Hey ladies! The brawny and bawdy “Mr. Harvard Freshman Contest” has snuck up on us again. If only it hadn’t. The contest, run by Freeze College Magazine, seems something of a twisted take on the women’s lib movement of our mothers’ college days. Ivy League ladies may not peg themselves as high-priced steak for the delight of their male classmates—at least, not in this context! But for the third year in a row, Harvard guys have stepped up to put themselves on the menu.

It might make Betty Friedan roll in her grave, but women are still the object of a lot of Ivy League eyeballing. At Yale, Rumpus magazine still churns out its 50 Most Beautiful People every year. There isn’t quite the enlightened thirtieth-wave feminism that seems to flourish at Harvard. Women and men are fetishized just the same.

But things like Rumpus’s list seem more passive. These Harvard Mr. Americas are actively soliciting their reader’s love. Or at least their attention. Be careful, though, gents: you’re part of a long Harvard-man tradition of preening for the ladies. This either leads to the career of Keith Gessen or a more revealing sort of publicity.

The girls who brought us the Harvard douchebag contest have extended their reach beyond Cambridge. Yesterday, Windsor Hanger ‘10, Stephanie Kaplan ‘10, and Annie Wang ‘11 of Harvard’s Freeze College Magazine launched their new “collegiette’s guide” called Her Campus, setting a new precedent for useless Ivy League publications (which, to be fair, could explain about 90% of all Harvard media enterprises).

After contacting co-founder and CEO Kaplan about what these three Prada Devil wannabes hope to accomplish with their new cyber digs, she responded with a lengthy mission statement:

From: stephanie@hercampus.com
To: qichen@ivygateblog.com
Subject: Re: IvyGate’s inquiry about Her Campus
Date: Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:20 PM

HerCampus.com is an online magazine for college women that seeks to pave the way for the media industry to successfully make the transition online.  Her Campus will transition magazines to today’s digital world by individualizing its content college by college by setting up “My Campus” branches, beginning at Harvard and eventually expanding to 1000+ colleges and universities nationwide.  By supplementing national with local content, Her Campus represents the future of online media.

Uh, was there ever a time when the internet wasn’t national? Not only that, but the pearl-donning triumvirate of the Ivy League’s new Seventeen seems to think they’re the first ones to come up with the idea of female-oriented college media. Read more after the jump.

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