Carleton’s sex lit magazine has been aroused from a sleepy semester and is gearing up for the new year, said Jeff Blackman, the co-founder of The Moose and Pussy.
“Last semester was pretty quiet,” Blackman said. “A lot of the old team has left. We’re focusing on getting more submissions.”
With funding from the Carleton University Students’ Association, he said the magazine is putting out open pitches for writers and then will “publish on the fly.” For 2012, they will be wrapping up their short story contest and releasing a poetry CD.
While their sex lit magazine was best know for its printed copies, it now relies more on online distribution, Blackman said.
The blog is updated with poetry, fiction and prose, and takes a very honest approach with their contributors, each covering a wide range of topics related to sex. Posts about the sensuality of eating chicken wings are completely at home with poems bearing titles like “Fuck Me Till My Knees Crack.”
The magazine is no stranger to more taboo sexual content and has content including the pro-life and pro-choice debate.
There has been one case where the magazine refused to publish a story because of its subject matter, Blackman said.
“It was a very engaging story about a call girl whose job was to go out to very rich clients,” Blackman said. “She was beaten each time, but she would make so much money that it was worth it. It led to a debate about consent.”
When these conversations come up, the team does not send a generic “We regret to inform you” blanket email, Blackman said. They explain why it cannot be published, creating an environment of respect, which goes hand in hand with sex positivist ideologies, he said.
Since founding The Moose and Pussy in 2008, Blackman and his wife Kate Maxfield are still pushing sex positivism.
Erotica online is mostly garbage, Blackman said, which is why he founded The Moose and Pussy. He said he hopes to provide entertaining material for readers.
“Sex is everywhere, it’s in everything, it’s all everyone thinks about,” Blackman said. “[The Moose and Pussy is] a bit more well-thought out and sensitive perhaps [rather] than just vulgarization.”
The magazine is based at Carleton, but receives contributions from as far as Japan, India, and Britain.
One of its cross-Canada contributors is St. Francis Xavier University graduate Tyler Bigney. He said he wrote a coming-of-age story set in a world where pornography and sex evolve symbiotically.
“Three magazines I had submitted the story to rejected it on the grounds it was too explicit,” Bigney said.
But after pitching it to The Moose and Pussy and working on it with editors for a month, it was finally published.
“I wanted to find a magazine that would be more open to this kind of story, and The Moose and Pussy was it.”
