A Porno Mag You Just Might Like

Sarah Nicole Prickett, founder of the new erotica magazine Adult, was just hanging out and watching porn over Christmas, as one does, when she realized there was a serious hole in the sexy media marketplace. She wanted to create pornography that appealed to not just women or men, but to both genders of sex-having and sex-desiring humans. It sounds so crazy it just might work.

Prickett told nymag.com this week that she doesn’t “believe in ‘porn for women.’ The porn that I watch certainly does not fall into that category,” she says. “It’s not that I think porn for women is going to be, like, softer or gentler than it is for men.” And her new hard-copy-only magazine sets out to appeal to both genders, with articles and revealing photographs for and of both guys and gals.

So can this actually work? As The Gloss points out, the idea that women want more porn isn’t exactly a widely held belief. And while we are all in favor of porn changing in such a way that it’s no longer harmful to women, The Gloss says of Prickett's description of Adult's first issue, “this new porn sounds an awful lot like the old porn.”

But, Prickett does seem to challenge some worn-out pornographic tropes — like that the female body is intrinsically more attractive than the male and that skinny weight girls are the height of sexiness. She aims to bring in some physical diversity.

“We’re probably going to move away from using modeling agencies at all,” she tells nymag.com, “because it’s really, really difficult — their idea of size diversity is, like, here is a size-six white girl.”

With its vintage aesthetic and brilliantly gender-neutral name, I'm going to say this magazine has a chance of actually being pretty cool. And as for the idea that women don't want more porn? Well, call me radical, but I aways kind of assumed that women have just as much of a sex drive as men, and therefore probably like looking at images they find sexy just as much as men do. And I might be getting really crazy now, but attractive naked people are sexy. And pictures of naked people, when done right, are sexy. The thing about porn, as far as I can tell, isn't that women are fundamentally not into it — it's that most porn today is so heavily geared towards men that it doesn't do much for women. Which is why I think the idea of a magazine that tries to gear itself towards both is actually pretty cool; it breaks down the idea that sexuality is hugely different for men and women.

Adult comes out with its first issue mid-November, but you can already pre-order a copy at Amazon.