Objectify This

Stripping to pay for college is fairly common these days, leading some to question where the power lies in the profession in today’s sex-positive atmosphere: with the customer or the stripper? Across the East Coast, students at colleges and universities have been breaking into another sexy industry: pornography. In this article from the New York Times, Alexandra Jacobs lists off the schools sprouting ‘zines with titles like Boink (Boston University) and H Bomb (Harvard). There’s the tame SWAY (Sex Week At Yale), and the lofty-sounding Vita Excolatur from UChicago, Squirm at Vassar, and Outlet at Columbia.

Yet Jacob’s article notes a decorousness “primness” in these magazines which is not found in its commercially-driven competitors such as Playboy’s “Girls of the Ivy League.” The magazines do not want to titillate just anybody: “We try to limit unwanted exposure as much as we can,” according to Squirm’s editor, Sarah Fraser, in an e-mail message. “It’s one thing to know you’re posing nude or writing erotica for an insulated campus, and understandably quite another to know it’s being disseminated widely.”

According to Jacobs, after a brief initial flurry of publicity, Kimi Traube, one of Outlet’s founders, began declining interviews from noncampus press. “We’re flattered by all the attention but have decided it’s best for the magazine to focus our energies on the Columbia community,” she said, also via e-mail. The current editor of H Bomb, Ming Vandenberg, is especially concerned about the security of the magazine’s content on the Web. “I am trying to design a foolproof plan to prevent any negative externalities,” she said, adding with a note of horror, “There could be a photo of a clothed Harvard student that someone goes into, chops the head off and puts it on an unclothed body.”

But the fact that any photograph of a Harvard student could be defiled in this manner does not prevent the wide circulation of, say, applications for admission to Harvard, which also feature the shining faces of Harvard students.

So, we want sex, and we want public sex, but not too public. Why not? Would it really be so much worse to expose yourself to a complete stranger than that guy who you were once in a big lecture class with? This fear of The Public seems like an elitist argument, considering the class divisions in the United States today.

Aside from the issue of distribution, what leads to these publications in the first place? What separates them from commercial porn? Well, in the first place, these magazines don’t consider themselves porn, per se. As Jacobs observes, “while all strive to be provocative after a fashion, they generally eschew the term “pornographic,” hurling it as an insult with the good-natured mutual contempt of varsity football teams. “Outlet … is not intended to be porn,” sniffs a December letter from Traube to readers, saucily addressed “Dear Hotbottoms.” “They do a very good job of that over at Harvard.” On their Web site, Harvard staff members retort: “If you aren’t mature enough to tell the difference between playful nudity and pornography you probably shouldn’t be reading H Bomb.”

Boink is the exception: its co-founder and first-issue covergirl, Alecia Oleyourryk, (above) calls it “user-friendly porn,” while Jacobs characterizes it as “an unblushing assortment of bared private parts, lewd prose and graphic caricatures. With its panoply of contributors — about 50 percent of whom are enrolled at B.U., most of the rest at other colleges — Boink is the most independent and commercially ambitious of the pack, and at first glance the least interested in critical thought. It retails for $7.95 at Newbury Comics and other stores in the Boston area, has a print run of 10,000 and, atypically for a college publication, pays its contributors. Boink has also sponsored a number of parties, some shut down by the police for under-age drinking. Recalling one of these events, [Oleyourryk's cofounder] Aaron Foster said enthusiastically: “Girls walk around with their tops off. But it’s just a party. My buddy was convinced there was some secret orgy room. I was like, Dude, there is no secret orgy room!”

Regardless of this disappointment, Oleyourryk has appeared on Howard Stern’s radio talk show and has a book coming out from Warner in time for spring break 2008. In addition to its success, Boink can boast the endorsement of B.U.’s Women’s Center, because its photographs feature both men and women.

Heather Foley, a senior political science major at B.U. and the head of the Women’s Center, told Jacobs that “What really stood out is that there were male students in it . . . it was sort of alternative. It kind of equalized it: gay men could look at it, women could look at it, and that was great. Women as objects, men as objects.” But, she also added, “I believe Andrea Dworkin, that porn perpetuates violence against women,” she said. “Most pornography is just women. Boink is different in that way, but because porn does feed into that system, I tend to be against it in general, and I don’t think just because we’re putting men in it that makes it O.K. But it’s a step forward that men are being put in it.”

But the fact that Oleyourryk, as a woman, has any say at all in the matter is interesting. The majority of women who work in the porn industry have no creative or editorial control over the images of them which are published: they are treated like objects. Boink is revoluntary not just because it has men in the photographs but because Oleyourryk is in the photographs, and in the editorial staff. This kind of object/subject dualism is almost never seen in the mass media, and rarely in the field of art. One place it is seen, though, is in Francesca Woodman.

Like Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and many talented female artists before her, Francesca Woodman (see top photograph, and those below,) committed suicide when she realized that she would never be recognized for her artistic talent.

Woodmanwas a photographer who positioned herself as simultaneous female object and subject of her photography, exploring the objectifying and subjectifying gaze and the spectrum of identifications in between. Her work:

explores the role of the female as object and subject in a playful, intellectual manner.