The entire run of the once-revolutionary cybersex magazine is yours to enjoy.
Nothing dates faster than technology, while nothing is as timeless as sex. So Future Sex magazine was perhaps doomed from the get-go, with nothing but the flash-in-the-pan excitement of early 1990s virtual reality (which, some readers will recall, was distinctly lacking in reality), CD-ROM porn and the like, mixed with a splash of early 1990s kink and fetish fashion, to distinguish it from the rest of the adult magazine pack. For a brief time, however, the San Francisco-based magazine was all the rage – the excitement of the cybersex age meant that it got a lot more attention than it might have otherwise expected, with writers seeing it as the next big thing in erotica, with editor Lisa Palac being hailed as part of the new female movement revolutionising erotica.
But the fetish scene was well catered to already, the photospreads were at once too conventional for the cyberpunk crowd and too stylised for the porn mag reader and the female porn scene that was so heralded in the early Nineties never quite lived up to the extensive hype, with the likes of the Pussy Posse in England (not the American groups of womanisers headed by Leonardo Di Caprio, but a female group once ubiquitous in the British media, now entirely undocumented on the web) and various erotic magazines aimed at women coming and going pretty quickly. Feminist porn would have its real moment some twenty or so years later, in a rather more organic revolution, but the future that Future Sex eagerly predicted never quite came off – at least not in the ways that were being predicted. It’s amusing to realise that while everyone was getting excited about the idea of strapping on virtual reality helmets and controlling penis pumps and vibrators via the internet, no one even thought about the cell phone revolution that would allow people to sext and share erotic Zoom calls.
Future Sex came and went in seven issues, and is now almost forgotten. But the entire run is available online, and there’s a strange fascination in reading articles that gush over cutting edge technology that today would be so obsolete that you couldn’t even use it on your laptop – assuming you still use a laptop. Like poking through vintage computer magazines, it’s a reminder that nothing gets old as quickly as the future.
You can read the collection here.
https://archive.org/details/futuresexmagazine
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