Boink Drops a Bomb

H Bomb could only get more scandalous if it started spawning progeny. And it has. Boston University’s Boink Magazine—or, as it calls itself, “the college guide to carnal knowledge”—released its first issue last month. Its website calls the magazine “a sex-themed publication” that involves “frank discussions about sex and nude pictures of real university students.” Its features “are necessarily explicit to accurately reflect the sexual openness of an evolving generation.”

Boink may sound like a slightly raunchier version of our own H Bomb, but Katharina Cieplack-von Baldegg ’06, H Bomb’s editor in chief, insists there is no relation. Unlike H Bomb, a nonprofit organization funded by Harvard grants, Boink charges undergraduates $8 per issue and is unrecognized by its school. While Cieplack-von Baldegg wrote in an e-mail that H Bomb is “a rebellion against both New England Puritanism and the superficial, misogynist, and often pornographic depiction of sex in pop culture,” BU’s version doesn’t claim to be as multi-dimensional.

BU senior Alecia Oleyorryk, Boink’s publisher, said that H Bomb and Boink, “started off somewhat the same, but ended up kind of different,” and that Boink is the, “pornographic magazine.”

But though H Bomb was relatively subdued, its audience seemed more than satisfied. “When we were door-dropping last spring,” Cieplack-von Baldegg said, “people were stealing it out of each others’ door boxes.” Zealous readers can compare H Bomb to its spawn when H Bomb’s second issue appears this month.

H Bomb may have inspired a fledgling counterpart, and a national revolution may ensue. But all that is irrelevant. H Bomb is for Harvard students only. As Cieplack-von Baldegg wrote, “the Harvard experience of sex is a very specific phenomenon.”