SQUIRM magazine is the campus magazine Chris (founder of PleasureMechanics.com) started with friends and lovers their freshman year at Vassar in 1999.
Squirm was Chris’ primary project for four years and became more than a publication – it became a communal experiment in culture making. A year-round calendar of events and fundraisers funded the first editions of the magazine and established the group as a fully funded campus organization. As a group of students from across campus cultures, we asked ourselves: how could we co-create a realm where we were all free to express, to grow, to explore?
Squirm received national media attention in the early years, especially when Harvard students announced a new magazine, H-Bomb, based on the SQUIRM model. SQUIRM went on to inspire magazines at dozens of other colleges, and now 20 years later Vassar students continue to generate a more pleasure-positive campus through community, events and publications.
Here is a collection of Squirm memorabilia from Chris’ archives:
My first week of college I enjoyed my first dose of smut. The source? Squirm: The Art of Campus Sex, Vassar’s erotic magazine, which is replete with salacious prose, poetry, and photography created by and for the student body.
Squirm started four years ago when a group of Vassar students decided to create “a project that would start dialogue [and] act as a forum for queer/sex-positive ideas,” says editor Chrys Fawley. In These Times article about Squirm Magazine
