The Only Way to Start a Magazine
5 min read
A lover of magazines may find a few good reasons to pay attention to AFM, a new publication about sex and relationships. It’s visually fun and full of excellent writing. It’s also the latest in a long line of magazines to exist only because of the largesse of a tech company.
AFM stands for both “A Fucking Magazine” and “A Feeld Magazine”—that second one a reference to the dating app that is funding the enterprise. Feeld started its life in 2014 specifically to facilitate threesomes. It was originally called 3nder, pronounced “Thrinder,” which quickly led the company to receive a trademark-infringement complaint from Tinder. (Rebranding might have been a good idea anyway, as some initially perceived both the name and the app itself to be corny and embarrassing.) Feeld got a chic makeover last year, then worked through some major technical glitches and is now known as an all-purpose dating app with a uniquely broad range of options for identifying one’s sexual and relationship preferences. It remains especially popular with those seeking nonmonogamous connections.
To expand its cultural cachet, the app is now joining many other tech companies and VC-funded start-ups that have spun up media outlets in recent years. Previously, these publications have tended not to have protracted lifespans. The buzzy, VC-funded luggage start-up Away had a magazine, Here, that quietly stopped publishing in 2020. The direct-to-consumer mattress brand Casper launched Woolly (after folding another online publication, Van Winkle’s); it did not last. Dollar Shave Club funded the popular website MEL until 2021 and then just stopped; Snapchat funded the popular website Real Life until 2022 and then just stopped. There were magazines by Airbnb and Uber and Bumble and now there are not. Tech gets into magazines for a good time, not a long time.
Still, for journalists who are staring down a crumbling media business—one that teeters on the edge of “extinction” because of anemic traffic, a poor ad market, and burned-out readers, as Clare Malone argued in The New Yorker earlier this year—this arrangement is better than nothing.
AFM is co-edited by Maria Dimitrova, a long-time Feeld employee who previously created the company’s U.K.-based literary journal, Mal, which ran for five issues, and by Haley Mlotek, who has held many jobs in media, including as the editor of The Hairpin, a feminist website that folded in 2018, and as an editor at The Village Voice, the legendary alt weekly that collapsed in 2017 but recently has been resurrected as a mostly online property. Mlotek applied for a copywriting job at Feeld in the fall of 2022 to supplement her freelance-writing income and the company emailed her back to ask her to edit a magazine instead.
“I have a lot of experience working for really wonderful, beloved, in my opinion excellent publications that just no longer exist,” she told me. AFM is two things at once: a magazine and an advertising campaign for Feeld. Mlotek said she’s hopeful that this model is at least as sustainable as anything else. She gestured at a history of publications being funded by single businesses or brands, citing European department stores that produced their own magazines beginning in the late 1800s. AFM’s title is also a direct reference to the frustrating state of the media industry, Mlotek explained. Obviously it’s about sex, but it is also a reference to how wild starting a magazine, of all things, is right now: It reflects “the frustrations and the risks and the thrill of trying to produce a print publication at this moment in time,” she said. “It’s a joke, but it’s so serious.”
Feeld has no plans for AFM to make any of its own money. The only ads in the first issue are in-kind ads for other magazines, including n+1 and The Drift. The idea is more that it will “bring back a bit of romance to dating,” Dimitrova told me, which might naturally help Feeld’s business. This is a task that a lot of dating apps are struggling with: The experience of using a smartphone to look for sex and love has started to feel numbing and hopeless to many people. The dating app Hinge also recently debuted an online zine that is more explicitly a marketing campaign—love stories written by cool writers including R. O. Kwon and Brontez Purnell—accessible via QR code on the subway, presumably with the same goal. In so much as AFM can be a successful ad for Feeld, it will suggest to its readers that Feeld is the app for creative people who are deeply thoughtful, imaginative, funny, and smart—that using the app will not make a person feel like every potential match might be a bot, an idiot, or a freak.
The first issue of AFM has contributions from a number of prominent writers, including Tony Tulathimutte, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Allison P. Davis. Many of the contributors, the editors said, are Feeld users themselves; some of the poetry in the issue, including “Self Portrait as the Tree of Knowledge (aka Trans Poetica)” by Delilah McCrea, was selected from open submissions solicited directly in the app. A reported feature on masculinity and bisexuality, written by the novelist Fan Wu, sourced interview subjects from Feeld. It’s a healthy combination of sexy stuff, sweet stuff, and serious stuff—one photo essay of people in their homes getting ready for dates and one accompanying a guide to making your own latex.
A funny piece of fiction by the writer Ashani Lewis is made up of several distinct “breakup fantasies,” including one about ending a relationship with someone by tossing a sex toy they gifted you into a body of water and watching it drift away. An essay by the 96-year-old filmmaker James Ivory, about coming of age in Palm Springs and later spending an evening hanging out around Truman Capote, is both gossipy and moving. The stand-out piece is a dead-eyed essay by the writer Merritt Tierce, recounting her years of attempts to get a TV show made about abortion. (“The executive vice president of television said, Well, ‘abortion anthology’ is not one but two words no studio wants to hear.”)
The first AFM cover star is the artist and musician Juliana Huxtable, who will DJ at a launch party in Brooklyn this week. The magazine will be distributed in the U.S. and the U.K. in the same places where you can buy any other highbrow cultural or literary magazine, and it will also be available for purchase online. Asked whether people could subscribe to it, Dimitrova said no.
She and Mlotek already have plans to start working on issue two. Yet, though she didn’t state as much, Dimitrova seemed aware that you never can tell how long the money will keep coming. Things often change. “You know,” she said, “each issue is its own miracle.”
