Some unsolicited advice for our neighbors at CMU

Dear Sex N’at:

We are the editors of a weekly college paper here in Pittsburgh. Our… Dear Sex N’at:

We are the editors of a weekly college paper here in Pittsburgh. Our school has a reputation, deserved or not, as an enclave of privileged white folks who are more book-smart and maybe less so socially smart. We’ve noticed you guys over at The Pitt News having a yearly tradition of a funny, satiric issue on April Fools Day. This year, we got our April Fool’s edition paid for from student fees — like your Student Activities Fee, basically.

This year, we might have gone a little bit overboard, like making a joke about running over a black guy (but that’s not what we called him, ha ha!) and lots of jokes about violent rape. We even credited some of our staffers as being “Token Black Guy,” and “Random Asian Name.” We were awfully tired when we signed off on these pages, because, let me tell you, it’s hard work putting out a paper once a week, and we were working really hard coming up with funny jokes.

Now, a lot of people are mad at us. There was a rally at our campus calling for us to resign or even be expelled. Nobody got our jokes, I guess. How dumb can people be, not seeing the humor in poems about how funny it is to rape a woman to death with an ice skate blade! What’s funnier than that?

So, what should we do?

–The Natrat Kids

That letter, kids, was fake.

They didn’t ask for it, but I have some advice for everyone even remotely responsible for Carnegie Mellon University’s April Fool’s edition.

Resign from the paper, resign from your social lives, and immediately seek therapy.

The weekly Tartan ran a super-hilarious spoof paper called the Natrat — clever, clever! — and paid for the whole thing with $2,500 in student fees, so that no advertising would interrupt the flow of sick humor.

Now, some of you may have noticed that I write about sex every week. I hear a lot more than I publish, and I have a very thick skin. In fact, I am just about unshockable. At least, I thought I was, until I got hold of a copy of the Natrat.

Getting that was no mean feat, because all the physical copies are being pulled from newsstands and presumably destroyed. Luckily, an eagle-eyed colleague of mine grabbed a copy and let me take a gander.

The hatred of women and the unbridled violent tendencies expressed toward the female body that this piece of crap exudes made me feel physically ill. I literally felt faint when I read what these kids thought was funny. Because we have standards here at The Pitt News, I can’t quote from any of it.

I’m a huge fan of free speech and pushing the envelope. I think a college paper is a great place to put things that don’t necessarily belong in a regular paper. The audience is narrower and is generally at a time in their lives when they are more receptive to racier content, but old enough to handle it.

What these kids put out, though, was childish and gross for the sake of being gross. None of it was even remotely funny, except a doctored graphic of the Cathedral with the Eye of Sauron on it, glaring down at CMU’s campus. It’s like all the frustration these kids have been feeling all year has come out in one wave of vengeful anger.

It’s frightening to presume that people still hold such disturbingly low opinions of women and people of other races. It’s even more frightening that such opinions are published and are being disseminated so widely.

Hearing the editor in chief blame deadline pressure and tiredness for letting this “slip” is complete bull. A slip is missing a comma. A slip is spelling a name wrong. Putting out 12 pages of complete hatred, with the n-word as the icing on the cake, isn’t a slip; it’s indicative of people with scary ideas thinking they are edgy and funny.

College media is great. I’m going to shed a tear when I graduate and move on from college media. The Natrat Squad has abused an institution, and they ought to hang their heads in shame. And never, ever get laid again.

Ask Melissa Meinzer a question at sex@pittnews.com.