Monday, March 5, 2007
Degree Fetishism: The ‘Times’ Does College Sex Magazines
filed under: We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira
Sunday’s New York Times magazine goes for deep coverage on college sex magazines, but not without playing the “educated elite” (their words, too) want their sex all classy-like bit to the hilt, with breezy and vaguely creepy extended profiles of the publishers of BOINK and H BOMB (Boston and Harvard University, respectively).
Takeaway: as long as you aren’t getting paid for it, and as long as you’re at a good school, and as long as it’s not on the internet, taking a few naked photos won’t tarnish your campus reputation wholesale (but people will still wonder if you’re capable of “real relationships” and other such rubbish even the most innocent of MySpace queens is accused of these days). Once you call your naked posing professional and ask for a paycheck, that’s when you cross into the province of the rubes who populate the rest of pornography (you know, the stuff the elite still jack it to just as hard, yet they just don’t write Sunday Times magazine features about).
We make no bones about pandering to the “erotic elite” here at Sexerati, but that’s not to say we cater to class war, either. Oddly enough, we, too, were making smut in our undergrad years, both Lux and I, though we both took the more entrepreneurial route and started businesses of our own. Fancy that, getting paid for it — so, then, no, it’s not a surprise that of all the college sex magazines, only BOINK pays their models, and still runs the gamut from explicit imagery to sex cultural commentary.
Giving a bit of an inch to the sex magazines who don’t think of themselves as pornographic, we also say, neither do we. True, one could say that any media that deals in sex can be pornographic, but one can also say that’s painfully simplistic (and honestly, were you snoring through Foucault?). We want to believe that there’s more to sex media than pornography, even if we can’t agree what pornography is. What is clear is that when sex media erupts that deals smartly with sex, old media doesn’t really know what to call it.
College sex magazines do have the potential to escape what we’ll henceforth call degree fetishism — but, that sort of cliche-breaking is hardly evident in the reportage on the magazines themselves. What’s true, as the Times reporter asserts, of college sex magazines — that there is something quaint in doing it in print these days — could surely equally apply to the print media in its covering of sex.
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meta meta, was that?
You mean us reporting on reporting on…? (This is how we do it, baby.)
I think that Boink is the only one of the major college sex mags (and how could the Times leave out UPenn’s Quake? For shame!) that is actually and unabashedly pornographic, and has no bones about marketing itself as such. The rest of them have to be more circumspect, if for no other reason than the grossly financial. Once you start paying models to pose explicitly, once it looks like you’re for-profit, once you get the label “pornography” applied to you, funds from your school’s activities programs start to dry up.
Also, it’s hard enough to find advertisers in a college sex mag when you’re marketing yourself as “sex-oriented” or even “erotica”. Once you cross the line to pornography, well, you’re no longer skirting the edge of the Pink Ghetto. You’re buried deep within, with all of the attendant issues.
I think that more of the college mags would be more daring and more willing to veer into daring territory if it weren’t for the financial issues, but as long as they’re dependent on school funding and squeamish local advertisers, that’s not likely to happen.