Now that sex columnists are old hat on Ivy League campuses, some students are taking things a step further. Students at Columbia University this month unveiled a sex magazine that includes nude photographs taken by and featuring Columbia students.

Although Outlet is not yet funded by Columbia because their Web site was not functional when the staff applied for funding last spring, editor in chief Kimberly Traube said she hopes to secure school backing in the coming months now that the magazine is on its feet.

Ms. Traube said Outlet provides a forum for students to voice their feelings about sex in an intellectual way, and she is quick to eschew the claim that the magazine is little more than a student porn factory. “The point of the magazine is not titillation but intellectual, social, and cultural discussion,” Ms. Traube said.

And she says the publication has been well-received on campus. When asked whether the inaugural October issue has caused a stir, Ms. Traube said, “You know, everybody asks that and it really hasn’t. People have been very enthusiastic about it.”

At Harvard, the publication in 2004 of H-bomb, the school’s student-run sex magazine, was contentious inside and out of the university community. Like Columbia’s Outlet and Boston University’s Boink, H-bomb features nude photographs of students, but its photographers are prohibited from taking their photographs on university property.

H-bomb bills itself as a “literature and arts” magazine, but is evasive in its detailed self-description. “If H-Bomb has a philosophy,” its editors wrote in the inaugural issue, “it is that somewhere beyond porn and beyond esoteric scholarly inquiry there is a happy medium where intellectual is sexy and hot is genius…”