For some years I’ve been writing for the magazine Geare, usually just reviews of the assorted bits and pieces that I review. I was always a bit ambivalent about it because Geare is one of those ‘guys’ magazines, in which everything purported to be of interest to men was gathered within its pages — cars, home entertainment, cameras, motorbikes … and girls. There was always a multi-page spread of some attractive young lady, scantily dressed, with just a, er, fig-leaf of relevance in the form of a product list on each page (watch by so-and-so Swiss watch-making firm, G-string by such-and-such).
Not porn by the conventional measure of level of exposure, but certainly porn by the standard of reason for inclusion.
Happily, several issues ago, the magazine came to the realisation that if a bloke wants porn, there’s plenty of it around from specialist publications, and most of this is much more, um, satisfying than one picture spread of a girl in pre-1960s Playboy levels of attire.
Getting rid of the girl has had another effect, even more pleasing to me. Namely, Geare is now commissioning more stuff from me. So the new issue — #27, 2004, which should be on the newsagency shelves across Australia and New Zealand any day now — has my ‘Know it all’ column in its usual garish yellow (all about DLP projectors), and my history of the Internet. Go get it.