Editing by desire

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

FOLIO: Readers seem to like Juggs, which invariably winds up as the punch line of any joke requiring the title of a sex magazine.

Hanson: And, God bless [those comedians]. We love it! Juggs is the epitome of bad taste. It's a humorous magazine, a sexual sideshow. That's very different from what it was when I first arrived. Back then, it was ghastly. It was being produced by gay men, and they made photo sets that they could laugh at. They would choose the ugliest possible women, the ugliest facial expressions, and they would laugh their asses off, cracking themselves up over what foolish heterosexual men would masturbate to.

FOLIO: What did you do to change that? Hanson: I began putting in women who are like the Willendorf Venus--a prehistoric fertility symbol with enormous breasts and a massive belly. The idea was that people would worship her to become fertile. But I believe that she was just a piece of early pornography, something that cavemen masturbated to if they couldn't get any.

FOLIO: Your newest magazine, Bust Out!, is the only one that you launched from scratch. What made you decide on that particular approach and why is its circulation the lowest of the three in your stable?

Hanson: I wanted to find a niche that was not being filled. At the time of Bust Out!'s launch, the giantly augmented, very bizarre feature strippers were just making their appearance. I wanted to do a magazine devoted to those women because I figured that anything so extreme would develop an extreme following. But the circulation will stay exactly where it is; there are only so many [potential readers] out there, and they are very fond of the magazine. See, my interest in making magazines is to define a core group and feed them, get the magazine finely tuned so that it is exactly what the readers want. Then they will buy every issue. Though each magazine has its maximum, a devoted audience ensures that you will hold your sales month after month.

FOLIO: You say your readerships are growing. Playboy's, Hustler's and Pettthouse's are falling. Why?

Hanson: I meet our readers' needs. Other [sex magazine editors] don't stop laughing at their readers and hating themselves. My response to them is this: If you think you're too good for what you are doing, then make what you are doing better. Also, we're in an era of specialization. Why would you want to buy a magazine that once in a while touches on what you really want when you could buy a magazine that wallowed in it every month?

FOLIO: What can the editors of mainstream publications learn from you?

Hanson: Anybody could benefit from my method of asking my readers what they want and then giving it to them. Generally, though, editors want to change other people. The reasoning goes, "This is what I think is best, and I think other people ought to be like me." Manipulating the world is a very male trait. Women, on the other hand, are compromisers. I have a very feminine approach to my magazines. It amazes me when people read Leg Show and think of me as this bitch-goddess dominatrix. They don't see how fluid and truly feminine I am.