I remember that on the evening I bought it I flicked through it at home and thought “why have I bought this? It’s not what I want and it’s not even a good girlie magazine.” And I put it away.
I’ll start with why it’s not a good girlie magazine and address “why have I bought this” in a different post, as that’s the important and more complicated question.
Mayfair used to be a stylish magazine. It was owned and edited by one man, and was essentially a reflection of his personal tastes. He had quite corny tastes, tastes that were middle aged and middle class even when the magazine was at its best in the 70s and early 80s. Sports cars, hifi, wining and dining, big houses, and conventional looking pretty girls taking off their day clothes or evening wear. Sometimes they were professional models, sometimes they were ordinary young women who really did work at a bank or were in the upper 6th, and every now and then one would read in the gutter Sundays that one of these had lost her job just for appearing in Mayfair.
Hard-core and explicit soft-core pornography has been produced since the invention of photography around 170 years ago. But in Britain and the USA it was never easy to find, had literally to be bought from under the counter in a handful of specific newsagents, surgical supply shops, and such.
Some cities, usually dock cities like my own, always had shops selling pornography just as they had open prostitution. My mother, an otherwise shy woman, had friends who were prostitutes. The docks had closed by the time I was a teenager, but I remember walking down Trafford Road to Old Trafford with my mother when I was about 16 and her pointing out to me various derelict shops and pubs. One shop she pointed out and said “They used to sell dirty books and magazines. I think they got away with it because of all the sailors and the prostitutes – you used to see men coming out, always well dressed, and shifty. They must have travelled miles”. This area used to be called – at least locally – “the Barbary Coast”. Today everything has been demolished and re-developed and it’s now known as Salford Quays.
But in most places pornography was not easily available.
By the early 1970s, things had changed. Cheap four-colour printing and the “permissive society” meant that legal magazines went from printing black and white photographs of coyly posed women with their pubes airbrushed to an statue-like alabaster blankness to photographs of women showing their open genitals and their anuses. These were available not in dusty backstreet shops, but in mainstream newsagents. I started buying pornography in my mid-teens, and the mainstream magazines were already explicit and available in the family newsagents near my school even then.
But in the midst of all this gaping pink, Mayfair remained coy. There were never any open legged poses, and where possible the models had their pubic hair clearly combed and teased to cover the cleft of their fannies. Any photograph where the models’ labia (majora, never mind minora) were visible were airbrushed to a tan brown.
At the time I wasn’t a great fan of Mayfair, and only bought it if it featured a particular girl I liked. I preferred Club International, Men Only, Knave, and of the explicit softcore magazines, Rustler. They had a younger feel and acknowledged that their “readers” bought the magazines for one main reason – to wank while imagining penetrating one or another of the women in the photographs.
Explicitness wasn’t necessarily down to the models. From the late 70s onwards many top british glamour models would work in every market. They would do cute page 3 work, they would appear coyly nude in Mayfair, open their fannies and bums in Rustler or Whitehouse, and be variously penetrated in photosets for European hardcore publications like Private, Anal Sex and the delightfully named New Cunts. Models themselves usually didn’t limit the explicitness of their work, the explicitness was set by the editorial policies of the magazines. And Mayfair’s editorial policy was very tight.
But Mayfair did have its charms. Because it wasn’t explicit, it had to rely on showing off the femininity of the women’s bodies, to have them dress well, to have the photographs technically excellent, to rely on the models’ ability to project physical womanliness rather than just plonk on a sofa, spread their legs and hold their cunts open.
So when I bought this copy of Mayfair the other month I was particularly disappointed to see what a mediocre magazine it had become. It had nothing to offer. Every single photograph was flatly lit and all skin texture had been smoothed out in photoshop, removing the natural translucency of skin, the sense of light actually suffusing through the upper layers of skin and making them luminous.
The only selling point I could see was that the models showed their sex parts. And these days that is no selling point at all.
I wrote elsewhere in comment on an article by Naomi Wolf that H sent me that the women – and men – in pornography are not the artificially flawless airbrushed mannequins that Wolf claimed, and that if you want to see a photo of spotty bum or stretch marks, porn is about the only place you’ll find them.
I had not seen a mainstream modern girly magazine for about five years – they’re a declining part of the market, which is mostly online, or if paper, aimed at niche tastes.
Having bought this copy of Mayfair and having bought a copy of Escort a few weeks earlier and found it similarly dire, I must say that a section of the dying mainstream girlie magazine market is publishing heavily manipulated photos of unreal-looking women. The thing is that I can’t understand why it’s being done – in the old days the magazines used to do it to enhance the physical beauty of the models, to make their legs appear longer, their waists smaller, or they used to do it to render the photographs legal by airbrushing out the vulva.
These magazines aren’t doing that. The models aren’t enhanced as much as flattened and anonymised.
I’m baffled as to why these magazines exist.
Here is a page from the recent copy of Mayfair,
and a copy of a set from about 25 years ago which I pulled at random from my collection.
The modern set is characterless, the lighting does not model the contours of the woman’s body, she hasn’t been photographed in any particular location, she doesn’t have a freckle, a mole, a pose, a scar, or a line. Even small ch1ldren have some lines, however fine, natural skin creases round the eyelids, around the wrists, around the armpit.
I wonder to what degree the teenaged and early twenties lads who must now make up Mayfair’s core market have been formed by fantasizing over female characters in computer games, because the models remind me of flat featureless opaque-skinned computer-generated posable mannequins. It’s as if the boys nowadays don’t want the girl next door, they don’t even want manipulated paragons of physical perfection like the old Playb0y Playmates, they want to fuck Lara Croft.
The page of photographs from the old Mayfair are of Pat Wynn, also known as Auntie Jayne. She’s not photographed like that because was she was coy but because Mayfair wasn’t interested in genital explicitness. Pat was perfectly happy to spread her fanny as the following photo – from Whitehouse - shows.
In the old Mayfair set we see Pat middle aged, voluptuous, side lit to model her body and limbs, in a domestic setting, with moles, freckles, sags. There’s a sense of reality about it that says this is a real person, a flesh and blood human woman who has had a life, who has chosen to take her clothes off to make a bit of money by turning men on. Most of all there’s a sense that this is a real woman, and you could meet her – or someone like her – and perhaps have her, in real life.
I think that this is exactly what is missing from the modern magazine.
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