Femme

Caitlin Thomas, 22, is a University of Nevada, Reno junior, with a dual major in women’s studies and English. She plans to launch a new campus magazine in early 2011 called The Hound.

Tell me about The Hound.

The Hound is an alternative publication I’m trying to start up. It’s going to cater to an audience—not so much a mainstream audience. It’s going to cater to an LGBT audience, like the [Queer Student Union]. I’m a pretty big feminist, so it’s going to be kind of a feminist thing. So it’s for the LGBT community, feminists, artists, just people who aren’t your stereotypical college kids.

Do you feel like those people are underserved by the current UNR publications?

Yeah. I’ve worked for both publications, which is the Sagebrush, the paper, and Insight. And I just never really saw those voices being heard or being reached out to, or connected. Those are great publications, but they’re just not so deep, more about budget cuts and football games, and sororities and fraternities, and not everyone fits that form.

What kind of stories do you want to cover in The Hound?

I have a friend who’s a drag queen, and I thought it would be cool to maybe run a drag column, and call it “Life’s a drag.” I just think it’s a really interesting point of view. … I was going to dress as a man for a whole week and chronicle that. I like doing exposés and stuff like that. It’s going to be a mix of art, activism—I want students to submit poetry and photographs. … Sex, feminism, activism, art—articles that cater to that.

And you currently write a sex column for the Sagebrush?

I worked as the sex columnist for The Sagebrush for a year, and now I write the sex column for Insight magazine, the student magazine. … I like to keep it really personal. I write about what’s going on in my life, and I tackle really controversial things, like I did an open letter to spitters one week.

Spitters?

People who don’t swallow. [Laughs.] I wrote about my first time having anal sex last year, and a lot of people were kind of like—it was just weird. My mom wasn’t happy. … That was in the Sagebrush. But the open letter to spitters was last month in Insight.

If you’re writing about anal sex in the Sagebrush, then why is The Hound necessary?

Well, they’re completely different. The Hound is more for a different, alternative audience. There might be one or two pages on sex, and I don’t even think I’m going to write them. It’s going to be more like erotic literature or like, “a new sex position!” It’s not programmed around sex really. It’s more about activism and having a voice that’s not represented in the other publications.

Tell me about your night job.

I am a stripper. I’ve been stripping for about a year and a half. I love it. I could never really do a normal job, because I’m just not a normal person. I’ve always been an exhibitionist. … I’m a huge feminist, and I like to own my sexuality, and I think stripping allows me to do that. …

When you say you’re a feminist, what do you mean?

Once I started to figure out feminism, and what it meant to be a powerful female, and having perverse sex doesn’t make you a bad person. I was just under so many false impressions growing up. Once I figured out that I could do anything I wanted to, and I didn’t have to change my hair, and I didn’t have to have a boyfriend, and I could do exactly what I wanted, it changed me. I feel like a lot of girls, especially freshmen on campus, they’re under the impression that they need to look a certain way, or they need boyfriend, or they can’t say certain things, or they can’t enjoy sex, and that’s something I really, really want to change.