Daily · Dreamtime

User-Friendly? Alecia Oleyourryk, a founder of the unblushingly lewd and "sex positive" Boink.

saw an ad for nude models. It had been posted by Boink, a glossy new sex magazine by and about college students founded by Alecia Oleyourryk, then a senior at nearby Boston University, and Christopher Anderson, a software consultant in his 30s moonlighting as a photographer



These days, when anyone can run a virtual media empire out of a dorm room, student-generated sex magazines, some with the imprimatur of university financing and faculty advisers, are becoming a fact of campus life. Their subjects and contributors are the gals — and guys — down the hall; their target audience is male, female, straight, gay and everything in between. Not all are as overtly titillating as Boink. The grande dame of the group is Squirm, a “magazine of smut and sensibility,” which has been circulating since 2000 at Vassar, once the inspiration for the awkward lunges and contraceptive pessaries of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel “The Group.” Topics considered within its pages have included bondage and sadomasochism, the history of the condom and the fluidity of gender. At Yale, there is the earnest, instructive SWAY, whose title is an acronym for Sex Week at Yale, a student-run symposium held biennially there since 2002, with administrative blessing and a corporate sponsor, Pure Romance, a company whose representatives sell sexual aids for women at Tupperware-like “parties.” The premiere edition included a slightly breathless interview with the porn star Jesse Jane along with an essay by the conservative Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., a former Yale economics lecturer, which concluded: “Marriage is for lovers. Hooking up is for losers.” In 2004, H Bomb arrived at Harvard with slightly loftier intellectual aspirations: its founders, Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg and Camilla Hrdy, positioned it as a “literary arts magazine about sex and sexual issues.” Vita Excolatur followed shortly after at the University of Chicago (its title a truncated version of the university’s motto, translates roughly as “Life Enriched”), proclaiming itself “eager to engage all interested parties, from Republican pro-choicers to pro-Foucauldians.” And Columbia now has, simply, Outlet, whose second issue, published online in December 2006, includes a review of eight vibrators and an article on “vaginal personality” — shades of Dr. Betty Dodson, the masturbation instructress — subtitled “How snarky is your punani?”