<p>What's this I'm reading in the NY Times magazine about Boston U., Vassar, Columbia, Yale and Harvard having these soft porn student magazines with financial help from the Universities? Why would a woman that intelligent want to do something like that? They're brighter than Anna Nicole, right?</p>
<p>will you require any research assistants?</p>
<p>Are the people "posing" for the magazines students at the university? Hopefully, they don't aspire to a future in politics or anywhere in the public eye, for that matter. That stuff will come back to haunt them.</p>
<p>I once read where Harvard and Yale photographed all incoming freshmen nude-something called posture photographs.</p>
<p>I think the nude photographs were women's colleges: Wellesley, Barnard, maybe Radcliffe.</p>
<p>For what it's worth, my daughter says she knows practically everyone who has been photographed in the last couple issues of her college's sex mag. They're definitely all students or 2006 grads with a little FTL. They're into it. As far as I can tell, it's not remotely like Hustler or Penthouse, or really anything other than what you would expect from a bunch of arty, smart, not-quite-mature kids who, like every generation, are enormously proud of having invented sex and sexuality and anxious to explore them further (and to convince themselves that they really are confident and uninhibited).</p>
<p>"What's this I'm reading in the NY Times magazine about Boston U., Vassar, Columbia, Yale and Harvard having these soft porn student magazines with financial help from the Universities?" </p>
<p>I can't speak for the other school's, but BU's magazine is in no way affiliated with the university other than the fact that it is run by and features (primarily) students. The university does not fund nor approve of the magazine. Harvard's, on the other hand, is partially funded by the school.</p>
<p>"Why would a woman that intelligent want to do something like that? They're brighter than Anna Nicole, right?"</p>
<p>It's not just women who are posing. I'm sure that they each have their own reasons.</p>
<p>What's FTL JHS? When Playboy did their "Girls of the Ivies" issue, my friend's sister went for it. She's always regretted it. From what I've read in the article, these mags are pretty explicit with full frontal, etc. I still don't get it but you're probably right, JHS, they figure they've invented sexuality.</p>
<p>FTL = Failure To Launch, e.g., hanging around your college community after graduation with marginal, student-type employment and doing a lot of unpaid work for the student publication you helped found.</p>
<p>I haven't seen the magazine from D's school (and won't, probably), so I don't know what the precise mixture of art and genitals is. D (who wouldn't pose nude for anything, but that's not such a positive thing) says she doesn't mind seeing pictures of her actual friends -- she knows what their bodies look like, she understands what they're trying to do, she gets the joke -- but that it creeps her out to see explicit pictures of casual acquaintances.</p>