Religious Studies Public Lecture - Everything (You Think) You Know about Pornography...

[Fiona McAlister]

Why (Almost) Everything (You Think) You Know about Pornography Is (Probably) Wrong.
Dr. Doug Cowan, Department of Religious Studies, University of Waterloo


Date: Wednesday, November 26, 3:30-5:00 pm
Location: HH 280 - Refreshments will be served





If the harm done by pornography and the social threat it represents are so clear and obvious, then why are the arguments made against it so uniformly bad? In this lecture, Religious Studies professor and sociologist Doug Cowan explores the social construction of the porn threat. And what he says may surprise you. The size of the pornography industry, for example, is regularly over-estimated by at least an order of magnitude. There is little or no evidence for anything called “porn addiction.” And the evidence for the variety of harm narratives by which alarm over pornography is raised is thin at best. That is, the antiporn crusade, whether religious or secular, looks like other later modern moral panics, which raises the question: Why is that we think the way we do?

Doug Cowan is a Professor of Religious Studies and Social Development at Renison University College.  He is the author or editor of ten books and numerous articles and essays.

Sponsored by the University of Waterloo Department of Religious Studies.
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