Sex Magazine Goes Against The Grain

Asher Penn photographed by Haley Briggs

Launched by Asher Penn in 2012, in some ways the story of Sex Magazine is a story of how print, publishing and the Internet have evolved and intersected over the past decade. Starting as an online-only series of interviews, from its inception Sex has been characterised by Penn’s idiosyncratic subject choices and by the sprawling, original scope of their interviews. For a time this fit the spirit of the Internet, with its early promise of a certain freedom, anarchy and fun. Then, right around the time the Internet began to morph into an increasingly corporate, dogmatic space, and as print publications became scarcer and scarcer, Penn decided Sex Magazine should become a physical publication. In a sense it’s a magazine that has always gone against the grain of mainstream publishing.

With a background in fine art, Penn spent stints working at Printed Matter and Karma Books, and dabbled in independent publishing, before he launched Sex. Now based in his native Vancouver after many years in New York, he credits this lack of a ‘conventional’ publishing, or journalism, background with helping form his approach. “I was really into photo books and independent magazines in general, but I was not a journalist, or even somebody that had any kind of magazine editing experience,” he says. “I had a fantasy of what editing a magazine was, and just figured it out based around my understanding of what an interview was.”

Here he discusses why he started Sex, the value of being niche, and what makes a good interview.

There has to be a little bit of naivete

Sex began in 2012 as an online-only series of interviews. What made you launch it in the first place?

In 2011, weirdly enough, print magazines in general weren't putting that much budget or energy into their online outputs. Even, for example, Vice was still way more interesting in print than it was online. Those that had put energy into it weren't really being able to transition the print experience into an online thing. Meanwhile on the Internet it was kind of a peak moment for post-Internet art, Tumblr was really exciting at that time. So the idea was simply that there was a niche, there was an opportunity, and my goal was to try to really give the full experience of a print publication through something that was published online.

Do you think your lack of a professional background in publishing or editing meant you had a more original approach?

I don't know. I think that, in general when you start a project like this, there has to be a little bit of naivete. You can't just go into it knowing everything, because if you did you wouldn't do it. Also, a lot of the time when you're trying to start something new, there's probably a really good reason that that thing doesn't exist, and it's usually better not to know the reason why.

There are always growing pains

If you could go back in time, knowing what you know now, would you still do the magazine?

It's funny, I think everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to happen. We had a really fantastic three-year run of doing quarterly online issues, and then things started to move from desktop web browser to the phone, and we weren’t really able to keep up.

Around that time we had been commissioned to do an anthology book, and that was when we were able to, hilariously enough, learn how to convert the online experience to the print experience, and that template was what helped us to eventually make the transition back to being a print publication. I think there are always growing pains and these experiences where you make mistakes that maybe in hindsight you say, “Oh, that was kind of weird. I wouldn't necessarily do that that way this time around.”

Maybe one big thing is that I wouldn't necessarily have named the magazine Sex. I was really high when I decided on that name, and it wasn't even my idea, it was a really good friend's idea. The thinking was: there hasn't been a magazine called ‘sex’, and around that time there was this aspect of art culture where you take a word and by doing creative work, you reassign what the meaning of the word is. So the idea was that we could choose the word ‘sex’ and then completely change the meaning of that word, or attach this other meaning to it. But then what ended up happening is that we entered one of the most heavily literal cultural periods, starting in 2014, and this idea of playing with meaning completely evaporated, right? In general now everything is supposed to say what it is on the label.

That was a real surprise, and people were genuinely confused, that this was a magazine called Sex that didn't have sex in it. My joke was always, “Well any good magazine that did adult content would never call itself Sex.”

I like the idea of being able to address a niche

I think it's interesting with a magazine, or any artistic project that spans a period of time, you’re in some ways tethered to something you conceived of years ago, even as it grows and changes.

Yes, and you've kind of outgrown it, but at the same time the magazine is still the best thing that I've ever done. We're working on our fifteenth issue currently, and there are all these things that we're doing with this issue that we haven't done previously. I feel like, “I can’t believe it took us this long to go in this direction, or to try this thing out, this is going to be so much fun.” So I still feel there’s a lot to discover within the framework. Now we're also at this weird point where we have contributors who were reading the magazine when they were teenagers, but it is also still a very small magazine, it’s a niche publication.

Would you ever want it to not be niche?

Yes, but I think you've got to be able to figure out what you can do that other people can't. So for me, it’s important to be able to put somebody like Million Dollar Extreme on the cover of the magazine and think, “Okay, great. Nobody else would do this, and this completely aligns with our values and our interests and the values and interests of our audience. We have to do this. This is our job.”

I really like the idea of being able to address a niche that nobody else can or will. And now what we're trying to do with the magazine is really find that sweet spot, of a celebrity who has incredible cultural influence that the status quo can't get near because it's just too weird, too freaky, too intense, too provocative, but at the same time there’s a huge audience for it. It’s funny, going back to the naming thing, if I could go back in time a name I would definitely have considered would be ‘Internet magazine’ because so much of what we've ended up doing has been stuff that the Internet has embraced.

And as you’ve said already, the early Internet was so formative of the magazine’s approach. How was it, then, to transition to being a print magazine? And what was the thing that made you do that in the first place?

Around the period that we started to consider transitioning to print, online discourse had become so over the top and I didn't really want to participate in it. I think I got a little burnt out from that online space, and I just did not feel that if we were publishing exclusively online that we could have the creative freedom that I wanted. If you're publishing online you're giving away your content for free, and I wanted people, if they were going to criticise what we were doing, to have at least paid for an issue.

Online magazines also had become completely ubiquitous, whereas the print magazine had fully died out within five years. Sometimes you’ve just got to pivot in order to bring something to the table that isn't there, and right now there's a dirge of quality print magazines that represent counterculture.

There has to be something that is reactive

It seems that you like to go to spaces when other people aren’t.

Maybe this is just art school brain, but I don't see how anybody can consider themselves to be doing anything interesting if they are gravitating towards what everybody else is gravitating towards. There has to be something that is reactive, there has to be something that is responding to where things are going. To me that makes sense in terms of a business model, but it's also the most fun. When we've covered certain people who have also then been featured in, say, The New York Times, even though I am proud of those pieces, it does bum me out that we were just kind of adding on to a dog pile, versus being able to do something that nobody else was able to do.

I think ‘the press cycle’ can mean things get quite boring, because every conventional publication wants a timely hook for an interview, so you tend to end up with a lot of similar conversations from one person being published all around the same time.

The press cycle is one of the things that I never really understood, because I didn't come from a journalism background. One funny thing, I’d say, is that we tend to get our best interviews with people when they've done a press cycle, and are out of that mode. For example we have a really beautiful piece in the next issue with [the French filmmaker and novelist] Catherine Breillat, and that piece exists because she had done all of her promotion for her last film, and so she was very available. The same thing happened when we interviewed [the American film director] Paul Schrader. We've often talked to people in between their projects, and I think that those pieces always end up being a lot more timeless and a lot more oriented towards process than they are towards a product.

What do you think makes a good interview?

In general I think I'm always thinking about the person I was when I first started reading magazines. I was an art student, and I was trying to figure out who I was going to be in the world and what I was going to do. I would sometimes approach people who I was jealous of because they were successful artists, and I was not a successful artist, but I wanted to be one. Often if I approached the conversation in a biographical way, I noticed that I would learn there were these details about them, in terms of their background and their story and the way things happened for them, that were so specific that there was absolutely no way that I could possibly have had a similar experience to them. So that's off the table, which was great. Then at the same time, it also meant that my own journey, my own experience, was equally legitimate and important.

In terms of talking about the nuts and bolts of process, and how someone got to where they were, as an artist I find that tremendously useful, far more so than pithy talking points. In general I skew biographical. There is a way, if you sculpt an interview, that it can flow like a documentary, and the amount that you can conjure up through the narrative can be really evocative.