Observations on tits out

''The nipple counter was just too offensive," blurted Laura McInerney, president of the junior common room at St Peter's College, Oxford University. Her college has banned the Daily Star and Daily Sport from its JCR. And it's not alone: rid- ding common rooms of naked flesh and vulgar headlines is becoming a trend at the ancient university. Recently, St John's College banned the Sun from its JCR. "The overall consensus was that page three was demeaning and offensive to women," said Hardip Dhesi, the president of the JCR. Christ Church College had also earlier rejected the tabloids.

This puritanical pruning of JCR print offerings seems at odds with Oxford's reputation for binge drinking, orgasms (or not) and drugs. Tales of bright young things dressing up in S&M outfits and drinking champagne from one another's shoes at parties held by the Piers Gaveston Society regularly emerge from the city of dreaming spires. As one Oxford graduate recalls: "Sure, we got naked all the time, but that was just par for the course."

Not every student participates in such hedonism: Melanie Marshall, women's officer for the Oxford Students' Union, believes that "archaic drinking societies are a bit of a quirk that everybody laughs at". But if some undergrads frown upon societies such as the Assassins and the Bullingdon, their thriving membership shows that decadent goings-on still prove irresistible to many Oxford students.

At Worcester College, the Buffaloes and the Heifers, clandestine drinking clubs both, reveal the steamy side of undergraduate life. One former member boasted: "We met once a term in a garden shed. Everyone would be naked but for a lab coat. Each member brought a bottle of spirits and nobody was allowed to leave until all the alcohol had been drunk. A bucket was placed in the middle of the shed where we would regularly defecate. Mixers for the spirits included Tabasco sauce as well as our own urine."

In the light of such debauchery, one might assume that a bare breast or a titillating headline would barely raise an eyebrow among Oxford students. Wrong: the same students who think nothing of donning see-through togas and smoking a joint while cavorting at a May ball find headlines such as "Buxom blonde bares all" terribly offensive.

Over at Cambridge University, students seem more relaxed about the tabloids. Wesley Streeting, president of Selwyn College JCR, said: "I'd probably get lynched if I tried to get rid of the Sun."

Back at St John's College, Oxford, one student appears to agree. Since St John's banned the Sun, he has been using his own resources to buy a copy and then secretly slipping it into the pile of broadsheets and academic journals available to students in the JCR.

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