And Hrdy said nothing in the first issue can be classified as pornographic.
“It’s about, what are you trying to get across with this photo,” Hrdy said. “I don’t think there’s anything in H Bomb that can be called porn...If you have a girl lying on a couch looking out provocatively, and it goes with an article, people can be aroused by it maybe, but that’s not the intention of the picture.”
The co-founders said photographs cannot be classified either as art or as porn without considering other factors.
“Of course it’s fuzzy and subjective,” Cieplak-von Baldegg said. “It’s context and it’s also the relationship between the photo and the viewer.”
And in a society already saturated with pornographic images, H Bomb Magazine tries to address sexuality in a non-exploitative way, Cieplak-von Baldegg said.
“Porn is already all over pop culture—we really don’t need more,” Cieplak-von Baldegg said. “We’re trying to get away from it.”
And since neither Cieplak-von Baldegg nor Hrdy is graduating this year, both will have at least two more chances to continue publishing their sex magazine.
“It’s hard doing it for the first time, because you do everything wrong several times before you get it right,” Cieplak-von Baldegg said.
—Staff writer Katharine A. Kaplan can be reached at kkaplan@fas.harvard.edu.