BU Students To Launch H Bomb Twin

H Bomb flooded campus newsstands and hallways last spring, but next year it will have some competition from a publication across the river.

Boink, a new publication about sexuality started by Alecia Oleyourryk, a senior at Boston University (BU), will debut in January. Oleyourryk will be helped by Christopher Anderson, a Boston area photographer who shot photos for H Bomb last year but said he has not been in contact with H Bomb representatives since.

Similar to H Bomb, Boink will feature articles, essays, and art about sex and sexuality.

But unlike H Bomb, which was approved by the Committee on College Life and partially funded by grants from Undergraduate Council, Boink is an independent publication.

BU does not fund any of its student publications, but BU administrators made it a point, nonetheless, to distance themselves from the publication.

“The university does not endorse nor welcome the prospective publication Boink, nor view its publication as a positive for the university community because of our concern for the treatment of serious sexual health, relationship, and related issues,” said Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore in an announcement. Anderson said that the publication’s non-affiliation with BU gave it greater freedom of expression than H Bomb.

“Boink is not a university-sponsored publication so the editorial team will have full creative control over the content without any pressure from the college administration,” he said.

Anderson said Oleyourryk is not bothered by the fact that Boink has been called pornography and will focus on sex and nudity as a natural and integral part of college life.

H Bomb contributing writer Jeremy P. Galen ’05 said the Harvard counterpart has similar aims but is more inclined to portray subjects as art.

“The H Bomb’s effectively negotiated pornography is art. A compromise between artistic integrity and pornography [can exist],” he said. “But the relationship can be abused for sensationalism and be regarded as counter-cultural.”

But Anderson said that Boink doesn’t feel the need to argue its publication has artistic merit.

“Boink will not attempt to legitimize its focus by trying to place it in the context of art or an intellectual exercise,” he wrote in e-mail. “Boink’s editor believes that sex is a relevant topic in its own right, and hopes that her readers will be excited (sexually or otherwise) by its content.”

Co-Founder of H Bomb Katharina P. Cieplak-von Baldegg ’06 noted that the two magazines take different approaches to publishing sexual material, thus appealing to differing audiences.

“People will buy Boink because it is pornography,” she said. “People buy H Bomb because it’s a smart, fun, multimedia discussion of sex and sexuality by and for students at Harvard that cannot be found anywhere else.”

Word of Boink spread on the BU campus over the past week. But the hype that accompanied H-Bomb’s unveiling hasn’t yet materialized.

“It’s not an original or shocking idea to me,” BU sophomore Kris M. Seto said. “It sounds like a rip off [of H Bomb].”

But Harvard Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser, who is also the faculty adviser for H Bomb, said there is always a place for such magazines.

“The question is whether, for any given university, there is a need for such a publication,” he said. “Given the universality of sexuality, it would be odd if this wasn’t the case.”