Spying on the Future: Adult Magazine, 10 Years Later

Meg Cook, co-editor

All we had was a Barnes & Noble, but it was big and had a great, vast magazine section. I started with the usual culprits—the gateway drugs—of Seventeen, CosmoGIRL, and the like. I’d save up to buy a New Yorker when I could ($8 is a lot, for a magazine, to a high schooler working in fast food) when I knew there was a new David Sedaris story out, or something similarly enticing. But the real prize was the quarterlies, the heavy-hitters: Holding a fresh NYLON or PURPLE held infinite possibilities of other worlds—Paris or New York may have well been outer space, then—and the weight and feel of these publications accurately reflected their gravity. Keepsake items. Collectors editions. 

I started college in 2011, in Florida’s marshlands, and then I had a laptop and Instagram was invented. I could inhale everything from these publications, and more: Archives of storytelling from a hundred-plus years of magazine content, plus new things being made all. the. time. Not only by publications I admired, but by people, who I could now follow, and learn from, in real time, everything new about everything I was interested in. Now, at age thirty, I believe social media is basically a sickness, a human blight and a marking of a crucial downfall, but then it felt hopeful and exciting; the surplus of information and content felt like riches rather than like a crushing weight. Creators—at least the ones I was interested in like writers, editors, and artists—started to feel familiar; they weren’t like friends, exactly, but definitely like acquaintances. I could finally consume how I’d always dreamed: both intimately and infinitely. 

But still, I always trusted, most of all, the magazines with weight. It’s as if they had an inherent credibility—a mass that spoke for itself, wise and sturdy as a monolith. This isn’t a mind-blowing take, to be a person who thinks, Print will always be special to me. But, it’s just true, and maybe more so than that simple reason, I will always respect those who prioritize publishing a print issue, even if it’s hard, even if it doesn’t make money, even if there’s “no reason to.” Print magazines are the ultimate.

In Fall 2013, Sarah Nicole Prickett (with Berkeley Poole as creative director) published the first print issue of Adult, a magazine of “contemporary erotics.” The phrasing of this excited me: erotics—the most ancient of impulses, the basest of feelings—presented anew. Reframed to encompass everything that was currently happening, specifically within the rhetorical landscape of the internet, social media, and expansive new methods of creating and communicating. 

ISSUE 1: A World In Us

On the cover of the first issue is a girl—a woman? Maybe, but barely—with an olive complexion just dark enough to be ambiguous, a smattering of freckles, her hand raised above her eyes to block out the sun that shone just for her. Think: what National Geographic pictured humans would look like by 2050, but the symmetrical, assumedly bisexual hot-girl version. I remember this being one of the first instances of a small “controversy” (heavy air quotes) coming out of a decision to center someone young, feminine,  conventionally beautiful, and skinny. The first, of too many instances in the decade since, of me thinking to myself: It’s really not that deep. 

The first issue was titled A World In Us. US! Them and me. I was part of it, just as I had suspected. In the pages before the first editors’ letter, there are three ads that perfectly encapsulate the time and ethos: First, for BookMarc, then a subscription ask for The New Inquiry, and finally, the apex, an advertisement Santal 33. I imagined this publication bathed in that scent, seeping from its pages’ pores. That just made sense. 

The editors’ letter begins: “If you bought this magazine, thank you. If you stole this magazine, thank you.” They—there are four signatures under this letter in Issue 1—described a feeling all too familiar to my own experience: “As teens we snuck home magazines to ‘spy on the future’,” and that they were “[bored] with our own nostalgia.” This idea of “spying on the future” was exalting; as teenagers and young adults, nostalgia, often for times we didn’t even experience firsthand, guides us as we inquire and obtain our tastes—aesthetic and otherwise. But there comes a breaking point, which I consider tantamount to “growing up,” that throws the crutch of nostalgia aside (with gratitude). 

Rookie had been perfect for teenagers for precisely this reason: that magazine (which also, though digital, revered and published hefty print editions) held tightly onto nostalgia’s capital, which served its purpose to get its readers out by turning them back to what came before them, as guidance and inspiration. Adult was already, well, adult—and I, too, had felt then, in 2013, that the ache of nostalgia was being replaced by a more vital hunger for the future. I didn’t need to rely on what had been done, because I was now in a position to do. 

The contributors’ page featured everyone listed as a personal ad; genius, and effective. In reading the first issue of Adult, it was the first time where I was following, literally, all these editors and writers and artists already (on social media), and so the experience of seeing their name listed in these personals felt like a next logical step in the parasocial  relationship I was harboring with these creators; closing the gap between me and them, my interests and theirs. Adult’s print issue was like a secret, finally whispered aloud, and I was in on it. Or rather, I had been in on it, but now it was real—because the names I recognized, whose work and lives intertwined—that I already had intimate connections with—were in print. 

The contributor list was, to me, an embarrassment of riches: Durga Chew-Bose film writing, Alexander Chee fiction, Katharine Bernard on Erica Jong (?!?!), email transcriptions from Rachel Kushner…it was immediately clear that Prickett’s MO was to recruit friends and contemporaries because she both had to, for the sake of making this new endeavor work out from jump, but also because she could. Such a beautiful confidence, to make use of your network because it wasn’t embarrassing or beneath your standards to do so—because you only surrounded yourself with likewise brilliant, capable artists and creators. In this way Adult was the blueprint for Fecund; it’s meaningful to highlight your friends because your friends do incredible things. A World In Us was exactly what it felt like, and I was one of “us.” 

Issue 1 presented everything as an offshoot of erotics: artist studio visits, book reviews, recipes (a good excuse to use the word “masticating”). The editors cautioned, with a badge on the front cover, against selling to minors, and the editors’ letter recommended reading at night, in bed, alone. In doing so, they could double-down on the inherent, if not overt or obscenely X-rated, erotics presented in the magazine as an object—almost too hot to the touch. Presenting everything as erotic not only rang true, but lent Adult a credibility that whatever they gave us, whatever they told me, was just that. 

The pure “porn” eroticism we did get in that first issue was a little beside the point. The part of the magazine that most disinterested me, interestingly, were these overt attempts to be “on message.” The photoshoot by Missy Reyes that reveals white skinny girls naked, or in various states of undress, peeling off pretty lingerie, or another, titled “The Girl Upstate,” were almost rote and borderline boring, but I understood the necessity of their inclusion and the purpose served. One photo story, infamous (to me), and titled “Auto-Erotic”— “inspired by the American writer Harry Matthews and his seminal work of fiction, Singular Pleasures (1988)”—showed creatives mid-jerk off, in states of auto-arousal. Even the porn was literary, and connected to some higher intellectual and creative pursuit. 

The real thrill, rather, of Adult issue 1 were those features like the emails from Rachel Kushner, which articulated so clearly the humor and boundless form at the center of the magazine. The email project in particular—which is like if I’m Very Into You by Kathy Acker/McKenzie Wark meets oughts-era Postsecret meets found-poetry with a perverted eye and ironic, self-deprecating humor—was a pristine example. Screenshots of emails with random shit redacted for the hell of it, is both illicit and  funny. Joe Coscarelli’s longform piece “I’m not Gay, but in Florida I’m a Faggot” resonated with me deeply; someone recognizing and going deep on the strange and off-putting erotics and aesthetics of my home state, mixed with early iMessage inlay.

The issue concludes with a reverse Q&A with Blood Orange, before he’s even released Cupid Deluxe, and on the heels of “Everything is Embarrassing” virality. In the Q&A, the “interviewee” himself poses questions to the reader, which acts as the final push, on the part of Adult, to implicate the reader in the shared intimacy between this magazine object and themselves, by force. 

ISSUE 2: The Rigor of Beauty

Adult issue 2, published spring 2014, was titled The Rigor of Beauty. Issue 2 is slightly slimmer, but, in my opinion, more visually appealing, with a color palette of blue and brown and a Sam McKinnis painting—a nude male backside—as the cover image. I always loved this title so much; so evocative and concrete. Only now, on reflection, of the darkness at play in the second issue in comparison to the first, do I realize the “rigor mortis” association. The first piece of content listed on the front cover is, menacingly, Asia Argento; further proof of Adult foreseeing the future in a specific way, soothsaying rather than acting on historical impulse. You can tell immediately that this issue will be different than the first. 

Once again, we begin with a Le Labo ad. Then the editors’ letter begins: “In Hell…” Signatures have dropped from the letter, and it’s clear that Prickett is now in fuller control, which is exciting. Everything reads riskier, and what are erotics if not risky—if not a little scary? Issue 2 is The Death Issue, and the letter includes topics like necrophilia, le petite mort, and Biblical connotations of eroticism; the heresy of “making the word into flesh.” Is that not the mission statement of the magazine itself? This scary erotics, then, feels bolder—and thus more true to form. 

Not for nothing, this issue is also “more diverse,” in both race and gender. I say this as politically neutral, not to highlight the fact of the magazine becoming more “woke” or even listening to feedback from the first—maybe that was the case, maybe not—but I find it interesting merely because, with issue 2, Adult’s very gaze has evolved, grown, and become more-encompassing. 

Again, the “rigor”: there’s an effort on the part of Adult to encompass a perspective it hadn’t previously, to approach the audience’s perception of erotic aesthetics in a more dynamic, defined, and “rigorous” manner, but also the play on “rigor mortis”: Issue 2 is glitchy, fetishistic, and precisely moody. The content is reeled in, and therefore pricks harder. John Edmunds’s spread shows Adult readers its first black male nudes, introducing us to an issue that’s also markedly gayer. Molly Crabapple’s photos, which maybe under different editorial standards could fit into the first issue, are blurred and defamiliarized to fit this new erotic standard. 

Issue 2 employs an anonymous, dark-web aesthetic so markedly different from the “personal” depicted in issue 1. Trading social media-literate and pithy self-consciousness, “The Rigor of Beauty” pushes back on the biracial, freckled, soft female skin of issue 1 to welcome an erotics of bondage, pain, risk—even the layout and color choice are literally darker. 

If issue 1 of Adult is a magazine, issue 2 is an Art Book. The issue feels more IRL, less overtly “online.” As I mentioned earlier, this online feeling is what makes the first issue so special, and so of its time. But whereas the connection to eroticism in issue 1 was made intellectually—even humorously—in issue 2 it's below the surface; haunted and threatening. 

When I was young, adulthood meant erotics, sex, “adult content,” sure. But it also meant those other, more hidden “adult” truths, those I was banned from exploring and gaining insight into. Erotics of “adulthood” meant sex—and lessons of evil, the devil, the occult.

The issue ends with a reverse Q&A: this time with Asia Argento. I really can’t believe how fittingly her inclusion is as a bookend to this new form of erotics proposed by issue 2. Again, Adult dared us to forgo nostalgia for the erotic fear of embracing the future. With Blood Orange, that was dancey and pop-cultural; with Argento, it summoned the dark psychic forces of eroticism in the years to come, beckoning the nefarious “sexuality” of the late aughts, including Me Too, Weinstein, Epstein…

Argento asks the Adult reader—asks me: “How would you define evil in the mundane sense?” 

In the end, what made Adult special was also precisely the reason of its short-lived nature: it heralded an intimacy heretofore reserved for online communication and relationships—those of which that, in the grand scheme of things, hadn’t even been online that long—and sentenced them to print (i.e. to death). But, not a death that’s to be feared. Rather, a death that incorporates all of that stuff: finality, corporeality, and decay of product (my copies, though kept safely on my living room side-table, now creased and stained from a decade of semi-regular, yet low-impact, flip-throughs) while being immensely lifelike. 

People say that print magazines now are dying, have been dying, a slow and merciless death, and I think this is in large part because publishers deem it impossible to replicate the virality and marketability they so desperately crave—and achieve—with online media. But with the rebirth and revitalization of Bookforum and Paper, I’m hopeful that we’re also rethinking our aims for these media, their important existence in and of themselves. Adult seemed to solve an equation that few publications can or would replicate: capturing what’s essential and communal about online life + the necessity of and inherent intimacy of print = erotic.