“I want to take the format of porn and use it as a force for good,” explains Suraya Singh.
“And I want it to be as good as it possibly can be.”
Singh is the editor of Filament, a self-funded women’s magazine which launched in June to much hoo-ha about its strapline “the thinking women’s crumpet”.
For Filament’s raison d’etre is not just to provide interesting articles and interviews in a glossy women’s mag (a subject very close to FQ’s heart) but to print beautifully shot photos of semi-naked handsome men. And Singh is intending to up the ante even further-the latest issue of Filament, out on 1st September, includes naked photos of an erect man.
Getting it out there
The publication itself is a hard-won triumph, pun intended. After Singh’s printers baulked at the idea, citing possible offense to “their other clients, and religious and women’s groups”, Singh was forced to opt for more expensive printers. But how to raise the cash? A campaign evolved from her asking people to buy a copy of the magazine (“I didn’t want to just ask for money, I wanted to get the message out there. And people who actually saw it were more supportive,” she says). The Erotica Cover Watch blog picked up the campaign, then Girl with a One Track Mind, then the Guardian and the Indy. Singh soon found herself fronting a media onslaught, and facing questions such as “What do your parents think of what you do?”, which, as she points out, would never be asked of a man.
Singh was first inspired to set up Filament during her previous job as a civil servant, working on the government’s plans to tackle the UK’s soaring underage sex and teen pregnancy rates. It became apparent through her research that one of the reasons behind these, and the seemingly widespread ambition of young girls to become Katie Price-alikes, was that sexuality was everywhere, but mainly in the context of men looking at women.
And there was no media to support “happy, sexualised women who speak their minds”.
A gap in the market
After months scouring magazine racks, the internet and book shops, and when even the girl-friendly Sh! sex shop in East London could only provide erotic photographs for women of women, she realised there was a “gap in the market. Something needed to be done.”
Singh has done piles of academic research into that market, also forming her own internet-based forum, to find out what women really want. And what she discovered was that the reason that erotic 
magazines aimed at straight women, such as Playgirl, in the past have failed is a) because they were “all about sex. Women found that a bit strange, like you’re an alien from planet sex” and b) more importantly because the male models were all wrong. Singh has now set up detailed criteria regarding her raunchy photos: “in the past it was assumed that what women wanted was the opposite to men. So the models would be muscley, square-jawed, on a plain background. No eye contact . . . A character study in the Nineties found that women who like the square-jawed hunks were likely to be very confident women. So no wonder those sort of men made it to the magazines, they were the only women speaking out!”
Singh cites the popularity of the likes of Ewan MacGregor and Jude Law to prove her theory, asserting that the famous scene of a burly Daniel Craig emerging from the sea as James Bond is actually a very rare one. Women like these girlier men because “people like people who look similar to themselves” and this more feminine look is seen as “more reliable”, she says.
What next?
It could be argued that Scarlet magazine and even Cosmo do something similar. Singh concedes that Scarlet “was a fairly big influence in where I went with Filament. I’d never heard of [it], but I kept on happening across women talking about how they found that it didn’t chime with them. In particular, there seemed to be an issue with a publication that is supposed to be sexy for women, but features more images of sexualised women than erotic depictions of men. . .
“I can’t really comment on Cosmo as I haven’t seen one in many, many years, but I do applaud both publications for, to some extent, including erotic images of men in their publications, and in some cases some cutting-edge, original and challenging material.”
So what next for Filament? While it’s not specifically illegal to depict erect penises, it seems that in the end it comes down to the squeamishness of shops and distributors that would rather see women’s magazines fit into the accepted mould of Cosmo, Elle et al. But hope may be on the horizon- Singh’s currently in talks with a distributor sympathetic to Filament’s values.
“I’d like to go more mainstream, but ‘not’, if you see what I mean. I want it to be available in a way that makes it a genuine alternative.”
Pick up a copy of Filament here.