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Student sex rags surface across US

Publications include erotic fiction and nude photographs of university students

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BOSTON: Once a semester, Rice University students in Houston gather for ‘sex-trivia pub night’ to test one another’s knowledge of all things sexual. The students divide themselves into teams and, after a few rounds of erotically charged questions, the members of the most sexually knowledgeable team win $20 tabs at the on-campus, student-run hangout.

Hosted by Open magazine, whose pages include nude photos of Rice students, the goal of trivia night is to help students talk comfortably about their sexuality. “Our generation is growing up in a time with moral codes that are preached by Christianity,” said Rachel Solnick, Open editor in chief and Rice sophomore. “But if you’re not religious, you have to have your own moral compass.”

Some publications include erotic fiction and nude or semi-nude photographs of their students, which creates an uncomfortable balance for school administrators as students increasingly come under the influence of sexual material on TV and the Internet, experts said.

“Students are becoming more openly questioning of authority and what’s acceptable,” said Robert Gaines, an adolescent psychologist in New York.

At Rice, 1,500 copies of the first issue of Open magazine were distributed free of charge last spring to students. The magazine was funded by a $3,300 grant from the Dr. Bill Wilson Student Initiative Grant.

At Columbia University in New York, C-Spot is another publication aimed at promoting intelligent conversation about sexual behaviours and norms. It operates independently of the school.

“C-Spot is a means for students to combine the intellectual, academic and creative with the erotic,” said Jessica Tang, a Columbia College senior and the editor in chief, C-Spot.

The online publication Diamond, for example, is less concerned with the intellectual aspects of sexuality in favour of exposing the sexy side of Harvard University’s student body, according to its editor.

But some Harvard students are uncomfortable with the idea of women being portrayed as sex objects in such a magazine on their own college campus.

Such debate comes as no surprise to students and faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, where the university-supported Student Forum on Sexuality has published X Magazine once a semester since 2003. Dedicated to the ‘exploration of sexual culture’, X Magazine aims to provide students with a forum to communicate about ‘the developmental task of becoming sexually mature’.

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