It’s like bathroom habits or masturbation: you just don’t talk about it. Then, all of a sudden, it’s on your required reading list.

Pornography was once a topic heavily debated but rarely studied. Now, academics are beginning to find substance in the once disgraceful genre. Pornography is becoming a trendy topic intellectually, and what Time magazine has dubbed “the porn curriculum” has slowly trickled into to Northwestern academics.

Students and professors alike are becoming more interested in using pornography as a tool for studying everything from history to science.

“Pornography has many uses beyond the classic one-handed one,” radio-TV-film Prof. Laura Kipnis writes in her book “Bound and Gagged.”

She writes that pornography is “profoundly and paradoxically social, but even more than that, it’s acutely historical. It’s an archive of data about both our history as a culture and our own individual histories-“

And this is exactly the idea that English lecturer Bill Savage plays off in his Spring Quarter literature class –