The Sexiest magazine you really will Read for an Article

Everything is sexual, but nothing is sexy.”

It’s one of those sticky phrases that floats around social media, out of context and unexamined. In the pages of Erotic Review, a twice-annual literary magazine based in Britain, the opposite often seems to be true: Everything is sexy, but need not be precisely sexual.

An issue last fall featured the novelist Max Porter’s five erotic words. They were “slip,” “cut,” “jouissance,” “habibi” and “tether.” It also included a photo essay of the artist Richard Malone’s textile sculptures and a short article by the critic Ryan Ruby about the sensuality of written correspondence.

An earlier incarnation of the magazine was occasionally erudite, too, publishing the work of George Saunders, Damien Hirst and Evelyn Waugh’s eldest son, Auberon. But its approach to its subject matter was not so subtle. When it was founded in 1995 by Jamie Maclean, then an art dealer, it was a frisky print newsletter with illustrations of women’s bare bums on the front and articles headlined “The Best Nipples in Town.” It retained that sensibility even as it changed hands, led in its heyday through the late ’90s and early 2000s by a female editor, Rowan Pelling.

The staff who put together some of these issues was known for its naughtiness. Like characters in a Mary Gaitskill story, they handcuffed and playfully whipped one another in the magazine’s offices. When the publication was strapped for cash, the female editorial staff members “stripped to their scanties for a photo shoot,” Pelling recalled. At one point, it had 30,000 subscribers.

But every era has its own sexual mores. This one — with more expansive ideas about gender and sexuality — seems to call for a different kind of erotic magazine. So too does this era of media, when readers otherwise ensconced in digital life look to print publications to immerse them in worlds of taste (a rarer commodity on the internet than sex).

It’s fitting then that this iteration of Erotic Review is an elegantly designed, inquisitive periodical more at home beside n+1 than Hustler. Among indie bookstores and newsstands, it can also be found at Barnes & Noble — though still in plastic wrap.