Editing by desire

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 1996 by Michael Kaplan

Nobody scans the racks of skin magazines in search of enlightenment or education. Like schools of hungry bottom feeders in some sleazy singles bar, rack scanners seek one thing and one thing only. Dian Hanson--editor of Leg Show, Juggs and Bust Out!--is well aware of this. She also holds fast to the belief, however, that titillation can be presented with a certain degree of intelligence and humor, thus providing readers with sexual kicks without making them feel like suckers for spending $7 to indulge their fantasies of choice.

A former editor of Outlaw Biker, 44-year-old Hanson attributes her publications' success to an overall sense of empathy for people who routinely get treated as creeps. The numbers seem to bear this out. According to the publisher's unverifiable figures (all titles are unaudited), circulation and publishing frequencies have risen steadily since her arrival at the Manhattan-based MMG Services: The flagship magazine Leg Show (for leg and foot fans) has gone from bimonthly to monthly, and circulation has increased from 75,000 to 250,000; Juggs (the editorial slant here is, obviously, large-breasted women) has gone from 85,000 to 150,000; and the start-up Bust Out! (it centers around surgically augmented strippers) hovers at 80,000.

A high-school dropout, Hanson was raised by religious fundamentalist parents and developed an early obsession with sexual fetishes and perversions. When it came time to find employment, she moved east from her home state of Washington, and worked briefly as a respiratory therapist. Exposure to sex magazines including Cheri, Hustler and Screw, however, left her breathless enough to embark on her current career. "I was thrilled by the idea of hardcore hippie porn," recalls the statuesque cofounder of the 20-year-old, ultra-glossy hardcore Puritan.

Hanson spoke to Fono: recently about the challenge of arousing readers, the parallels between art and porn titles and how publishing gets under her skin.

FOLIO: Are you trying to take sex titles to a higher level?

Dian Hanson: When an artist creates a painting, he wants to evoke an emotion from the viewer. That's what I do. Good pornography creates very strong emotions. Everyone believes that you don't have to work hard in pornography, that any idiot can do it: It's made by idiots for idiots. But it's not easy to make something that can pinpoint your readers' truest, strangest, darkest fantasies, then arouse them. That is what I am interested in doing.

FOLIO: Then why is the sex magazine regarded as such a hack genre of publishing?

Hanson: The morality arbiters have decided that pornography is unworthy of the efforts that go into other magazines. Why is it any more honorable to write for a food magazine? Food magazines are all about sensuous pleasures. I look at those magazines and I want to eat the food. I fantasize about it. Food, like sex, is about having an appetite and lusting after something. I don't see the two things as any different.

FOLIO: But you must have some compunctions about what you do. After all, when you pose in lingerie on the editor's page in Leg Show, you always hide your face. Even for the photo accompanying this interview, you concealed your identity.

Hanson: I live in a small town. People don't know what I do for a living because I don't want to have problems. I don't want it to be that the guy who plows my driveway can't do it because his wife thinks I'm a big slut: I don't want my mechanic and carpenter to have problems coming over. People don't understand how dangerous it is to be a woman in the sex industry. Hugh Hetner's only problem with walking down the street is that he likes to wear pajamas all day and somebody might want to kidnap him, but he's not going to be grabbed by sexual obsessives.

FOLIO: Then why run a photo at all?

Hanson: Knowing that I am a real human being, my readers find it easier to bond with me. Plus, hey, I'm 44, I've got a nice body, and I like getting all those letters from readers who tell me what a babe I am.

FOLIO: As a woman at a male-oriented skin magazine, you are definitely part of a minority. Have you ever considered doing an erotic magazine aimed at heterosexual women?

Hanson: So few women are interested that it is virtually impossible to do that kind of magazine successfully. The women who buy Playgirl are pink-collar, and it's always been known that 50 percent of the magazine's readers are male. If you were to do a magazine aimed at women, the only chance for success would be to make it exactly along the lines of very smutty romance novels, which represent the fastest-rising market in the field. The magazine would have to be about good-looking guys ravishing women.

FOLIO: Most men's magazines operate on the Playboy model--presuming that the reader is some really cool stud who's always in control. LegShow, however, nearly always presents its women in a domineering mode. Did you plan on going against the formulaic grain with this magazine?

Hanson: I took over Leg Show a little more than eight years ago. It was a small magazine that had been patterned after the leg magazines of the 1950s--an era when you couldn't show anything but leg. I asked readers what they wanted to see and based the entire magazine on their letters. I saw that they were literate and obsessed and had clear-cut ideas about what they wanted in the magazine. I knew that the audience would be extremely loyal as long as they were given what they wanted. I centered it on submissive male fantasies and situations.