“It makes you assume that something is beautiful rather than just affirming your unconscious view of what is beautiful, like those swiping things,” she said, referring to Grindr and Tinder. Summers, is in her 50s rather her 20s.Ī print magazine “has the power to make you stop and look at an image and consider it,” Ms. There are photographs by John Edmonds, an employee of a public library in Washington who takes nude portraits of young men, some of whom he knows, and others whom he persuades to be photographed. Adult, for example, recently published an account of a straight man’s youthful dalliance with homosexuality. Prickett and another co-founder, Berkeley Poole, said they sought to create an atmosphere that is very different from online pornography or the sex advice in women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan or digital dating apps like Grindr and Tinder, which ask you to swipe images. “The difference between porn and erotica is the lighting,” said Sarah Nicole Prickett, one of Adult magazine’s founders, quoting the former sex actress Gloria Leonard. The biggest of the newer magazines, a venerable French publication called Lui, has sold as many as 350,000 in France.ĭespite their relatively small audience, the magazines are influencing the direction of the pornography industry, according to Theo Sapoutzis, chief executive of the industry magazine and trade organization Adult Video News. Penthouse, which sold nearly five million copies, sells about 100,000. Playboy, which at one time sold almost six million copies a month in the United States, now sells about a million, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. They include Adult and 25 from New York, Irène from Paris and Extra Extra out of Rotterdam. About a dozen newer sex-themed magazines, often with predominantly female editorial staffs, are blending nudity with art, fashion and philosophy. Still, while these older magazines have retrenched and moved online, a newer breed has taken their place in specialty magazine stores and independent booksellers. Last summer, Larry Flynt, the founder of Hustler, acknowledged that the print version of his magazine was not going to be around much longer. In the not too distant past, Playboy and Penthouse each sold five million or more copies a month, and were so much a part of the culture that in 1986 a federal judge ruled that denying blind people a Braille version of Playboy violated their First Amendment rights.īut traditional pornographic magazines have been hit hard, falling victim to boundless quantities of nudity online and rapidly declining print sales. Pornography used to mean Playboy or Penthouse or another of the hundreds of glossy magazines kept on high shelves and purchased furtively.

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