CarnalNation

England has given us many wonderful things over the years, from the Beatles to Monty Python to fish & chips, Now, from across the pond, comes Filament magazine, “the thinking woman's crumpet,” a quarterly publication dedicated to the female gaze. From the name right down to the design, everything about Filament is tasteful and elegant. It is feminine without being frilly and explicit without being tawdry. Most importantly it is intelligent.

Allow me to digress for a moment on the topic of porn for women, specifically of the printed variety: The question isn't whether women want porn but what sort of porn to give them. That whole business of women not being “visual” has always rubbed me the wrong way (heh) and in today's highly interactive environment, we are all increasingly attuned to imagery. I've held that if women were provided with smut that didn't insult our intelligence or mistake us for gay men, we would be consumers as avid as our male counterparts. So what sort of porn might fit this bill?

Men have been acculturated to find a stereotypical female attractive: a petite, young, slender blonde with big boobs. Mind you, this is a generalization; thankfully plenty of men appreciate women of all shapes and sizes. But women's taste in men is all over the map: older or younger, slender or beefy, muscular or androgynous, hirsute or hairless. So who to photograph for a porn pictorial? And, correspondingly, whose fantasies to depict? In my opinion, Playgirl did an admirable job of delivering when it first debuted. Of course, the '70s were a simpler time, when demographics were still divided mostly by age. Plus, women had never had their own porn mag; we were happy to have something to call our own. Now that our collective tastes have been categorized and genre'd down to highly specialized niches, it seems that pleasing an audience wide enough to support a printed publication would prove impossible.

I could go on forever about societal norms and the profit margins of the marginalized. Let's get back to Filament. If the men featured in the magazine's pages could be classified, I would say they're primarily of the alt.emo variety: slight, pale, hairless, long-haired and contemporarily tattooed. (Though in issue 4, the hunky and hirsute Tristan is decidedly none of the above. See image here, right.) On the whole, the magazine seemingly caters to an educated audience with, presumably, either an alt lifestyle or, at the very least, an alt sensibility. It will probably not appeal to everyone.