Marketing junior Brandon Dorner had no idea his “How to Seduce Women” class presentation would induce an Internet firestorm, let alone that LSU would take notice.
The video, which featured Dorner standing in front of his CMST 2060 public speaking class giving tips on how to entice women with a blow-up doll next to him, made the rounds on sites like BroBible and Jezebel before it was taken down from YouTube at the university’s request.
Dorner said the assignment, which he received a B- for, required students to give a demonstrative speech for five minutes in front of the class.
“It all started with me and my roommates joking that it would be funny if I had done my speech on that,” Dorner said. “I then realized this topic would get the class laughing and let them realize that tough classes like speech didn’t have to be a painful experience. So I went with it.”
While BroBible praised the presentation, Jezebel lampooned it, calling it sexist. Dorner said his intentions were not to demean, but to make the assignment enjoyable.
“The whole idea for the presentation was meant to be a satire of people who actually try to seduce women like this,” Dorner said. “So I thought of date scenarios and imagined some things that would get laughs because they would never actually work.”
Despite what he deems a misunderstanding of his intentions, Dorner said the video amused most people, which is ultimately what he wanted.
He said some in the media are misconstruing his intentions for the presentation, but he isn’t letting the critics get to him.
“This speech is making fun of people who actually think like this ,and I’m not upset about the people writing negative articles about me because I don’t actually believe these things,” Dorner said.
The LSU administration contacted Dorner after the video made waves and told him to take it down. Though he didn’t necessarily agree with taking his video down, Dorner said he understood the university’s reasoning and didn’t fight it.
On his Twitter feed, Dorner’s followers are clamoring for him to put the video back up, but he said he doesn’t think it will ever see the light of day again.
“I think most people will forget about it all in a week or so anyway,” Dorner said.
Nutrition junior Jaci Soileau, who was in class when Dorner gave his speech, said she was shocked.
“He’s like a really quiet guy in class, so it was very surprising,” Soileau said. “Especially when he brought up the blow-up doll. I never even heard him talk before, and then he pulls that.”
After the initial shock, Soileau said she found the speech funny and inoffensive and doesn’t believe it was necessary for the university to request that the video be taken down.
Soileau said that this particular CMST 2060 section is close, and everyone, including the professor, jokes around in this way. Understanding the dynamic of the classroom is important in determining whether or not the presentation was offensive, she said.
“If you took it literally, it was obviously pretty sexist,” Soileau said. “But he was just joking, so I didn’t find it offensive at all. He’s a nice guy. At the end of the speech he was like ‘that’s not really how you get women’ because he was scared that people would think it was offensive.”