Abstract
Suck Magazine (1969-1974) was an underground sex magazine with a distinct visual rhetoric, based on words combined with a variety of images, from comics through caricatures to artistic paintings, photographs and photomontages. subtitled “the first European sexpaper”, it was the brainchild of Jim Haynes and Bill Levy, two counter-culturists who have relocated from the US to London to become part of the underground press milieu. They invited feminist public intellectual Germain Greer and London editor Heathcote Williams to join them, and together they cofounded and coedited the magazine, and published it in Amsterdam, which was then “a mecca for the counterculture” due to its “relaxed Dutch pornography laws” (Kleinheinz 2018, 121). Considered “one of the most attractive and radical products of the Amsterdam sexual underground”, Suck played a major role in turning the canal city from a “sleepy town” into a “sex capital” (Hekma, 2013, 49). According to Levy (n.d.) “Suck was a magazine of art and literature with sex as its theme.” However, in addition to its inimitable visual-verbal style, the magazine was also unique in highlighting both female and queer sexuality. This emphasis offered a fresh alternative to the male dominance and sexism of the underground press “mainstream”, and to contemporary phallocentric and exploitative pornographic magazines such as Screw or Hustler (Greer, in Kraus, 2008). This study defines and discusses the characteristics of the unique imagetext sexual rhetoric of Suck, against the backdrop of the sexual revolution of the 1960s-70s.
Presenters
Ya'ara Gil-GlazerSenior Lecturer and Head of the Education through Art Program, Department of Education and Department of Multidisciplinary Studies, Tel Hai Academic College, Israel
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Suck Magazine, Counterculture, Sexual Revolution, Imagetext
