Pornography for women, or what they don’t show you in cosmo!

This paper introduces For Women magazine, one of five sexually explicit titles launched in 1992 aimed at women readers. It is often claimed that women have little interest in pornography and the lack of success of these top-shelf titles appears to support those claims. Yet this tells us very little about the commercial and professional decisions to target female readers, nor does it tell us anything about the publishers’ attempts to provide a sufficiently female experience of heterosexual sex that would persuade women to forget their “innate” distaste for explicit representations. Drawing on interviews with editorial staff, this paper explores the production and development of For Women magazine alongside the editorial team's efforts to reconcile the contents of the magazine with the shifting concerns of potential advertisers, stockists and readers.