Diamond: A New(ish) Ivy League Sex Mag

One Harvard alumnus has the drive to tell us what we already know about sex. And charge us for it.

When we first discovered Diamond's website, we fell in love with the upbeat attitude the founder/editor-in-chief, Matt Di Pasquale, takes towards sex and sexual expression. He writes, "To repress or limit your sexual desires, keeping them to yourself, is to hold back a natural part of your being... So, by restricting the flow of one type of emotion, you naturally condition yourself to prevent the flow of other kinds of emotions like happiness, love, sadness, and joy."

But when Diamond's pilot issue came out, it was less about sex than it was about sneakers. The only skin to be seen belonged to the founder, and he wasn't exactly working it. In his ten-page spread, he flaunted both his penis and his high school AP scores (guess which impressed us most).

But with their first official issue, Diamond's managed to release official naked pictures of students from around the country. The articles—penned by students at Harvard, Barnard, Princeton, Yale, and other prestigious locations—are more sex-centric than before, and feel earnest and straightforward. So is it better? No.

Boston University, Cambridge, Columbia, and even Harvard have already jumped on this bandwagon, sometimes even giving the goods up for free. Now, we're not saying we're tired of college sex magazines (it's real, legal nudity and naughty talk), and we are happy to the models get paid a decent amount for their time, and we do respect Diamond's to branch out to other universities. But asking us to pay $9.99 for a digital issue (or $29.99 for a print copy) is just silly. Trust us: we downloaded the free sample version. The sample should be enticing, and it wasn't.

At the end of the day, Diamond's just another college sex magazine in a sea of college sex magazines—more a piece of a hay in a haystack than a, ahem, diamond in the rough. Publications like Boink and H-Bomb understand that when readers approach an Ivy League-generated nudie mag, they expect a certain bit of self-conscious tomfoolery. Dormitory antics, suggestive sororities, TAs with T&A, and nerdy babes wearing nothing but mortarboard caps are all things we hoped to find in Diamond, and we were disappointed by their absence. We genuinely like the kids and what they're trying to do. Here's hoping the next issue has a little more sparkle.

· Grab the free sample issue at Diamond Magazine (diamond-mag.com)
· Harvard Alum Launches Ivy League Porn Mag (business.avn.com)