Do sexy men and smart writing make for good reading? After spotting Filament magazine on my local newsstand – featuring the tagline “the thinking woman’s crumpet” – I unwrapped what I thought was a new ladymag and, well, rediscovered porn.
*Warning: Images Below NSFW
Before the launch of Filament, now in its fourth issue, the Independent conducted an interview with the editor. Singh Singh quit her job to start Filament after leafing through thousands of magazine pages talking about makeup and diet tips, with little else:
“There are an awful lot of stereotypes about who women are and what turns them on, which I don’t think are true,” she says. “If you’re not some walking stereotype of a woman – who really speaks to you?”
Singh then set-out to create a space for women to be both mentally and sexually stimulated – which flies in the face of all conventional knowledge about what turns women on. The FAQ section of the website – where Singh and crew directly confront naysayers – is full of hilarity.
How can you possibly use research to make porn?! I mean, it’s so clinical!
You probably won’t like our mag. It’s more for women who embrace new ways of thinking and think that using your brain is hot.
What does ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’ mean?
A crumpet is a toasted bread snack popular in the UK and other commonwealth countries. ‘Crumpet’ is also a quaint colloquialism for ‘an attractive person’. British humourist Frank Muir coined the phrase ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’ to refer to an intelligent and attractive woman. Similarly ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’ describes an attractive and intelligent man.
Surely popularising erotic images of men legitimises degrading images of women?
‘Erotic’ and ‘degrading’ are polar opposites as far as we’re concerned. It’s natural to be attracted to viewing the human form erotically, and there is nothing inherently degrading about the subject being less clothed or more aroused. In conducting our research we’ve been heartened by the kinds of things women are asking to see, namely more erotic imagery that depicts the subject as a person, not a sex object. We’re proud of catering to such twisted fancies.
Singh, for her part, had me from hello – her editor’s letter, that is:
[T]he single most controversial thing about Filament isn’t the cocks; it’s that we have some content that isn’t about sex. Our critics have honed in on this fact obsessively, bleating that there’s nothing erotic about recipes or articles about population control. Many marketers, publishers and distributors have looked at me with pity as if – oh, silly me! – I’d slipped and accidentally dropped in an article about women and the games industry.
Plenty of men’s magazines contain beautiful naked people and some articles that aren’t sex related, but apply the same model to a women’s magazine and it becomes, in the words of one distributor, ‘confusing.’ The people who decide what fills magazine racks are confused by the idea that women can be interested in perving on hot men as well as the big questions of society, like tolerance, or even little questions like, how do I bake a tea cake? The rest of us call this being human.
Indeed, why is it such a major revelation that women like to be visually stimulated? Though I often crack on Cosmo, one of the things I’ve always appreciated is that the magazine acknowledges that women want to oogle scantily clad men every now and again. And, according to current editor Kate White, the inclusion of more eye candy was a direct result of reader feedback. So why are so many ladymags so slow to catch up to the trend?