Australian Women's Forum Was My Revolution

I’ve got a new thing to add to my list of “You know you’re getting old when…” Today, Daily Life has an article that begins:

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.

My first response was to get my curmudgeonly high dudgeon up and shout “What do you mean you’ve never heard of it! Muggenjuggen young feminist whippersnappers, how can they not know of the greatest magazine in the world?” But then I remember: AWF’s heyday was in the 90s, a decade that is now marked for heavy nostalgia. And it’s now 14 years since the mag closed down. 14 years! So um, yeah. I guess there’s plenty of young women who wouldn’t know about it. And I’m old.

If you haven’t heard of it, go and have a read of the piece and then come back. It’s OK, I’ll wait. Actually, even if you have heard of it, go and read. It features an interview with the magazine’s last editor Helen Vnuk, who I worked closely with in the 90s and who remains my friend today. Helen does a fine job of summing up the mag but I’m going to do it here as well.

I came of age in the 1990s and my discovery of feminism went hand-in-hand with Australian Women’s Forum. I bought my first copy in 1993 and instantly loved it’s anti-Cosmopolitan attitude. No diets, no cosmetics ads, no fashion. Just naked men, sex and real women’s issues. It was my initiation into sex- positive feminism, a glimpse of a world where I didn’t have to care about hairstyles or “how to please your man”. AWF was fun and intelligent and sassy and did I mention the penises? Full frontal male nudity spread across the centre pages, beautiful, tanned, muscled men showing us their semi-turgid wangs in all their wangy glory. Not to mention the amateur guys and dirty, dirty “letters” detailing all manner of erotic encounters. It was porn but it was for ME, for women like me. For women, in a world where almost all porn was for men. That was a revolution to me.

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Without it I wouldn’t be the evil pornographer I am today. AWF taught me that you can have female-friendly sexual material and that Andrea Dworkin might have been wrong when she said that porn wasn’t feminist. It made me want to go out and make my own porn… and I did.

Before I discovered the world of online porn I freelanced for AWF, writing articles on diverse topics like workplace discrimination, sex and religion, feisty pop culture heroines and the history of vibrators. One of my pieces was about how to find female-friendly internet porn and that led me down the rabbit hole of online smut where I still exist today. For The Girls was based on the ideals of Australian Women’s Forum and modeled on its format of articles, naked men and erotic fiction.

The magazine suffered the death of a thousand cuts thanks to increasing government censorship, with stringent laws introduced in 2000 limiting what kind of dirty letters they could run and even restricting the illustrations on an article about genital cosmetic surgery. When AWF folded in 2001 it was a shadow of its former self. I still have all of my copies, taking up most of a shelf in my office. I occasionally flick through them for inspiration.

I’m not sure if the magazine would have survived the rise of the internet; every women’s erotica hard copy magazine launched in the intervening years has fallen by the wayside: Filament, Scarlet, Sweet Action. Even Playgirl gave up for a while before finally giving in and going totally gay. I could claim For The Girls as the goddaughter of AWF, an ideological spawn made freer by the internet age; no censorship online meant hard cocks and hardcore sex photos (and eventually, videos). It was able to offer a less restrained celebration of female sexuality and desire and I’m proud that I could create that.

So thank you to Australian Women’s Forum. It really was the spark the touched off my passion for feminist porn.

Here’s some scans from my various copies: