The Four Lessons I Learned From Working At Europe’s Largest Porn Publishers

In the great British tradition, “obscene” material likely to “deprave and corrupt” left plenty of leeway for interpretation.

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B ack in the early 1990s, I worked for (what was then) the largest porn publishers in Europe and it taught me a whole lot about the sex industry, pushing boundaries, fetishes, interior decor, and well, people in general.

I stumbled across my new career pretty much by accident, after seeing an advertisement to work on a “radical” new magazine a company called Northern & Shell was launching . It was a porn mag for women, titled, imaginatively, “For Women”, which was purchased primarily — and not all that surprisingly — by gay men.

I grew up in a town called Maidstone, which is located in Kent, about an hour outside of London. I attended the local girls’ grammar school where at that time their primary aim was to prepare students for an unremarkable office-based career in insurance or banking — so it’s safe to say that porn maven wasn’t on the curriculum, but then I was never one to play by the rules.