Brandeis Women Counter Porn Film

WALTHAM--The women's coalition at Brandeis University presented a series of erotic films last night as an alternative to a hard-core pornographic movie simultaneously shown by the school's student programming board.

"We are playing these films to protest the violence the pornography attaches to sex," Julie Reuben, the head of the women's coalition, told about 100 people who had gathered to see erotica.

"The women's group is not puritanically opposed to sex, but rather we are favorable towards films that do not portray women as willingly subservient to violent sex, acts," she explained.

But larger crowds of mostly women waited in line to see the pornographic film "Debbie Does Dallas," sponsored by the programming board. The board, responsible for scheduling student activities, had scheduled "Deep Throat" to run, but because of Middlesex County Laws ruling the movie obscene, the student group could not run the movie without the risk of legal prosecution. "We saw what happened at Harvard when they showed the movie," Bill Mandell, the head of the group said yesterday.

Last year two Harvard juniors were arrested after a heavily-protested playing of "Deep Throat" in the Quincy house dining hall.

Each year during the weekend before exams, the board shows a pornographic film to relieve the tension of study pressures, Mandell said. "We let off steam here," one student attending "Debbie Does Dallas" said, as his female escort added that "most of the women here do not condone the violence of the sex--we are just curious."

Many of those who attended the erotic films said they do not consider their presence as a protest. "I was just glad to be given a choice," one student said, adding, "because of the beauty of eroticm films I at least have a chance for the arousal that pornography cannot give."

Despite the differing views of the two groups, leaders of both called freedom of expression an important goal and did not call for suppression of the other's film. "With the new right in politics, such freedom to show films and express opinions may well be stifled," a women's coalition member said, adding, "it's important that we do what we can now."