Stanford undergraduate Senior Mandy Thompson is reportedly writing her capstone thesis for the Film and Media Studies major on a production called “Shower Thots 4”, a modestly budgeted but well-received 2015 adult movie. The thesis is still in progress, but when completed will contain a complete analysis of all the various symbols and artistic choices used in the work as well as arguments for the significance of the work as it relates to broader themes in the world, like sex, but also, coitus.
Like many humanities students at Stanford, Thompson has chosen her major and topic out of intellectual interest, not practicality, and that fiery passion shows through her remarkable enthusiasm for her work. “Shower Thots 4—or ST4, as I call it—has a lot of nuanced things to say about human sexuality,” she explained.
“Here, at 10:53? The phallus penetrating the outer layers of the pudenda seen in the shot is representative of psychosexual anal retentiveness—that’s a little too out there for me to explain right, but if you reference the color of the curtains at 6:22 with Freud’s model of unconscious fixations, my theory pretty much confirms itself. To use a layman’s terms, the pecker says it all.
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Thompson was also happy to tell us how she first became interested in Shower Thots 4, and pornography as a broader medium, for exploring significant cultural ideas through an academic lens. “I noticed that I tended to spend a lot of time writing comments discussing various merits or weaknesses of adult movies, and getting into arguments with people doing the same. From there, I sort of naturally became interested in more formal critical analysis, looking up sources on pornography, and so on. Today, I can spend hours watching porn wherever I want—in the bathroom, in class, at the park—which is great because it’s all research! I’m quite productive, really. To others, it might seem that I’m watching a man penetrate himself with a watermelon in the middle of this Starbucks for my own pleasure, but in fact I am witnessing a profound analogy of oedipal transference.
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After graduating, Thompson plans to explore the possibility of entering academia under the same field of study, which she describes as “somewhere between sexuality and cinematography, with a side of sociology”. She also believes that there’s a lot more work to be done. “A lot of people watch porn to get off, which frankly is just ridiculous. Why do that when you could be examining parallels between ‘Lemon-Stealing Whores’ and Moby Dick, or interpreting ‘Humans Having Sex 5342” through a pseudo-anthropological/Hegelian lens?
Poor isn’t about sex. It’s about the metaphysical essence of humankind.”
