I don’t see the men in Filament being ‘used’. Porn addiction is a real danger to both men and women and has ruined many relationship.
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After all the real men in our lives (well, for most of us at least!) have bulging waistlines, receding hairlines and all the other imperfections that make us love them all the more. On a final note, from a mental and emotional health point of view, I would not recommend using highly idealized and largely unrealistic imagery of naked men to get aroused. I can therefore sympathise with the thoughts of Kay above. Our thoughts were that we would be very hurt if it was our daughters and sisters being used in this way and similarly I would be shocked to see my brother or son naked, in a clearly sexualized contest, in this magazine. Many feminists are opposed to the commodification of the human body and to paying for sexual gratification, whether in the form of prostitution or purchasing explicit imagery/erotica/pornography. We have campaigned for many years against the male-oriented porn industry. I wish the editors of Filament the best of luck in their endeavours but just remember that not all feminists are comfortable with such a magazine. Wings – I haven’t sent one to Romania yet and would love to do so! Email us if you have any trouble with the check-out with paypal, we can usually find a way to get someone a copy if for some reason it’s difficult to get one via PayPal from their country.ħ September 2009 Daniela Vincenti Log in to Reply
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And some pants-on stuff for the gals who like that too. And there is a smaller group of women who prefer that, so they shall have it too in Filament. However, if you’re just doing male “nude” photography (as opposed to erotic male photography, which is a hugely different thing), then of course there’s no issue with flaccid penises. Some people even pointed to the consent issue, which makes it difficult to be turned on by someone who clearly isn’t. However, the flaccid penis was one of the main reasons why readers of 80s women’s erotica magazine For Women felt that it didn’t cut the mustard (if you want to read more about this, try Clarissa Smith’s book One for the Girls) and we also had a very strong steer from our research community that if you’re going to show a penis in the context of erotica, it should be erect. Jennifer – we already do show some images of men flaccid. If you’re interested in the the campaign to get publishers to print more images of men for the straight female gaze, you might like to check out Erotica Cover Watch (some images NSFW), a blog run by two female erotica writers who are sick of sexualised images of women being used to illustrate their work. What gets out there branded ‘for women’ is part of what defines femininity in our times, so it’s all the more important that women create, support and demand what we actually want.įilament have yet to secure a distribution deal, and a number of supposedly women-oriented sex shops have bizarrely declined to stock the magazine, for reasons as yet unknown, but the latest issue is available online for £5.89, and features all this lovely stuff. It is a trap to believe that what is available on the market merely represents what sells – most of the decisions about what’s supplied to us are still based on poor, if any, evidence, and often largely on gender stereotypes.
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If a tiny magazine like Filament can challenge sexist rules from the dark ages, anyone can. It has never had a legal basis – it has purely and simply been about people deciding what we want on our behalf, and therefore what gets to market. The UK publishing industry double-standard that Filament has now made one tiny inroad into, is a big part of what has kept genuinely erotic female-orientated imagery of men off the market.
I’m delighted to announce that the makers of Filament magazine successfully sold sufficient numbers of their first issue to change printers and become the first UK women’s magazine to feature an image of a naked man in all his erect glory! Editor Suraya Sidhu Singh contacted me to extend a big thank you to all The F Word readers who supported their campaign, and had this to say about the sexist double-standards of the publishing industry: