The Original Coed Consumer Sex Guide

OCTOBER 18--More than 30 years before a Duke University student’s treatise on her assorted sexual liaisons became an Internet sensation, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology coeds printed a similarly scandalous review in a campus newspaper.

“Consumer Guide To MIT Men” was published in an April 1977 edition of thursday, an alternative student weekly. The guide, written by students Roxanne Ritchie (pictured at right) and Susan Gilbert, rated 36 men with whom the pair claimed to have slept.

Ritchie and Gilbert, who rated the men on a scale ranging from four stars (“Must fuck”) to “turkey,” were placed on formal probation by the school’s Committee on Discipline. The sanctions grew out of complaints that the guide violated community norms and invaded the privacy of men named in the article.

The thursday article is reprinted here, with the surnames of Ritchie/Gilbert consorts fogged out. Because, really, who needs to have their names attached to reviews like “Has a large water bed and he’s medium good in it,” or “If you want to feel like a piece of cold meat…try this one.”

Two weeks after the guide was published, Ritchie told the Associated Press that the piece had triggered obscene telephone calls and threats of gang rape. “I tried to contact all the people on the list to apologize for it being in print and to say, 'That's not what was important to me when I was with you,’” Ritchie told the AP. (1 page)