Bared in Boston
By Libby Copeland Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 8, 2005; Page C01
Alecia Oleyourryk is a fast-talking, jumpy senior at Boston University. When she's really concentrating, like now, she picks at her cuticles with a thumbtack.
"Desperately grasping his damp skin," she says, picking away and reading aloud from a computer screen. She is editing her new campus sex magazine, called Boink, due out in February. The idea is to beat the Harvard students who last year published a campus sex magazine called H Bomb with references to Freud, French structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, along with skin shots such as a naked guy in an Einstein wig.
Desperately grasping . . .
She doesn't like the "grasping."
"What would you use -- 'cling'?" asks Christopher Anderson, 38, her co-founder. He is not a BU student but he is a man fond of photographing young people who wear no clothes.
They're reading an account of sex in a Fenway Park bathroom during a Red Sox game. The piece is tentatively titled "Heading for Home" and includes the phrase "forcefully pushing me against the baby-changing station." It's supposed to be true, but it reminds you of those letters to the editor that start, "Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me, but . . ."
Oleyourryk and Anderson promise more nudity than Harvard delivered -- naughty bits and everything. Faces, too. (Many of the models in Harvard's magazine didn't want their faces shown. Something about wanting careers.) The Harvard editor says her magazine isn't porn, that it serves as "a rebellion against all of our porn-saturated popular culture." Boink has a different ethos.
"It is porn," Oleyourryk says. "There's nothing wrong with porn. Porn has such a negative connotation."
Oleyourryk is skinny but takes up a lot of space. She pulls her wavy blond hair into a messy ponytail. Her closet is a technicolor chaos of shoes, metallic blue pumps and metallic pink pumps with extremely high heels. What appears to be a red thong dangles from a pull on her bureau, and her bra lies on the couch in the living room of her off-campus apartment.
There have been sex magazines at Vassar, Oberlin and Swarthmore, a Sex Week panel at Yale and S&M parties at Bard. As far back as the '70s, University of Chicago students held a "lascivious costume ball," to which students showed up in various states of undress. But Boink is mostly focused on outdoing Harvard. Oleyourryk exhibits an intercollegiate competitiveness that most students reserve for football rankings and U.S. News & World Report scores.
Unlike H Bomb, she says, Boink will not have "artsy" sex, which is to say "sex that's okay." There will be fewer avant-garde photographs of girls covered in gold paint or slimy hair, or guys with their nether regions tastefully obscured by shadow. There will instead be a well-lit close-up of a guy's nether region, and a review of a sex toy called the BedBuddy, and photographs of guys kissing, and a heavily tattooed woman clothed only by a huge snake. While H Bomb has university approval and was given a $2,000 grant from the student government, Boink has been shunned by the BU administration and is beholden to no one.
"We can do whatever we want," Oleyourryk says.
Oleyourryk, 21, felt it would be hypocritical for her not to pose for Boink while asking others to, so she did two photo shoots with a 20-year-old student named Erica Blom. She and Blom didn't know each other before they started working on the magazine, but during the first photo shoot they got to know each other more via a kissing session. Oleyourryk says it felt weird and she tried to imagine Blom as a boy.
I've kissed my friends before but not passionately," she says. "Just like, 'Hey, we're drunk and betcha if we kiss, he'll give us a free beer.' "
The magazine's prospective cover came out of the women's second photo session, when they'd apparently gotten to know each other even better. In it, Oleyourryk is wearing only a pair of frilly red panties and her hand is wandering down Blom's torso.
Go BU! Beat Harvard.
A white-tail buck deer named Goliath stands in the field of Rodney and Diane Miller's farm in Knox, Pa., Aug. 5, 2003. Goliath, a massive buck with a huge rack and worth perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars, died, Dec. 6, 2004.