'The Pornography of Everyday Life' viewed

The title speaks for itself.

Jane Caputi's 30-minute documentary "The Pornography of Everyday Life" links pornography to popular culture, religion and ancient myth, through the use of many sexually explicit images.

The documentary shows how women such as Aphrodite were portrayed in ancient Greece as powerful godlike beings and compared those images with the submissive images we see in mainstream America today.

The documentary had more than 200 pictures of pornography from all areas of media, art and the Internet throughout history.

All of these pornographic images were shown at 2 and 5 p.m. Monday in Atwood Theatre and the Voyageur Room as a part of the Women's Center's "Good Sex Series."

A majority of the pictures were taken from modern American magazines such as Vogue, Sports Illustrated and Playboy.

The pictures showed how "clothed" men are portrayed as the dominant person in countless pictures and women who wear little to no clothing are portrayed as sexual conquests and sometimes even animals.

Because people are being exposed to all these "dirty" images in everyday life, Caputi said she believes American culture is becoming desensitized and people do not realize how damaging these images are to society.

The event was co-sponsored by the Women's Center, Women's Studies, Students for Sexual Consent, Students for Choice and Women's Action and was the second of three "Good Sex Series" events.

Graduate assistant to the Women's Center Lucille Guinta-Bates said the main reason for putting on the series was to talk about what healthy sexuality is and to talk about the consequences of not being healthy sexually.

Both showings of the documentary were followed up by a question and answer discussion between the audience and Caputi, in which she talked about being against censoring these "dirty" images.

"I do not want to want to censor anything. I really do support the First Amendment," Caputi said. "When you censor something, you give it more power. It gives us the power to forbid."

Caputi, a professor of women's studies and communication at Florida Atlantic University, started working on the project back in the 70s as a scrapbook of sorts, but it slowly evolved into this documentary.

She had her students bring in interesting pictures for a collage-type project, and after the projects were done, she held on to a lot of the pictures and continued collecting images over the years, until it was completed earlier this year.

Guinta-Bates was in the audience during a showing of the documentary at an anti-pornography conference in Boston last spring and thought it would be great to have it as apart of the new series.

"We thought this would be really great because one of the things the Women's Center really wants to make clear is the that societal influences lead to gender violence and other violence," Guinta-Bates said. "That is why I felt it was important she came here."