Fuller didn t exactly discover sex, of course. I used to say that I had sex all to myself, she says, and then the other women s magazine editors started getting smart. The women s magazines aimed at a somewhat older audience, including Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and Family Circle, present a collection of articles about relationships, recipes, and serious topics. Even Whitney s Glamour hardly eschewed sex. In the last ten years or so, many women's magazines in general have gotten more racy, more raunchy hotter, as Brown puts it, at least in the text.
Readers don t seem to mind graphic words, but they tend to draw the line at sexy pictures.
Still, the words seem to do the job. I used to get my porno from sex manuals, says Ellen Willis, who teaches journalism at New York University, Now you can get it in the women s magazines. But Willis is not complaining. Nor, presumably, are millions of other women who buy and read the magazines. There is an acknowledgment that women want sex, Willis says, and have a right to it.