But when I’m in a convenience store and see a surprisingly large number of adult magazines for sale, I wonder what is contained within. Do they have articles and if so, what about? If they don’t have articles, is there any text at all? Is it just pictures?
I don’t buy or look at the magazines, so…I’m curious(but not enough to buy one)
Sure, there’s text. How else would you know EXACTLY what kinds of depraved things the models like to do? Also, whether or not the models are totally horny, incredibly horny or just horny?
If it’s in a convenience store, there will be plenty of text, mostly in the form of ads (unless it’s a Playboy or other such mag that has actual articles).
I think I’ve seen one or two porn mags that were all pictures, and they were the kind that are only sold in adult “bookstores”. The titles on the cover were descriptive enough that one wouldn’t accidentally happen upon something they didn’t want to see. The ones I saw were very vanilla as far as the types of acts that were depicted (by far the most deviant thing was a few pics of anal sex). However they were labeled “hardcore”. It seems that such a description meant “here are the penetrative pics you are looking for”. The camera got close enough in one or two of the pics that it was actually larger than life-size on the page, meaning close to an 8"x11" vagina, complete with penis inside. I have always been a fan of pretty wide angles on such things, meaning you can see most of both the subjects bodies, so I passed on the magna-porn.
So, yeah, there was little if any text at all in that one. I need to go take a shower after thinking about that stuff again. Porn is fine, but some of that stuff can get reeeealy creepy. Ick.
Are you not curious enough to pick one up and leaf through it? Your convenience store isn’t a library but you should have enough time to at least page through an issue or two before the staff tells you to move along. Unless they’re all sealed in plastic of course.
I have a couple of issues of “Leg Show”, if you consider that an odd magazine. The text-picture ratio is close to 50/50. The articles include profiles of the photo subject, reviews, short stories, and for some odd reason scholarly sounding articles about subjects like crossdressing.
Perhaps to get around the clause about “no redeeming social value”. Throw in a little information and Bob’s your uncle, you are safe from the proscecuter in Tupelo.
To answer the OP, most porn that is not Playboy or Penthouse (is that even published any more?) has text, but these are all erotic stories and letters, interviews with porn stars, etc. I think Hustler (is that even published any more?) has some political content. I seem to remember a lawsuit.
I bought a magazine years ago, Velvet or something like that it was called. It had articles with porn vid reviews, not that surprising but then it had the best album review section I’d ever seen. There were reviews of Tom Waits’ latest, and a few other quality bands and the writing was excellent quality. It might have been lifted directly from another magazine but it was slightly incongruous seeing it amongst the flesh.
In my youth soft porn mags always contained articles on non sexual subjects(veteran cars used to crop up quite often ) so that you could pretend to the attractive young lady shop assistant that you were buying the mag to catch up on early Rolls Royce radiator grills rather then off home for some self abuse while looking at pictures of overinflated mammary glands.
I remember reading an interview a few years ago with . . . Harlan Ellison, was it? He said when he started out, he particularly liked selling his stories to one of the soft porn mags, Cavalier, I think. They never cut any of his stuff.
There was a law back in the 1940s that to get the less expensive postal charges for a magazine (a second class permit, IIRC), the magazine had to contain some text. That’s how Stan Lee got started at 17 on his comics writing career. I don’t know when that law went away, although I know it did sometime.
Printing pictures is expensive. Printing text is cheap. Real hardcore picture magazines were far more expensive than newsstand magazines for that reason. Any magazine you find at a convenience store will have large amounts of text in it, otherwise it would run $20 or more an issue and never sell.
I really, really hate it when people call these magazines porn or even soft porn. The magazines of the 50s that imitated Playboy had pictures of nude women in them, yes. Nude women with no genitalia. Not even any public hair. Only the most priggish censors could ever call them porn. Today’s “lads” magazines, as they call them in Britain, don’t even show breasts. This gets them around the barriers put up against Playboy and Penthouse many years ago when their nudity got them banned.
Penthouse, or the remnants of whatever Penthouse used to be, apparently shows sex of various sorts, according to trade articles I’ve read. Playboy still has only nudes. So Penthouse may be porn. Playboy is not. And the rest of the magazines are even less than that. Most fashion magazines will show as much skin as the lads magazines and some do as many nudes as Playboy. Are they porn?
Asimov published a few pieces in skin mags as well, and had similar things to say about them, that they always treated writers well. And the stories they published didn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex, either: Asimov’s “Let’s Get Together”, which was published in Playboy, was about Russian robots smuggling a nuclear bomb into an American scientific convention.
When I was a kid, I heard the magazines you’re describing as simply “men’s magazines.” They contained articles that purported to be of interest to men (hi-fi systems, cars, military history, science fiction and detective fiction, and so on), some very well written, but the term always implied that there would be scantily clad women galore.
Maybe I’m missing your point, but you seem to be saying that there aren’t any porn magazines at local convenience stores/newstands. That’s not true in my experience. I haven’t bought one of these magazines in 5 or 6 years at least (maybe longer than that) because, well, the internet. But I know a store near me carries Club (amongst others) because the magazine stand is right next to the ATM and I glance at the covers while I’m waiting for my cash. I have some issues of Club from the early part of this decade/the late 90s sitting at home, and they feature hardcore sex.
As for articles, I remember them having some, but they were all sex related, as far as I can recall. Reviews of porn DVDs, reports from the sets of porn shoots, erotic fiction, letters from readers detailing their “real life” sex encounters, and articles on various sex subjects. I don’t remember anything other than that, but I’d have to check to be sure.
Maybe you don’t see it where you are, but up here, a lot of convenience stores still carry the really raunchy stuff – Hustler, Club, High Society, Barely Legal and so forth. I haven’t bought anything like that in years (not prudish, I just don’t want my kids to find anything like that), but I occasionally flip through one and the content has changed considerably from what it was 10 or 15 years ago. It’s gone from nudes and simulated sex to full on penetration and money shots. They are porn by any definition. You appear to be referring to stuff like Maxim, but I assure you, at least some convenience stores still stock the really nasty stuff.