U. Virginia: Boston U. student starts erotic magazine on campus.

(From University Wire)

Byline: Alex Sellinger

This fall on college campuses all across America, students tried out for a plethora of different activities. Here at the University of Virginia, they ranged from club sports teams to the University Guides Service. At Boston University this fall, 85 students came to try out for an activity of a different sort, the opportunity to pose in Boink Magazine, despite the consternation of BU administrators. Fifteen were given the nod and posed nude in the first issue, which appeared Feb. 17.

The resulting Boink Magazine, subtitled "the college guide to carnal knowledge," includes 15 models in various types of pictorials: male and female -- with heterosexual and homosexual sex acts. The magazine includes articles such as "The Straight Girls Guide to Sleeping with Chicks," "Sex in the City," and "Virginity, Not Purity," among other salacious reads.

"Our [magazine] is porn," said Alecia Oleyourrk, a Boston University senior who is founder, editor-in-chief, and a model for the upstart magazine. "It's meant to arouse, it's meant to excite." Other forms of this media have emerged among Boston-area colleges. Harvard University's newest campus magazine, the H-Bomb, rolled out in May 2004, with the approval of the administration's Committee for Campus Life. The magazine describes itself on its Web site as "racy, yes -- porn, no." None of the magazine's staff returned repeated requests for comment.

"The general consensus is that there was a lot of hype around [the H-Bomb], and it didn't really live up to it," said Chris Anderson, a Boston photographer who shot some of the photos and did some of the artistic work for the first issue of the H-Bomb before working with Oleyourrk on Boink.

The arrangement at Harvard drew criticism from people at all ends of the spectrum of opinion. Some felt the administration had no business sponsoring such a magazine. "The fact that the school allowed its name to be on that publication is a reflection of what is and isn't a concern at Harvard," said Bob Peters, president of Morality in Media.