By Lou Thomas
The team behind new "serious" sex journal SEx said they hope to see it on sale in mainstream newsagents, but insist that it won’t be a Scarlet magazine for men.
The magazine aims to give sex "the appreciation it deserves" and believes there is a gap in the market for intelligent discourse about the topic. Editor Chris Peachment said it would begin as a subscription-only quarterly, but would aim to go monthly by the end of the year. The first issue is priced £2.
Peachment said: "It won’t be like Scarlet, it’s not sex tips for men. It’s more serious. It won’t pull its punches — it’s more of an investigative thing."
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He claimed Scarlet was "not terribly good" at the moment. He told Press Gazette: "It’s a bit of a mish-mash. It’s seems that the women’s market is covered pretty well by things like Cosmo, which offers them how to have 60 great orgasms a night and how to get the best from your man and that sort of thing.
I think Scarlet is covering the same territory without offering them fashion shoots and all the rest of it."
According to publisher Jamie Maclean, who also founded and edited The Erotic Review, SEx aims to be "somewhere between Zoo and Prospect".
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Among the writers in the first issue of the magazine is former Daily Mail crime correspondent John Gibb, who contributed a piece on mini-brothels.
The team said they didn’t want SEx to be seen as top shelf.
Labour MP Claire Curtis-Thomas has attempted to banish the Daily Sport to the top shelf of newsagents because of its alleged "adverts for prostitutes"
(Press Gazette, 24 February). Asked about this, Peachment said: "Now that tarts’ cards have been banned from telephone boxes there’s surely a demand for some place where they can advertise, or how the hell are you going to find where they are? I would have thought they were providing a useful public service. I don’t think that sort of thing should be up to Labour MPs to determine."
The first issue of SEx, which is aimed at 35- to 60-year-old men, is currently being sent to subscribers of the Erotic Print Society, a niche publishing house.
Although 1,100 copies have been sent out so far, Peachment said: "We’ve had demand for another thousand, so we’re going to reprint."
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