Nude Rag to Spread Pages Soon?

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but if Matthew M. Di Pasquale ’08 gets his way, they’ll soon be a frustrated Harvard boy’s best friend too.

The Dunster House senior plans to publish nude photographs of Harvard co-eds in a new campus magazine, to be called “Diamond.” The plans for the magazine haven’t been fully fleshed out, but Di Pasquale said he hopes to discharge his first issue this spring.

Di Pasquale has created a Web site for the magazine, and he has solicited prospective Harvard models through the Dunster House e-mail list. He has also sent information to friends at the University of Pennsylvania. So far he has recruited one model.

As for how he’ll make money off the student body, Di Pasquale said he has financial backing, but he declined to reveal the source.

Di Pasquale said he conceived the idea of Diamond about two weeks ago. His inspiration was simple: “I love women,” he said.

If published, Diamond would not be the campus’s sole sex magazine. H Bomb, which is officially recognized by the College, was founded in 2004 and has been published periodically since then.

Michelle E. Crentsil ‘10, an editor of H Bomb, said she supports Di Pasquale’s efforts.

“I think artistic magazines involving the way people think about their bodies is always a great thing,” Crentsil said.

But Diamond will inhabit a different niche than H Bomb, with its artistic focus, according to Di Pasquale. Diamond will be more mainstream—”more Hollywood”—à la Maxim or Playboy, he said. Diamond will feature nude female models and possibly shirtless males, but not explicit sex acts, he said.

Diamond’s content will range from interviews with models that would allow readers “to get to know them” to “applicable” articles about exercise and style, Di Pasquale said. The magazine will also contain various self-improvement articles with the primary goal of helping men attract women.

Pasquale said that one of his reasons for creating Diamond stemmed from his belief that Harvard’s students were sexually aware, rather than sexually repressed.

He said that he sees potential in Harvard women to make Diamond a “really sexy magazine.”

Not everyone is excited about Diamond’s debut. Leo J. Keliher ‘10, co-president of the premarital sexual abstinence group True Love Revolution said he believes that anything that allows men to look at and fantasize about women “just objectifies women.”

But campus sex blogger Lena Chen ‘09 gave her nod of approval to Diamond. “I think that any increase in dialogue about sex on campus is certainly positive because Harvard is kind of Puritanical,” she said.

Chen welcomed Di Pasquale to Harvard’s sex publication scene with open arms. She recently accepted his friendship on Facebook.

—Staff writer Esther I. Yi can be reached at estheryi@fas.harvard.edu.