Ivy League Sex Magazines/NYT

[This was in the education supplement in Sunday's NYT, so you might have missed it. Somehow, although the sexual revolution was in full swing at Yale when I was there in 1982, I am still capable of being queered by this part : "The magazine, which runs mainly on student activities fees (about $6,000 a year), can show full-frontal nudity but not an erection or intercourse, according to an agreement with the administration. Its pages are reviewed three times by administrators before publication. . ."

This part is just gross (Do the kids realize who else is looking at them?): "Dean Kidd, of course, is not the target audience (though she flips through it with fellow administrators to see which students they know)."

This idea however, is simply quaint: "A few years ago, sex columnists sprung up in scores of college newspapers, from Yale to the University of Kansas to the University of California, Berkeley, tackling previously taboo topics like fake orgasms and favorite positions."

'Previously taboo'? Have none of these kids ever read Redbook? Maggie]

"Straddling the boundary between pornography and art, Vita is one of a spate of sex magazines to emerge on elite campuses since Squirm, at Vassar College, broke the buff barrier in 1999. The newest made its debut on Valentine's Day and takes its name from Sex Week at Yale, a biennial assortment of panels and parties. H Bomb, at Harvard, also carries the occasional footnote but shows much more skin than Vita and Sex Week at Yale: The Magazine.

. . .SINCE its inaugural issue in October 2004, Vita has been a constant challenge for a university trying to balance ideals of academic freedom and its role in loco parentis. The magazine, which runs mainly on student activities fees (about $6,000 a year), can show full-frontal nudity but not an erection or intercourse, according to an agreement with the administration. Its pages are reviewed three times by administrators before publication, and student models must sign releases before they shed their clothes and again on seeing the photos, when many balk. . .

"My mother said, 'I'm so proud of you' and my dad threw it out," Ms. Rutherfurd said. "My mother said 'I'm so proud of you' kind of awkwardly." Ming Vandenberg, a Harvard junior who is president of H Bomb, said her parents "always want to encourage me to do whatever I want to do," but quickly added, "They're happy as long as I'm not in it."

. . .Mr. Kelly and other models, who do not get paid, said posing for Vita had given them a kind of sexual cachet on campus. And Ms. Rutherfurd said she rarely had trouble recruiting for photo shoots. But Emma Bernstein, a photographer for Vita and other campus publications, said she got a lot of strange looks after shooting a spread on sadomasochism. "I had to keep explaining myself to people at parties," she said. "People saw my name associated with that, and their entire perception of me changed." . . .

A few years ago, sex columnists sprung up in scores of college newspapers, from Yale to the University of Kansas to the University of California, Berkeley, tackling previously taboo topics like fake orgasms and favorite positions.

. . ."To me it's like the floodgates have been opened," said Natalie Krinsky, who wrote the Sex in the Elm City column in The Yale Daily News before graduating in 2004, and has recently moved to Los Angeles to adapt her book, "Chloe Does Yale," for the screen. "When you're 18, you're always going to want to push the envelope a little bit more, see what you can get away with."

. . .Pamela Paul, author of the 2005 book "Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families," said the sex magazines represented a 180-degree shift in college women's attitudes toward pornography in just the 15 years since she attended Brown University.

"Porn is cool, porn is hip, porn is not something to get upset about on college campuses today," Ms. Paul said. "College women have really bought into both the pornography industry's way of spinning porn — this is hip, sexy, harmless entertainment and women should really get in on it — and the new academic perspective on pornography — as long as we own our sexuality and it's our choice, then, great, more power to us."

She describes the trend as "pathetic."

Dean Kidd imagines what would happen if an H Bomb model "was running for governor of California" someday. "Students as a whole don't tend to think about what the impact of what they do now is going to have on what they do later," she said. Dean Kidd, of course, is not the target audience (though she flips through it with fellow administrators to see which students they know). . ."
posted by maggie at 8:37 PM | link

1 Comments:

At 4/24/2006 12:59 PM,  Dr J Roback Morse said...

Maggie
your readers might be interested to know that I was a contributor to this year's Sex Week at Yale magazine. The student editor had seen an interview with me somewhere on-line. He thought the students would benefit from my perspective. My article is called, "Go Organic: Why to give up casual sex."

 

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