IIRC, didn’t Crotch Shots magazine publish T.S. Garp’s first short story?
Kurt Vonnegut sold stories to skin mags when he was first starting out and, if I recall correctly, his alter ego/SF writer character, Kilgore Trout made his living selling stories to wank mags as well.
Vonnegut used Trout in several novels, so he may have changed his backstory, but I only remember him publishing novels. The novels may have been sold in porn shops or put out by porn publishers, but he was a novelist first and foremost.
As for convenience stores, there may be significant regional variation in what mags they carry. But my point remains that calling mags that only publish naked women, or semi-naked or skimpily-clothed women, porn just confuses the dialog. Porn requires sex.
Well, I don’t know. Name me another mag, other than Playboy, that bridges the gap between Maxim - type “lad mags,” and Hustler and the “porn mags.” You have the lad mags, with generally no nudity, you have Playboy, with lots o’ nudity, but no sex or “open beaver” shots, and you have porn mags, with sex and cum shots and bears oh my!
To me, porn includes Playboy, but not the lad mags. Not that I give a fuck, but, y’know.
Joe
<edit> Sorry, missed the “national variation” part, which may affect other posters’ opinions, but Exapno and I are in the same country.</edit>
Neo-Penthouse is, pictorially, now softer even than the Penthouse of the late 70s. BUT it does retain “harder” text content specially in the form of the “Forum” letters column, 3rd-party advertising and porn reviews. In the mid-1990s Guccione took it in a sharp turn in the direction of true hardcore, with explicit penetrations, squirt shots and even “watersports”, but by '03 he was deep in financial trouble and he lost everything in the bankruptcy.
It depends on the magazine. Playboy magazine has a very high ratio of text to pictures and its text articles are pretty mainstream. But Playboy also publishes its newstand editions which are just collections of pictures and have virtually no text.
A magazine like Hustler will usually have a lot of text but it’s mostly sexual in nature - masturbatory text in addition to masturbatory pictures.
Celebrity Sleuth has pictures of naked celebrity women (mostly paparazzi shots or freeze frames from movies) along with gossip about the same women. So you’ll get pictures of Lindsay Lohan with no panties next to text about her getting arrested.
I remember the artists books that you are on about and it was amazing just how many aspiring artists there were at my school though I never ever saw them get their brushes out.
As to the comparative tameness of the images ,different times different thrills .
In Victorian times the flash of a ladys ankle would no doubt have sent an adolescent scurrying to the nearest toilet for relief.
Surely any magazine whos primary purpose was to supply sexual stimulation to its readers no matter how bland they appear to us nowadays is porn?
The magazines didn’t usually have pictures of racing yachts on their covers even if there was an article inside about them but suitably demure pics of attractive women with the implication that you would see more of them inside .
I realise that for those who worked in the industry then that it would be less embarassing to tell others that they worked for a Gentlemans magazine rather then a Tit pic mag. but thats what paid their wages not articles about Polo matches if we’re being honest about it.
I once wrote a story for one of these magazines. I had a friend that worked there…the story was a straightforward examination of foot/shoe fetishists, with quotations from experts, and illustrations. (I had nothing to do with the illustrations, my friend told me what they were so that I could slant my story so that it matched them.)
Paid pretty well. The check came from a corporation that, by its name, you’d never guess it was a porn mag. The name on the check was to the name of the magazine about as accurate as my name to the name on the byline of my story.
I was supposed to do another one on men who liked big beautiful women, in other words, plus-size hookers. Someone gave me the names of a couple of supposedly actual plus-size hookers to talk to, but this didn’t work so well. One of them was incoherent, the other one vehemently denied that she got money for sex. I tried to hang a story on that, believe me, but I couldn’t. (Well, I probably could have. I’m not kidding myself that anyone was reading the story, with the possible exception of the editor.)
Back when I was living in Berlin in the 80’s, I wrote articles for The Advocate (a non- porn Gay magazine) and two soft-porn, Gay American magazines, Blueboy and Numbers (I have no idea if they still exist). They paid very well. I wrote articles and stories that were published every month for about two years - then a new editor came on board and wanted to lower my fee by about 50% - so I stopped writing for them.
About 1/2 of the soft-porn magazines were nude photos and 1/2 was composed of short stories, letters to the editor, some porn film reviews, interviews with porn stars and others, health and fitness columns and the occasional travel reports.
My guess is that people bought the soft porn for the photos and only after “enjoying” looking at the photos did anyone ever bother to read anything.
Well, you know…they’ve got…um…porn?
If you look in the copyright page of Stephen King’s “Night Shift”, you can see that he got his start selling to the “lesser” skin mags (I’m pretty sure he mentioned it in his book “On Writing”, too). If you look in the current edition of Writer’s Guide you’ll see them listed, as well.
Prinnt takes less money to print than full-color photos. Of COURSE they’re going to fill up the issue with inexpensive copy.
In the best of all possible worlds, the very best porn mags would be odd, and full of very odd articles, which would be oddly excellent.