The news is out. Scarlet Magazine is no more, along with UK Forum and Best of Forum. I’ve known about this for a while now but haven’t mentioned it here, as the liquidation of Trojan Publishing has affected me both personally and financially – but that’s another story. Needless to say, these publications will be missed.
As epitaphs go, I couldn’t possibly have put it better than Suraya of Filament Magazine:
‘Scarlet inspired both love and loathing, and that is what made it so important. They offered something a little different in a magazine market that casts women as frilly, domestic or brainless.
While some of us were disappointed with the lack of man-flesh and the over abundance of woman-flesh, many women loved its strident sex-positivity and open discussion of sexuality issues.
Scarlet was formative in my decision to publish Filament. I never saw any of the issues that apparently better conformed to its first editor Emily Dubberley’s original vision for the magazine:
“You’re a Scarlet woman if you’re doing what you want, whether lesbian, straight, bi, virgin, monogamist or self-proclaimed slut. At Scarlet, we don’t think sexual confidence is about being able to tick a load of boxes. Having a great sex life isn’t about following trends or carving notches on bedposts. Instead, we see good sex as asking for what you want, and refusing what you don’t, without feeling self-conscious about it.”
By the time I got to see it, years after its launch and a change of editor, I found it strongly focused on pleasing your man, drowned in lingerie advertising and in places, explicitly anti-feminist. A glance at the flannel panel revealed the editorial staff were 90% female and the magazine’s management were 90% male. But whether I liked it is beside the point: Scarlet did speak to a lot of women.
Scarlet seemed to improve more recently, with less busy design and more content that wasn’t about sex. This year, one issue even had a man on the cover — a strong taboo in women’s magazines, an idea about as evidence-informed as the notion that magazine covers shouldn’t be green.
The women’s magazine market is set up to reproduce sameness. There is little variation compared to the men’s market, and its model of femininity has scarcely changed since magazines were invented. There are a handful of US-published independent feminist magazines, and that’s about it.
Scarlet was always difficult to get hold of — its distribution seemed limited, probably because distributors didn’t believe in its merits. Magazine distributors are a funny bunch: largely men in their 50s, not interested in research that proves your magazine has a market; they use their personal opinion to judge whether titles are likely to succeed. Some of those we spoke to judged Filament’s merit by asking a random junior member of staff whether she liked the magazine. When you’re talking about sex-related content and given that most women working in the magazine industry are those who feel well served by it, it’s easy to see how this methodology is a touch flawed.
It’s oft repeated that magazines are dying as a format. This is not true: the magazine market is growing overall, mainly through niche titles — while many mainstream titles are finding their readership diminishing. This seems a clear indication that it’s high time for something different in women’s magazines.
Some people have said that there may be positive flow-ons for Filament, but I am taken back to discussions with distributors in which they have mused on how nobody thought Scarlet could work, and yet it did. That is no longer a positive that we can rely on, so I guess how this event will impact upon Filament remains to be seen.
In any case, here’s to Scarlet and their challenge to the women’s magazine format. There is no such thing as failure in this incredibly difficult market; every publication that does something truly different for women does so in the face of eye-watering sexism, and should be applauded.’
Original article here.
