This petition is to express our unwielding support for and solidarity with Routledge Press in the wake of a recent campaign to distort and ultimately destroy their proposed Porn Studies Journal program, which was created to provide an effective alternative to the dominant prevailing paradigm debate about pornography and its societal impact. It is also in response to a counter-petition currently being put out by the antipornography group Stop Porn Culture, which seeks to impose their ideological and institutional controls onto the project through willfull distortion and libelous misinformation about the project, and to further their goal of stigmatizing and ultimately silencing alternative liberatory and progressive viewpoints about porn and its impact on culture, politics, and society. Over the past 20 years, active sex workers, porn performers, and progressive porn producers and consumers have emerged to challenge the prevailent conservative and "radical feminist" beliefs about pornography...yet, those voices have never had the same academic and institutional outreach as had the traditional antiporn opposition. This journal is specifically designed to be that counterspace for actual study and rigorous discussion and debate to be supported. It is designed to expressively expand the debate and discussion...which probably explains the degree of intensity of the efforts of the other side to premptly attack it even before it gets off the ground. It is no surprise that one of the main signatories of that petition is Wheelock College Professor Gail Dines, a long-time prominent antiporn activist whom has not only had a longstanding open bias against consensual adult sexual media, but has often resorted to ad hominen scapegoating and name calling in the face of evidence refuting her assumptions about porn as essentially "hate speech" against women and a template for rape and "degradation" of women. It is also not surprising that a significant majority of the sponsors and signatories of the counterpetition are either right-wing cultural activists who are devoted to using the issue of porn as a wedge to undercut women's autonomy (even as they hail themselves as "feminists"), or self-approved/self-appointed "experts" claiming scientific proof of the alleged harms of pornography, even when their "evidence" turns out to be assumed hearsay and invented out of thin air. But even more offensive than the arguments put forth against the Routledge study, is the basic fact that opponents seek once again to intimidate and silence their critics into submission, and use the stigmatizing label "pro-porn" as a means of subverting academic study and academic integrity. McCarthyism, whether political or sexual, has no place in an academic environment. We hope that Routledge stands tall and resists the urge to surrender to such tactics, and continues to stand for full scholarship and academic rigor, and proceeds to properly fund and support this endeavor.

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