In case you were wondering what those fancy Ivy League students are doing when they’re not busy speaking Latin to one another or reciting Shakespeare sonnets from memory, you should know they’re actually uploading anonymous pictures of their asses, cocks and tits to the Internet for you to behold! An anonymous website run by some clever, horny student at Brown allows the campus to snap pictures of their privates in iconic University locales, sometimes with the Brown logo right in the picture frame. Now there’s some good branding. The goal of the site, punnily titled BrownBares because Brown’s mascot is the bear—get it?—is to score the most obscene pictures in the most unlikely of campus places. It’s kind of like “Planking,” only with your privates!
Porn is the easiest, most available form of entertainment on the Internet, and you can run into it whether you’re actually seeking it out or not. So what’s the appeal of the Boobs and Cocks On Campus trend, especially when the photos are anonymous and everybody already knows what privates look like? Obviously there’s a rush in seeing how naked you can be in public, of how far you can go to break the rules and still get away with it. Cultural institutions like Girls Gone Wild, not to mention an entire genre of pornography that’s based on the premise of being “at college” or “in a dorm” or “in a frat house” appears on the computer screens of horny men and women around the world. But what, in particular, is it about college that excites such horniness?
College is obviously the place to be if you’re horny and between the ages of 18 and 22. Most pop cultural representations of college life focus on college as a cesspool of hook up culture, and certainly Brown Bares isn’t the only college that has its own anonymous, university-wide porn tube. Bard has Boobs@Bard and Bard Cocks on Campus; Wesleyan has Wesbreasts and the ever-clever Westacles; and, not to be out done, Vassar has Vag@Vassar. Some dudes at Tulane started a Tumblr called Cocks on Campus, and there’s one picture in particular of a dong chilling on top of a “Tulane University” mousepad and, just as a visual, the peen is nearly as long as the word “University.”
The promise of a sex life—of access to hook up culture—coupled with the potentiality for unlimited, boundless sex is something that most incoming college freshmen look forward to. Maybe one is gay but couldn’t really act on those urges back in Oklahoma. Or maybe one doesn’t have any experience at all. But no matter how you look at it, American stories about going away to college and escaping the wrath of mom and dad have to do with experimentation with sex.
Knowing that, one thing that voyeuristic, intra-university websites and blogs like Brown Bares does is foster a sex-positive campus community. Not only are both sex and bodily organs not something to be ashamed of, but one can safely imagine that at Brown, men and women, gay, straight, bi and whatever else, are all using and contributing content to Brown Bares. To spell it out, it means that sex is there, but the clutter of the hetero/homo binary of sexuality is not. I mean, gay tits look just like straight tits! So maybe if you see something you like, despite what “sexuality” tells them they’re supposed to be into, you will be more willing and able to experiment.
The bottom line is that these college bloggers are really onto something. Maybe there should be something like a Cocks on Capitol Hill so that horny politicians can get their urges out and just stop annoying us with pictures of their privates already, Anthony Weiner.