This was published 9 years ago
The best Australian women's magazine you've never heard of
By Lauren Smelcher Sams
Ever heard of Australian Women's Forum? Neither had I until I recently stumbled upon the now-defunct magazine while researching for a story at work.
Launched in the early '90s amid a landscape of riot grrls, grunge and sexually adventurous Gen-Xers, AWF was a female-friendly erotica magazine which folded in 2001, when the internet and increasingly tight censorship laws sent it to an early grave.
Australian Women's Forum.
Wait. So Australia once had a soft-porn mag for women?
I contacted its most recent editor, Helen Vnuk, on Facebook. And yes, she confirmed, indeed we did.
We agreed to meet and over lunch she told me AWF was more than "just tits and arse". And it was unabashedly feminist and body-positive.
"It was all about women loving sex and that being perfectly OK," Vnuk tells me. "It wasn't, 'You have to dress like this and do this and say this and then you can have sex', which a lot of the mags at the time were."
"In a lot of ways it was about what it wasn't - it was like, 'You don't have to be any better than you are right now, you can just enjoy sex'. It was looking at hot guys, reading sexy stuff and then some more intelligent articles."
The magazine, she says, was a voice for women who were unashamed about liking sex and men.
Regular sections included Studly, featuring real guys who sent their naked pics in, and Sex School, where real couples demonstrated sex positions. The erotic fiction section was called Wet Spot and a monthly feature called Body Talk showed real couples, photographed naked, talking about their bodies.
Vnuk was especially fond of Body Talk. "It was really lovely to see all these different couples being honest about their bodies in a totally healthy way, and for readers to realise that, OK, maybe these people don't have so-called perfect bodies, but they do have partners who are really attracted to them."
In some ways, AWF reads like the precursor to Jezebel, Go Fug Yourself and, indeed, Daily Life.
"When we talked about food," says Vnuk, "we only ever talked about how good it tasted. We didn't care that it was healthy or low-fat or whatever. The men's magazines didn't, so we followed their lead on that."
There was a healthy and premature inclusion of gay and lesbian couples and serious topics were given a cheeky spin ("Bachelor of arse: working your way through uni on your back").
As it had to be submitted to the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) every month, AWF was regularly - and increasingly- censored.
"Things that we'd run on the cover in the early days could never have gone in the mag at all towards the end," Vnuk says.
The staff conceded the OFLC might have been right to kibosh the phrase "blue-veined yoghurt pumper". But working with the real thing proved trickier.
"The OFLC was very particular about the appearance of genitals," Vnuk explains. "Penises had to be at a certain angle and vaginas couldn't show any inner labia. Penises were allowed to be semi-engorged but not erect. It was a challenge. Limp is not sexy. So photographers had to make the penises look bigger - I think with oven gloves? - and hope for the best."
The magazine also just missed out on an industry that might have boosted its chances: reality TV.
"I think if we'd been able to get more celebrities, like those kinds of celebrities, we would have been OK," Vnuk says. "They're exactly the type of guys who'd pose for us." The mag did feature celebs. Andrew Denton and Eric Bana were both interviewed about their sex lives, and Warwick Capper (does he count?) bared his bum.
As for naysayers, apart from the OFLC AWF went about its business without too much trouble.
"We didn't cop the flak that the men's mags did," Vnuk she says. "I suppose people thought it was good that we redressed the balance a bit. We were like, 'Yeah, well, we see you as sexual objects too'."
The annual Man of the Year contest (drawn from the Man of the Month winners), was testament to that.
After our lunch, Vnuk told she was thrilled to have reminisced about AWF.
"I just loved it," she tells me. "It was the best job in publishing at the time."
Lauren Sams is the author of She's Having Her Baby, out March 2, in all good bookstores.