Virginia is looking more like California every day. The William & Mary student council has agreed to provide $1,450 to help bring the Sex Workers Art Show to campus. The event, which is on nationwide tour, features monologues and performances by porn actors, strippers and other sex workers, reports the Daily Press. More than a dozen student groups are co-sponsoring the show.
Wrote Zach Pilchen, president of the Student Assembly: “There is no better place to discuss the sex work industry and its phenomena than at a liberal arts college.”
University President Gene Nichol now must decide whether to grant a campus venue for the production. Wow, what a tough decision for a broad-minded university president to make! On the one hand, it’s so vitally importance to display an openness toward a broad range of sexual lifestyles and proclivities. We wouldn’t want to send the message that the university is intolerant in any way. But on the other hand… feminist ideology stridently objects to pornography and other practices that “objectify” women as sexual objects. We wouldn’t want that either! Tolerance… objectification. Toleratance… objectification. What a choice!
I’m looking forward to seeing what decision Nichol makes, how he justifies it to the campus community and how he explains it to parents and alumni. Meanwhile, I’m interested to see what my daughter (a senior) has to say.
Update: My daughter, Ginny, responds by e-mail as follows: “If pro-life organizations on campus can use their funding to bring in evangelical Christians with signs that have pictures of bloody fetuses on them who shout at and harass people on their way to and from class, then student council funding for the Sex Workers Art Show is just fine.”