Filament again

Suraya Sidhu Singh from Filament (pictured above, photo by Gerard Harvey) has written to The Blogsplosion about her magazine’s plight, explaining what happened and putting to bed (ahem) a few assumptions:

“Yep – we’re a tiny little magazine that struggles to sell 328 copies during a three-week period. Overall our circulation for our first issue will probably be under 2,000 – however, this is still higher than a lot of independent magazines, particularly those run by one person in a bedroom in North London. We had to get 3,000 copies that we’d planned for distribution shredded after distributors gave us all sorts of reasons why they wouldn’t distribute us, which mainly had to do with not being like other women’s magazines. I always thought the point was to produce something new and different, but however! We have addressed as many of their ‘issues’ as we feel we reasonably can for the second issue, and now that we’re going to be on the top shelf, the UK’s main top shelf distributor seems very interested. I hope it comes through.

“Elaborate PR stunt” – I wish. If it had been, it would’ve been in more than one paper. Plus, then I wouldn’t have pissed off our very nice former printers, who are merely among the majority who adhere to the long-held print and distribution industry standard that only “erections, penetrations and ejaculations” count as “hard core pornography”. It all happened because supporters of Filament, the Erotica Cover Watch blog writers, heard about our struggles (which I had been quietly blogging), and decided to start a campaign, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I mentioned it to Zoe Margolis on Twitter, and the whole thing snowballed. We quickly worked out how many copies we’d need to sell to change printers, put up the campaign page and started spreading the word. It was pretty slow going until yesterday when we sold about 70 copies. Today we’re back to our usual handful.

I do this because I think the women’s magazine market currently presents a depressing model to young women as to what they’re going to grow up to be. If there’s just one title on the market, obscure or not, that shows that sex is not all about you being admired physically, and thinking means working out how many calories are in your snack, then I would’ve done a good thing. I just decided to stop whinging about women’s media being crap and do the one tiny thing I could do about it. And consequently, one panelist on a television talk show said that I “should be shot” for doing this, and a wide variety of other vitriol has been hurled at me. But actually I’m not complaining because it’s that important and I get emails from women every day thanking me for what I’m doing and asking how they can help.

The alternative is that women really truly don’t want anything better than that, which is fine if that is true, but nobody’s tried it before, so who knows?”

[Ed's note: All power to Sudaya and to Filament, for trying to do something brave and different in the area of considered eroticism in print; there's a long and often difficult history of such attempts, including one of my favourite old magazines, Eros. I certainly hope that Filament's story ends happier than theirs.]

You can support their campaign here.