(U-WIRE) SWARTHMORE, Pa. – “What could be more universal than sex?”

Nothing, thought three Swarthmore College students, and so they embraced that common thread and set out to form a new erotica magazine, ! mag.

“Bang mag”, as the magazine’s Prince-like title is pronounced, fills the void left several years ago when Unmentionables, the last erotica publication on campus, folded. Nostalgia for an erotic magazine resurfaced last year when The New York Times ran an article about H-Bomb, Harvard’s erotica magazine, and mistakenly cited Unmentionables as an existing example of sexy campus literature.

Amanda Winters ’08 said she remembered reading about Swarthmore’s erotica magazine last year. “I think it’s awesome it’s coming back,” she said.

“The article said we had (an erotica publication),” one of !’s founders said, “which made us all wish it was true.”

The students behind !, who, along with the first issue’s contributors, prefer to remain anonymous, said they realized last year that most campus publications have “a pretty narrow readership.”

“We thought it would be nice to have a publication accessible to everyone,” they said. “Especially at Swarthmore, there’s a lot of untapped sexual tension that is usually released in the form of violent masturbation between one’s soc-anth paper and physics problem set. We provide a more creative and public outlet for this energy.”

Prose, poetry, photography and art are all fair game for the magazine, said its founders, who are “embracing the ‘DIY’ ethos of the early 90s” and publishing the first issue on their own before asking for funding from the Student Budget Committee “if it’s well-received.” If no funding appears, they said, “perhaps an erotic cake sale is in order.”

But it appears the magazine will be well-received so far, or at least free of the administrative resistance that H-Bomb and several other erotic college and university publications have faced in the last few years. The founders admitted that they “actually haven’t talked to anyone in the administration” but pointed out that “as we see it, silence is complicity.”

– Alyssa Work