Barely Legal Yalies

This week The Yale Daily News announced, under the headline “Barely Legal Frosh Pose as Pin-ups,” that a dozen male Trumbull College first-years had bared their chests for a $7 calendar, with proceeds to benefit an organization called Women for Dignity and Self-Reliance. While such comfort with the scantily clad male body is both rare and laudable in frosty New England, the Yale calendar unfortunately exhibits the prudishness and lack of self-perception we have come to expect of Elis.

Women for Dignity and Self-Reliance is certainly not the first charitable organization to benefit from a revealing calendar. In recent years, organizations ranging from Cincinnati’s Civic Garden Center to the Maple Corner, Vt. community center have sold calendars featuring nude volunteers discreetly shielded by shrubbery or bales of hay. Trumbull first-years’ failure to follow suit by performing a full monty (or, as the gentlemen of Maple Corner render it, a full Vermonty) can only be seen as further evidence of Yale students’ sexual repression.

Even had Yale students managed to overcome their innate prudishness, there is some doubt that the calendar would have found popularity with a wide audience. One model, Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, confessed to The Daily News that he “had the chest of a 12-year-old boy.” As Pitts-Wiley is scarcely an atypical specimen of Yale manhood, we can only conclude that the Yale calendar initiative suffered grave problems from its inception.

Luckily, the scantily-clad-male-undergraduate-calendar vacuum need not remain vacant for long. As in so many other fields, from football to academics, Harvard undergraduates can here succeed where their New Haven brethren have failed. And in this economic environment, Harvard charitable efforts would benefit from the proceeds. A call for nude volunteers will encourage commitment-shy Harvard students to finally commit themselves to charitable endeavors—body and soul.