L’imparfaite
September 2010
L’imparfaite, the erotic magazine launched last fall by a group of
students at Paris’s Institut d’Etudes Politiques—France’s training
ground for the country’s public service and diplomatic elite—is at once
elegant and naughty. Effortlessly mixing high and low, it offers a
bathtub ménage à trois, a well-researched history of the uses and
misuses of French pissotières (public urinals), and a discussion about
sex aids for the handicapped. Financed in part by Passage du Désir, a
Paris “love store” specializing in sex toys, L’imparfaite has a print
run of 2,000. This isn’t the first time a student body has launched a
sex publication—Vassar’s Squirm came out in 1999, Harvard’s H Bomb was
launched in 2004, and the University of Chicago has titillated readers
with Vita Excolatur since 2004. But L’imparfaite, like most things
French, is about as far from Debbie Does Dallas as a soufflé is from a
Pop-Tart. The name, which means “imperfect” in French, expresses the
idea that erotica is a subject that can never be fully explored, but
it’s also a printing term referring to an edition that has mixed-up or
missing pages. “We all grew up in an age where porn is readily available
on the Internet, so for us it’s kind of banal,” says editor Abdel Fahd
Ayeva. “One of our models showed the magazine to his mother and she
didn‘t even recognize him.”
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