Aiden Arata chats with the editor and art director of Adult magazine.

by Aiden Arata

The first issue of  Adult is a lot of things. It is instructional (I studied a handy guide to sousveillence) and it is intimate (I read Rachel Kushner’s email). The paper is thick and technology-white, and there’s a section of poems in the back. Also, pornography. Adult is labeled a journal of erotics, and it is: from the close-up of a woman’s face, in orgasmic bloom, to the profile of David Cronenberg, Adult is entirely sexy. I sat down with editor Sarah Nicole Prickett and creative director Berkeley Poole to talk about why everyone deserves Photoshop, the Internet-analysis rabbit hole, and Adult’s future.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Aiden Arata: So, Adult. I know you’ve already done a few interviews. Is there anything in particular that you wish that you were asked, or that you weren’t asked?

Sarah Nicole Prickett: Oh, wow that’s a really good way of not preparing for an interview at all. Like, “what would you ask yourselves?” (laughter)

AA: No, I have questions! (laughter) I have questions but I don’t want to ask you, like, “What makes it porn for women?” because you’ve already answered that elsewhere.

SNP: We don’t answer that question. One question that came up a lot when we were doing these interviews was, “How are you creating this magazine for women, by women?” and I don’t think that’s ever what we set out to do so specifically.

Berkeley Poole: I think a lot of people like to take the super-feminist read to what we were doing, but really I think we’re just trying to create an erotic magazine that can appeal to more than just a straight male. It’s a lot bigger than it just being a feminist magazine.

SNP: And of course feminist magazines had and have their place. For me it wouldn’t be interesting to do that. In my writing career I’m often asked to provide the feminist perspective on a non-feminist item in the culture, and sometimes I can do that and it’s important. But I feel like we don’t really need, like, the feminist take on Chris Brown’s latest fight in a parking lot. I’m much more interested in how we can make a magazine in a less traditional way. Less hierarchical, I guess. Less patriarchal. So not patriarchal that you don’t even have to use the word patriarchal. I mean, that would be the dream, wouldn’t it? We started the magazine with Noah and Jai, but it just wasn’t… We couldn’t work communally. We didn’t share ideals, we didn’t have the same vision. So now Berkeley and I are in charge, and we have all girls working with us, except Raillan Brooks who’s been hired to do longer pieces on the website, which we’re launching, what, this week?

BP: Right. (laughter)

SNP: Our web developers are amazing, they’re guys. But on the Adult team, Raillan Brooks is the only guy that we hired, and he’s not straight.

AA: Did that matter at all in hiring him?

SNP: Yeah, it did! Unintentionally. We didn’t ever put like a call for applications, I just kind of asked around. It works better, I think, hiring friends and friends of friends. It did matter that he wasn’t straight because I’m over collaborating with the vast majority of straight men. I was going through old G-chats, trying to find material for the editor’s letter—

BP: Oh, God!

SNP: And I took a screen-grab, it was so funny, it was the number of times that we had said the word “boring” in various contexts. Like you could just search the word “boring” and it would come up everywhere, “this is boring, I hate this, it’s so boring.” (laughter) I think if you just make a magazine that’s not for a straight man, especially in the erotic arena, then you’re already doing something different, and you don’t really have to justify beyond that. I mean, at this point at least. We’re working on our second issue right now.

AA: Do you want to make any changes in your second issue?

BP: A lot. How much time do you have?

AA: Were you unhappy with your first issue, then?

SNP: The main thing we were unhappy with—and the main thing we got feedback about other people not being happy with was the photography. It was just… boring. I don’t know, I think [Berkeley and I] both have the mentality that if you’re going to do something like make a print magazine in 2013, 2014, you should be saying something big.

BP: There are so many things that are erotic and interesting beyond a girl looking apathetic and modeling half naked.

AA: Yeah in terms of the model’s facial expressions, et cetera, do you think you’re trying to do something different, like avoid that fish-eyed Lolita gaze?

SNP: Yeah, if you look at Beauty Today, magazine of Vice nudes… I know what you’re talking about. We’re independent and small and we can’t pay a lot—we cover expenses, of course, for all our photographers, which is surprisingly rare for magazines at our level—but anyway because of that we don’t direct top to bottom, you can’t not pay someone, and then tell them what to do in every aspect. So we try to hire interesting photographers that you trust, and we don’t have very many rules. We said that all the models had to be over 21, and already after the first issue we’re thinking of making it over 28 because of course our French cover-photographer got the youngest-looking 21-year olds in all of California. We had to cut out the shots with pubes because there weren’t any. (laughter) It’s like, do whatever you want there, it’s not un-feminist to shave, it’s just a little… they looked maybe 14 and we just couldn’t do it. For the second issue we’re working with more women photographers, ideally, and more cinematically, and most importantly the subjects are not all going to be like size four-to-six white girls, like they were in the first issue.

BP: We’re going to have a lot more men, and a lot more diversity in age and body type, which is really nice.

SNP: When you try to make something that’s feminist, you walk a fine line between wanting to be representative and not wanting to be tokenist. And you never want to feel like you have to fill a quota. But I do think that if you make not-obvious choices, if you use different criteria for hires, than “What school did you go to? Was it Harvard or Yale? Did you intern at The Paris Review?” If you don’t use the established system of credentialing for young writers, especially in this city, and if you kind of work based on kinship, intuition, et cetera, it’s just going to happen naturally that you don’t end up with a staff of all white guys.

AA: So this is like as much a statement about the writing industry as it is about erotics. And about the way that magazines are constructed, would that be accurate? I mean, it just seems that as much as Adult’s changing the way that women consume and are consumed by eroticism, there’s this parallel consumption of writers that you’re not engaging with either.

SNP:  Right. It is still rare for women to lead a publication that is not specifically mandated to be a feminist publication, or widely known to be a feminist publication. I think Jezebel for example will tell you they’re not just a feminist publication, but they’re always described and thought of that way. And if you read the site, it’s not just “women’s issues”—an already sketchy term—but “feminist issues.” It’s often quite focused on the negatives. Sorry, I have a whole skeleton to pick with Jezebel right now.

AA: Do you think that kind of, like, humanist tunnel-vision gets in the way of like theoretical or artistic advancement? Because it clouds the conversation with issues that everybody already kind of knows about?

SNP: Yeah, it’s grating. [Jezebel’s] offering $10,000 for un-retouched photos of Lena Dunham. That was the last fucking straw.

BP: Yeah, I find that repulsive.

SNP: Someone asked me about that, in an interview, like whether we retouch our photos, and I was like “This is not an issue. Next question.” So entirely basic. We want everyone in the magazine to look beautiful, and maybe in many of the same ways that people have looked beautiful in magazines before. And we do retouch, we want the lighting to be perfect. We’re not changing people’s bodies really, but if something happens with an angle in a photo that is totally awful, like, when you look at a photograph it’s different from when you’re looking at real life and everybody knows that. We try to restore to the photograph a vision of what that person looks like when you’re looking at them on set. And of course partly it’s fantasy, maybe it’s idealism. But I really don’t think retouching is the problem. Like what Jezebel will never notice is that Lena Dunham is one of like, ten thousand white women to be on the cover of Vogue. They’re so focused on these very superficial kind of ‘90s feminist criticisms, like, “Why can’t you just let Lena Dunham have a wrinkle in her forehead?” Lena Dunham deserves to be Photoshopped just like the models do. (laughter) I think everyone wants, if they’re going to be in a magazine, to look as beautiful as possible. And to say that just because someone already doesn’t fit the conventional mold, they have to be hairy and wartsy, like they have some obligation to be refreshingly ugly… ugh. So what I would like to do is cast a wider net when we’re casting and find people who are not conventionally model-y, but we’ll make them look classically great, like beautiful poses, lighting, all that. Why can’t you be a size twelve girl posing the way a size four girl would?

AA: Yeah, that’s not just offensive, it’s inaccurate. It seems curious.

SNP: It’s curious. It’s cheesy too.

AA: So what was the decision like to go print? Especially since you have such a minimal website.

BP: Well, the website now is just a placeholder. We wanted to wait until we had all our content, because making issue one was such a long and complicated journey. It’s funny people are hounding us for the website when making a magazine’s so much work unto itself. But yeah, it’s coming, and… oh, God, I just got lost in that, thinking about the website…

AA: Sorry!

SNP: The website will be great. We’re going to put a few of the articles from issue one onto the site, ditto issue two, but mostly I want them to be separate but equal entities and I want the print to really feel like something you can take to bed with you. I’ve said this over and over again, but I really think it’s true, we live in this time of constant surveillance, constant self-surveillance. We really feel like everything we do, everything we consume has to build our brand in some way, has to be quantified, has to be tweeted, and there’s something so beautiful about a magazine with little to no virality, that feels like it was made just for you.

AA: Who’s the “you”? Do you think about your customer base?

BP: I think we really just think about content that we enjoy reading. I don’t know how many times we’ve gone through Issue One, and it’s still something I just treasure, the writing is so intimate. And I think that with print, especially, we really wanted to honor that writing. When it’s a physical, tangible object, with the paper that it’s printed on, it just feels a lot more special.

SNP: There’s kind of a reactionary feeling about the internet, like, it’s not real, it’s not real life, it’s worth less, and I try not to be a dualist in that way—I mean, there’s a lot of garbage print magazines—but it’s different. And we try not to do stuff in the print magazine that the web does better. One thing about making the magazine a discrete object is that it can be themed. I really love the idea of a magazine being like a time capsule. In the second issue, everything is very dark and decadent. Working on that has been really fun. Perversely, the theme doesn’t represent how great it feels to work on it.

BP: It’s like, necrophilia. Necrophilia keeps coming up.

SNP: Hopefully not so literally. (laughter) But on the Internet, there are so many layers of removal and representation that real issues—say, for example, how men are treated in prison—are written from a sort of space-alien perspective. It’s so many layers removed. And that’s good, you can apply analysis, it may be necessary. But you also need something on the ground. Because I write so much on the Internet, I found that I was constantly writing a reaction to a reaction to a reaction; I found that I was, like, the seventeenth person to analyze something that I had no idea about. And it started to really tire me out. It feels like you’re trapped in this room—you’re in—what’s that old video game and like balls are flying everywhere?

AA: Pong. No wait pong has one ball.

SNP: Aren’t there multiple balls? You go up levels or something? (laughter) Anyway it feels like all these opinions flying around in a very small enclosure. You just want to escape and go somewhere and feel the air on your skin, you know, record some instinctive responses to something. I want to give new writers those kinds of opportunities. We want the writer to have some stakes in what they’re writing. The writers we’re soliciting are critical and analytical, yes, but I do think they have stakes in what they’re writing. And you can tell.

 

Aiden Arata writes essays and criticism for Medium, BOMBlog, and The L magazine. Follow her on Twitter @aidenarata.