<sday night, a group of about 15 students gathered in the Gender and Sexuality Center in the basement of Scoville to discuss the two newest publications that will soon circulate at Carleton. Thrust and Skin Deep will be Carleton’s first erotic writing and nude photography publications.
Each student, upon entering the GSC, was asked to take a slip of paper and write down their reason for attending the Skin Deep interest meeting. Answers were read anonymously and ranged from “I want to learn to love my belly rolls” to “Photography and streaking are two of my top five favorite activities.”
While Thrust and Skin Deep both have the goal of generating sex positivity on campus, each magazine will use different media to convey its message.
Thrust will be an erotic writing maga- zine to which students may submit creative writing pieces. Sophomore Kyle Schiller is the Editor and founder of Thrust. “Thrust actually started with Bust Magazine,” Schiller said. “I was actually sitting in [the GSC] reading [Bust], and I realized that they have a section called ‘the one-handed read,’ because it’s erotica. And so I thought, oh man, I should publish erotica at Carleton,
that would be super cool!
But the more I started to read online, the more I realized that I was really uncomfortable with a lot of the stories that people had written for a large number of reasons. They tended to be strictly heteronormative, they tended to have characters only within the gender binary, they tended to have stories that focused only on the man’s pleasure, and they were de meaning towards women.”
“And so I thought that the best way to create stories that were actually representative of the experience of Carleton stu- dents was to have stories come from Carleton students. And so the idea of Thrust is that we’ll publish anything that you sub- mit, but mostly erotic stories. And hope- fully we’re trying to build a context for those stories with essays, papers, opinions and thoughts that you have on the topic.”
Thrust is accepting submissions for erotic stories until seventh Sunday (Octo- ber 26), and will be publishing the magazine the following weekend. Skin Deep, on the other hand, will be a nude photography magazine. Students who wish to participate may choose either to schedule a modeling session with one of the Skin Deep photographers for a specific project that the magazine is working on, or may choose to do a “DIY Submission” and then submit their own work to the magazine.
“We’ve been pushing out a lot of conversations about body posi- tivity and sex positivity and feeling good about yourself and about other people in those regards,” said Skin Deep Editor Mollie Weatherall.
“We’re trying to ignite a lot of dialogues around peoples’ relationships with their bodies, and kind of creating a more open atmosphere on campus where we can talk about our relationships with our bodies regardless of what state we’re in with body positivity and self love and all that kind of good stuff.
“But I think it’s also really important to emphasize that body positivity and sex positivity are expressed in tons of differ- ent ways by tons of different people, and this is just one way. We’re not trying to push out the idea that this is the only way, that if you’re not taking nude photos of yourself you are not body-positive. That’s not the message.”
The two requirements for sub missions to Skin Deep are 1) there can’t be clothing in the shot, and 2) It cannot be oppressive.
“We’re not going to be very selective, we want people to be open to submitting stuff and are very open to all kinds of takes on nude photography and erotica as long as it’s not oppressive,” Weatherall said. “We’re encouraging everyone to model, and that can be done in an anonymous or non-anonymous way. Same goes for Thrust.”
Skin Deep is accepting submissions until November 19, and will be published at the beginning of Winter Term. Both publications will be non-profit.
