By Juliette Tang
It started as I was digging around for an old Janus magazine for a friend of mine (sigh, I swear).
Janus — the classiest and cheesiest British spanking magazine from the 1970s, and still being campily produced to this day — reads like the Vice Magazine of softcore spanking. There’s something that is, strangely and inconceivably, almost high-brow about this periodical, with its modestly made-up and un-enhanced models who look like they stepped out of a Richard Kern photo. The lo-fi, soft-focused, 35mm photos and the intentionally retro design of the layout and typeface — plus the fact that the magazine’s design philosophy has not changed in the last three decades — imbue the publication with a toothsome genuineness noticeably absent in its more explicit modern day counterparts.
The publication also makes no secret of its aspirations toward a “higher standard.” Janus also runs a popular sex shop in Soho, London, that boasts a storefront more fitting of a Prada boutique than a sex shop, and which in the past has participated in an homage to Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, two French poets who had a famously violent affair in the 1870s.
It was by pure accident that, through searching for Janus magazine, I discovered QSM, an online BDSM bookstore, its warehouse located here in San Francisco, woman-owned and -run since 1989.
