Harvard Is Just the Latest Ivy League School to Embrace Kinky Sex

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Did you hear about crazy Harvard, approving that crazy new BDSM sex club? Actually, they're hardly the first Ivy League school to recognize an organization for kinky students. 

The Harvard Crimson reports that the Committee on Student Life has voted to approve Harvard College Munch as an official student group, effective today. The club began last year as an informal way for kink-inclined students to discuss their bedroom behavior over lunch or dinner. And now it's a legitimate university student organization, with all the flyering and food money perks that status comes with. 

This story has been getting lots of attention. Fox News is shocked, The Daily Mail is breathless, and Gawker is amused. But none of these pick-ups note how Harvard is a bit derrière on the Ivy League BDSM support group trend. "The popularity of 50 Shades of Grey has accelerated a mainstreaming of the BDSM subculture already underway," The New York Observer's Rachel R. White reported earlier this month. "Columbia has a BDSM group. So do Tufts, MIT, Yale and the University of Chicago. Brown, UPenn and Cornell have hosted BDSM educators for on-campus seminars entitled 'The Freedom of Kink' and 'Kink for All.'"

Apparently, all that studying and networking gets students pretty wound up, and some like to release that frustration by wielding whips and chains. Kellie Foxx-Gonzales—president of Columbia's Conversio Virium BDSM club, which dates back to the early '90s—says these proclivities don't make students perverts. "Everyone has issues," she told the Columbia Daily Spectator's Devin Briski. "The BDSM community is diverse. Some people have issues and some people don’t. Some people just like getting hit." Even people who go to elite schools.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.