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Exhibitionist coeds bragging about their sex lives promise the same bloated rhetoric as an election-year stump speech: fudged truth, smug self-satisfaction and I-was-the-first-one-here braggadocio. It's 2008, after all. What could possibly be unexpected, unique or even revolutionary about sex and students?

Boston University magazine boink, a student-run publication self-described as both porn and an exploration of sexual themes, offers an answer. This collection of confessional essays, erotic stories, sarcastic advice and nude pictorials stays eclectic. Content appeals to straight, gay or bi- men and women, and the magazine never attempts to define something as nebulous as a generation's sexual attitudes. There are also a few somewhat sober and literary stories, like "Her Strawberry Ghost" and the surprising "Coach," a tale of gay sex in a men's locker room that defies its setting and moves well past cliché.

But in-between a few strong entries, sexy but slightly wooden pictorials and a handful of titillating tales of threesomes, sits some sub-par writing. The standard formula: Take the hallmarks of bad college prose -- overdramatic, over-stylized, long-winded and pontificating without the requisite experience -- and apply them sloppily to sex (or to sloppy sex, in the case of a few stories). One could peg the publication's exhibitionist streak as another manifestation of the Facebook generation's blurring public and private.

Ultimately, the highlights of boink's first few years of publication don't express much beyond promoting self-expression, rather than championing any new or more poignant commentary on campus experiences. The real story here appears to be the entrepreneurial one of the magazine's founding. Perhaps self-promotion, a mark of social-networking sites, is the guiding MySpace mantra.