Porn U

The New York Times reported Sunday that the University of Chicago which as the Times describes as being known more for its intellectual rigor than raw libido now has a X-rated magazine. Actually the magazine Vita Excolatur has been publishing since 2004, but the Times apparently decided to highlight it as an example of a disturbing trend of porn magazines developed and distributed on college and university campuses across the country.

In the case of Vita it operates on about $6,000 of student activities fees per year. Albeit it isn’t a great deal of money, but what are mandatory fees doing funding a porn magazine? As everyone knows students must pay these fees, but they have no say in how the funds are used. In 2004 at Harvard the undergraduate council gave the H Bomb $2,000 (again student money) to start publication. Yes it is another porn magazine and yes the majority of the students who pay the fees have no say in the how the funds are spent.

The granddaddy of the current crop of campus porn magazines is Sex Week At Yale (SWAY) where this year they printed 25,000 copies and distributed them to 18 universities, mostly but not limited to the Ivy League schools. It was bad enough that they were producing this material to begin with. Now they are exporting it to other schools. The magazine can afford to do this because it is underwritten by a company that sells sex-enhancing products. This leads to such intellectually riveting articles like ” 10 Things to Know Before You Get in Bed” or “Condoms 101: How to Choose the Right Condom”. Just the kind of information I could have used when I was in college.

At least at Boston University where students independently publish Boink, the university has banned the publication from being sold in bookstores near campus. Yet that hasn’t affected sales which the Times reported to be 20,000 a month at $7.95 a pop.

One question I have is where are the feminist groups and victim’s rights groups? I thought they were against treating women as sex objects and that pornography has resulted in violence against women. Why aren’t they protesting this debasement of women? It’s because to do so would be politically incorrect and the last thing these types of groups want to be accused of is that.

It must be so reassuring to parents that are forking out $40,000 plus a year to send their children to these institutions of higher learning that the topic of sex is so widely embraced and discussed.

For me it’s just another reason to be thankful that I can give my daughter a porn free education for a fraction of the cost at Yale.

Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media, AIA’s parent organization.