from it. If this all came out where they wanted Tristan back again, I’d be fine moving back to the other spot because I don’t think they have treated her appropriately. It’s my hope that the university and the conference organizers will work to find a way to bring her to the conference after all.”
I’ll continue to follow the story as it develops. In the meantime, here’s hoping for more positivity and less shame in our discussions of sexuality, on campus and elsewhere, even — and maybe especially — when they involve self-proclaimed pornographers.
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