Read on Twitter
1. Explicit content warning: I’m about to retweet pictures of vulvas.
http://2.Fun fact: I was called into the Dean’s office last year after an academic in my Faculty made a formal complaint to the University that I had retweeted this tweet from @MsOeming
3. This isn’t a formal University account. But my handle is @profalanmckee, and I mainly use it to tweet academic stuff. And at the time I was the Associate Dean Research for the Faculty and most of my tweets were selfies of work meetings.
4. On the other hand, my research is about “Entertainment-education for healthy sexual development” (as per my bio) – in clickbait terms, the effects of porn on young people.
5. There exists significant public concern that young people are getting unrealistic ideas about body shapes from pornography – and particularly worries that porn’s representations of vulvas are leading girls to seek labiaplasty http://bbc.in/34WUjLA
6. There are problems with that argument. For example, pornography shows young people a wider range of genitalia than they might see in other ways.
7. And if we’re concerned that young people have unrealistic views of genitalia then the solution is to make more, and more varied, representations of genitalia available to young people – not less.
8. For example, I’ve argued in the past that it would be great if every school kid in Australia got a copy of the book “I’ll Show You Mine”, http://amzn.to/2MnkOU3
9. This book contains non-sexual close-up photos of sixty vulvas each with a short piece written by the person photographed where they talk about their genitalia and their relationship with them
10. But I’ve also written about the fact that it would be very difficult – impossible? – to let young people see a range of what human genitals look like because there would be an immediate moral panic about sexualising children http://bit.ly/3hGZJjb
11. So we complain that young people feel shame about their genitals … while insisting that they must be taught to be ashamed about the existence of genitals.
12. So the retweet was directly related to my research. Showing people the range of vulvas in porn. Not vulvas being penetrated. Simply vulvas existing. And in that context it was deeply ironic that an academic complained about it and I was called into the Dean’s office.
13. Shoutout to the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences Prof Alan Davison who was very civilized about the whole “Professor retweeting pictures of vulvas” conversation.
14. Anyway, we agreed that as my account was primarily used for posting selfies of work meetings there wasn’t sufficient warning for any innocent academics who accidentally stumbled across pictures of genitalia and were upset by that.
15. And in retrospect I still agree with that. Ethical pornography is about consumption as much as production, and I have no wish to shove sexually explicit materials down people’s throats. See our chapter about appropriate signage of porn http://bit.ly/2WXaYdx
16. So we agreed that I would change my settings to “Mark media you Tweet as having material that may be sensitive”, change my bio to note that my tweets are “Not always Safe For Work - reader beware!”
17. And we agreed I'd be more thoughtful about how I presented explicit material on my account while I was ADR in the Faculty. I stepped down from the role in August 2020.
18. As a side note, at that meeting we discussed that an academic in the Faculty had also complained that in my ADR role I’d used the phrase “Fuck a baby” in a School meeting. Which to be fair, I did, but not in an aggressive way.
19. Happy ending: I’m still at UTS, now ADR in UTS Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, which does AMAZING work. And the staff at Jumbunna sometimes swear, and are not shocked by vulgarity. Hurrah!
