In conjunction with Women’s Week, OSAPR recently organized a screening of the documentary “The Price of Pleasure.” The film surveys the state of mainstream pornography, ultimately speculating that the problem with most erotic film is that it depicts sex, quite literally, through a single lens. Instead, Rankin suggests, we should be exposed to a plurality of sexuality and sexual experience.
“When I’ve heard sexuality experts talk about the erotic, it’s a critique of what’s happening, not that it is happening. They’re not saying ‘Let’s be puritanical and avoid all images of sexuality,’ but that we need more perspectives and more thoughtful discussion,” she said.
A BOY’S BEST FRIEND
For some artists, such thoughtful discussion is decidedly optional. When Matthew M. Di Pasquale ’09 was in middle school, his babysitter gave him a copy of Hustler. He found the nudity unpleasant at first, but nevertheless smelled opportunity. He began to buy issues for $20 from his babysitter, and then resell them to his classmates for $40. “I’ve been in the business for a while,” he joked.
Di Pasquale is the founder and editor-in-chief of Diamond Magazine. While not technically affiliated with Harvard, the publication is famous—or infamous—on campus. Very much in the tradition of men’s magazines like Playboy, Diamond contains editorial features on sex and dating as well as—the ‘money shot’—nude photographs of students. The Crimson’s own FlyByBlog has facetiously characterized Diamond as a reinvention of H BOMB including “all of the nudity without that stupid artsy shit.”
Funded largely by Di Pasquale himself, the first issue of Diamond was produced by a team of 15 students—mostly Di Pasquale’s high school friends who attended other colleges—and a photographer they found on Craigslist. In preparation for its September 2008 debut, Diamond advertised only through word of mouth, but coverage on blogs like Gawker and IvyGate quickly heightened the buzz. Di Pasquale estimates that the first issue, available for free online, was downloaded 10,000 times in the first three days. The second issue—which cost $9.99 to read beyond a free sample—sold over 100 copies.
Di Pasquale himself has achieved a certain measure of personal notoriety as the only model to pose nude in the magazine’s first issue. He doesn’t regret the decision, but admits he wasn’t fully prepared for the consequences. “Now I let models know from experience,” said Di Pasquale, “Your picture’s going to be on the internet and shit and you might get a lot of attention.”
Diamond seeks to recruit Ivy League models, though the staff have received an excess of submissions from students from other schools. They have also heard from Ivy League students “[who are] maybe not really beautiful or whatever.” Di Pasquale thinks this qualification is key to the magazine’s appeal—“[Readers think,] ‘Oh, my god, I can’t believe [an Ivy Leaguer] would do that.’ When people think Ivy League, they think of someone ready for a career in finance, pretty conservative.”
He doesn’t worry too much about the ideological implications of his product. “[Diamond is] not really artsy, but I wouldn’t call it porn,” he said. “But who really cares?” Overall, Di Pasquale considers Harvard to be quite liberal in its acceptance of sex. And University censorship? Di Pasquale doesn’t think it’s a problem: “According to the First Amendment, they don’t limit speech and stuff.”
But maybe we’re not all the way there yet. “[Harvard should have] a wild sex show in the Agassiz Theater,” he suggested, “That would be the most badass fun ever.” It seems—if we can justify its scholastic purpose—the University might be up for the challenge.
—Staff writer Molly O. Fitzpatrick can be reached at fitzpat@fas.harvard.edu.