FHM, STUFF, MAXIM, RAZOR, et al.
Porn is back at the 7-11. It’s the resurgence of clean porn to counter the free-for-all no-holes-barred internet, just like Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine put glossy clean brakes on the sexual revolution.

 
Hef put a gloss coat on the age-old girly magazine and put it unto the coffee table, Guccione dirtied it up with Penthouse and put it back under the mattress and Flynt left no fig leaf unturned with Hustler and put pornography right back in the garage. But after the ugly fin de siecle the puritans are back.

Now we have the nouveau prurient clothed seductresses. Here little flesh is revealed that is not already displayed on every popular magazine cover. Naked media stars, but covered. That’s another story, nudity in fashion magazine magazines.

Today’s men’s magazine’s entice but don’t deliver, they tease, and apparently that’s enough. In the porn heydays of the seventies, the magazines were owned by independent publishers. You could say “I read Playboy for the articles” and it’d be true. Many anti-establishment stories could only see daylight through the independent press. But the magazines today belong to the publishing empires which belong to the advertizing empires which belong to the consumer goods empire. You can’t use sex to sell anything if the boys are getting the sex. Visually at least.

The curious aspect of the today’s bathroom reading for boys is the lack of sexual depth. It’s all surface. It’s curves and titilation without a sense of anything lying beneath, inside, beyond. It’s beads of water, not sweat.

Surface and complexion is all that matters. Breast implants don’t matter because they’ll be under wrap. You’re not going to keep them, you’re not even going to undress them. Knock them against the bathroom door at the nightclub, disrobe them in the darkness at her place, you’ll be gone before it’s light. Only the visual coutour matters.

To whom? The virgin spectator.