Not Thinking. Just Kidding.

Want to insult a male Harvard student these days? Call him an "Edge Man" and watch him wince.

He'll wince because he'll be thinking about the guy on the cover of Inside Edge, the national publishing venture headed by a couple of Eliot House students. The Edge Man stands sandwiched between two female models, his hand resting uncomfortably high on one woman's thigh. He's smiling, but he looks a little baffled, as if he were wondering how an ordinary kid like him got so lucky.

"Battled" is the best way to describe campus reaction to Inside Edge. Students were baffled that something so inane, and so apparently misogynistic, could make it to the newstands--and baffled that something this moronic could come from Harvard undergraduates.

And some were a little fearful, perhaps, that Inside Edge really endorses a spree of misogyny--and that the rest of the world will follow suit. It is by Harvard students, after all, so it must be inspired by brilliance, driven by a grand scheme. But in their enthusiasm for conspiracy theories and their eagerness to point out the threat of the patriarchy, most students haven't examined what the magazine's editors are actually thinking. Are they misogynistic--or just misguided?

Perspective writers Craig Briskin and Jesse Furman consider Inside Edge a funeral dirge for the nation's future, "vivid proof of what many of us may have suspected for a while ... many of the best and brightest in our generation have already sold out."

Their indictment includes a list of sexist statements taken from the magazine. Some of Inside Edge, to be sure, is pretty atrocious. The article "How to Tell When a Woman Wants it Bad" advises men to treat the casual brush of an arm as a sure sign of foreplay: "An accident. Yeah, right. It's never an accident." Looks like sexism ... sounds like sexism. Yet the men behind Inside Edge vehemently insist that their magazine is not misogynistic. They say it's funny.

What about "Ask Mike," who advises one reader who's thinking about dating a "slut" to "tell the slut to give me a call"?

"Ask Mike' is definitely tongue-in-cheek," Inside Edge Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Hsu '94 tells me, nothing a disclaimer that bids readers to ignore Mike's "advice." I ask Hsu to show me which segments of his magazine are tongue-in-cheek. He points to nearly every page. But the word he uses is "entertaining."

Inside Edge Publisher Aaron Shapiro '94 says misogyny charges arise because students here tend toward a kind of ideological trigger-happiness. "People look at the cover and they say, 'gee, a magazine for men, it must be bad--and then they don't actually read it."

According to Hsu and Shapiro, anyone who reads Inside Edge will get the joke. Before they produced the first issue, the publishers even ran focus groups "to make sure that people could catch when we're serious and when we're not, "Hsu says.

Why would people complain, than, about the magazine's contents? Shapiro suggests that the origins of on-campus criticism are one part anobbery, two parts envy: "A lot of people spend a lot of time on extracurricular publications. We get written about in the New York Times." Inside Edge's coverage "creates a lot of jealousy and contempt," Shapiro sighs. "I guess it's inevitable."

A better explanation than jealousy, though, is a kind of dread. Perspective's fearful David Kennedy heaps slurs at the magazine: "The type of sexism advanced by Inside Edge is much more invidious than the patriarchal politics of Peninsula."

Kennedy gives Inside Edge too much credit. Peninsula is invidious because it is written intellectually. Its arguments, however disturbing, are stated logically and convincingly; its unreasonable agenda is couched in reasonable terms. Inside Edge editors claim simply to write a magazine that guys would like to read. Even the most sexist Inside Edge copy is far too vapid to pass for intelligent discourse.

Stated another way, Peninsula writers are smart, while Inside Edge writers are stupid. Yet that's not quite right; the Harvard juniors behind Inside Edge aren't truly insipid. They're just acting stupid--because that's the way they think they're supposed to act.

In seventh grade pre-algebra class, I sat next to a girl who was in the popular crowd. I didn't want her to think I was too smart--it wasn't cool to be too smart. So even though I knew all the answers on the math tests, I'd get one wrong on purpose. Just so I'd get a "97" instead of an "100." Just so I wouldn't look like a total geek.

Call it an "Edge mentality." It was a kind of dishonesty, and I feel awful about it now. But that's the driving force behind the contents of Inside Edge. Its editors are trying not to look like total geeks--and to them, being smart is being geeky. So when they write copy, they pretend to be stupid.

"Hooking up with your best friend's girl-friend," begins a list of Edge Man activities beside the subscription order form. "Getting drunk on a Wednesday afternoon... Ditching work to watch the game with your buds. Playing beer pong 'till dawn." This isn't a to-do list--it's a fantasy. Inside Edge writers will play out their fantasies in magazine copy, but not in real life. They'll throw away a question or two, but they'll never blow their A's.

In short, there's nothing Machiavellian about Inside Edge. Hsu says that if the magazine has a "message" at all, it is public service. Inside Edge urges its readers to use condoms and to stay away from drugs. Hsu explains that the traditional media doesn't relay these ideas successfully. But readers will listen to the Inside Edge editors. "They trust us," Hsu says. "At least they can relate to us."

Beyond that, Hsu's "position" is nonexistent. On final clubs, the closest things Harvard has to bastions of Edge Men, Hsu has only this to say: "I don't like the fact that they're exclusionatory."

"Exclusionatory?" Hsu uses the word again and again. This guy isn't slick--ne's just earnest. Is he an Edge Man? "Most definitely," he says. "But I'm also a Harvard Man. I'm also a New Jersey Man. I'm also a Community Service Guy."

Struggling to define the term, Hsu says that "everyone is an Edge Man deep inside." If he were thinking academically, he might say that the Edge Man represents the id. But Hsu isn't thinking academically. In fact, he's barely thinking at all.

Students who fear Inside Edge proliferation should keep worrying. The premiere issue, according to Hsu, sold out in Harvard Square and the state of New Jersey, and had to be re-ordered in some European countries. It has already raked in at least 5000 reader response forms and 1000 subscription orders.

But this is not a case of the advancing enemy. The campus furor over Inside Edge is just another example of Harvard taking itself too seriously. The "best and the brightest," as Perspective so arrogantly puts it, are susceptible to the same peer pressures as everyone else. Most kids who buy Inside Edge are probably just as insecure, and just as innocuous, as the kids who write it. A real-life Edge Man would be too drunk to read.

These fledgling magazine publishers are kids trying to act cool--not masterminds propagating evil on the scale of Sodom and Gomorrah. And if the good-natured guys in Eliot would never dream of doing what they print as "entertainment," maybe folks outside the Ivory Tower will take Inside Edge with a pillar of salt.