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Committee Vets Sex Magazine

College administrators express concerns about potential content

An “expose on the demented sex life of the Harvard Band,” a “photo essay” of art and porn, a “controversial fiction piece about female rape fantasies” and an article promoting abstinence are among the proposed contents for Harvard’s as-of-now officially approved student-run sex magazine, the topic of heated debate at yesterday’s Committee on College Life (CCL) meeting.

The committee reached no consensus yesterday on the status of the magazine, H Bomb, which made national headlines after its initial CCL approval as a Harvard publication on Feb. 10, based on reports that it would feature nude photographs of undergraduates.

Two days after the approval, the College released a statement saying that it would not fund the magazine and that it would reconsider its official status as a Harvard publication.

At yesterday’s CCL meeting, Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser, the Faculty adviser for H Bomb, pleaded the magazine’s case and discussed a preliminary table of contents for its first issue.

While the 23 proposed magazine entries are predominantly written works, yesterday’s debate revolved around the proposal of a “photo essay...that addresses the ambiguity” between art and pornography “by looking at a spectrum of photos, from acceptable/artistically evocative to unacceptable/too provocative.”

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Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd, who said she has received “thousands of calls” about H Bomb, said she worries that posing in the magazine could give students “exposure that in 20 years they’d wish they hadn’t gotten.”

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, who was absent at the initial CCL meeting where H Bomb was approved, said at yesterday’s meeting that a magazine fostering “serious discussion of sexuality” would be “entirely reasonable,” though the appearance of nude photographs would be “objectionable.”

But Hauser said H Bomb is a literary effort responding to “interesting, important, pressing issues dealing with sexuality that needed a forum for discussion,” and insisted that the magazine has been misrepresented in the media.

The two students who proposed the magazine, Katharina C. Baldegg ’06 and Camilla A. Hrdy ’05, and its newly-announced co-adviser, Adams House Senior Tutor and Lecturer on Psychology Michael R. Rodriguez, were not present at yesterday’s meeting.

Several CCL members expressed support yesterday for a system of “guidelines” to submit to H Bomb’s editors in order for the publication to maintain its official status.

If H Bomb would not adhere to these rules, CCL members proposed, it would lose the Harvard stamp of approval.

But Hauser said he would rather the magazine receive no College support from the beginning if it might end up losing that support down the road.

“I don’t want this to happen, but it’d be better to say no now,” Hauser said.

Some CCL members raised concerns about possible inconsistencies in Harvard’s approach to free speech if it were to restrict material to fixed guidelines. They cited the inclusion of sexually explicit artwork and writing in other student publications, such as the Harvard Advocate, and in Harvard-sponsored art exhibitions.

Kidd said she was worried about a “slippery slope if we ask something not to be published,” adding that censoring nude photographs in a student publication might not be legal.

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