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Sweet Action Heroines
Sweet Action magazine is a fucking awesome new dirty magazine for chicks! It’s full of hot naked guys sporting yummy thick n’ huge hard-ons. Micole Taggart and Robin Adams, the co-founders, started it all just for us! I got the chance to talk to them about their creation and the lack of porn for hot-blooded horny American women like me.
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When was the first time you saw a naked man in print?
Robin: I was in maybe fourth grade. I went after school over to a friend’s house and saw a copy of Bob Knob, with pictures of like mutant dicks, and all the kids were totally into it and passing it around and whispering about it. But I was like, Oh my god, is THAT it? The hugeness, it was scary yet fascinating.
Micole: When I was a kid all we saw were regular porno mags, with women in them. National Geographic was probably the first time seeing a dick in print, but not erect. We did go to Greece, though, when I was a kid, so I saw them on the naked beaches, but none in print.
How did you guys start Sweet Action magazine?
Robin: I had been talking about this idea for a porno mag for girls with all my girlfriends, but we just couldn’t figure out how to start. So one day I came into Micole’s store and said I had this idea but didn’t really elaborate until like a month later when one night we were sitting at the kitchen table and I blurted it out. And Micole just looked at me and was like, “Do you need a partner? I’ll do anything--let’s do it, what do we need? Money? I don’t care, whatever, anything, let’s do it!”
How do you guys know each other?
Robin: Well, Micole had a shop in (the Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood) Park Slope, just a really cute boutique, and she had put the word out for new designers, and coincidentally I just happened to walk in off the street one day. I make jewelry and was making purses too, so we developed a business relationship.
Micole: Yeah, and then we became friends and Sweet Action came to be. But it was hilarious, because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing at first. We were like, “How do we even start this?” So we had our first “business meeting” downtown in Tribeca, there’s a place that has this cheap artists’ night with three-dollar burgers and two-dollar beers, it’s great.
So how did it get rolling?
Robin: I did my first interview with my friend Marin, he’s been publishing a magazine since he was like sixteen or something and I had been interning with him and I asked him will you be my first interview? So I wrote that up and passed it around to all the girls involved and we were all just like chipping in and everyone was bringing in all these collages of naked boys cut out of magazines, or homemade Polaroids, it was the stupidest thing ever.
Micole: We were just pasting all this stuff together
Robin: We just kept working and even though we didn’t know what we were doing, it was good for the process because Micole was there, I was there, and actually all of the main original people were there who still work on the magazine two years later. And it was important to see who would be committed long-term and stick around through the hardest part.
Did the first one start out just sort of made out of nude collages, newsprint, and gum in a like mock-up format?
Robin: Oh yeah, shoot, we should have brought that with us today.
Micole: Yeah, we had this fundraiser to start out with and for that we made this mock up, it was just so homemade--we made it off the computer and then laminated it.
Robin: Well, the deal was, this writer from Jane magazine got wind of us, so all of a sudden Jane magazine calls us up and they said, “Oh, we’d like to see an issue,” and we were thinking like, “Oh, well we’d like to see one too! Ha ha.” We had been taking all these pictures of our friends, of boys, and I had a couple of friends working on articles. So we did have some material already.
So we kind of made one [a mock-up] for Jane and sewed up the sides and silk-screened the cover and we were seriously dorking out on arts and crafts. And of course we wrote them a letter just saying ok, this is a just a mock up and then saying we’re throwing this fundraiser to raise some money. So they did an article about it and we got a lot of hits on our website--which my sister put together within a week’s time, because we were thinking people are gonna want the magazine and they’re not going to know how to get it, so we even had a website up before we had a magazine and people ended up buying it before we even had a magazine . . . which, needless to say, really pushed things along.
Did you get a lot of orders?
Micole: Yeah, we got like 400 orders just from that Jane article and thank God because we had no idea how we were going to afford to print it. That article basically paid for our first magazine.
My girlfriends and I have been waiting for something like Sweet Action forever because we’re just so frustrated with the norm, i.e., Playgirl, with it’s cheesiness and flaccid cocks, or dopey flowery “erotica” for women or gay porn. It’s so refreshing to see raw, candid photos of hard cocks with no chicks’ faces in the way or oiled up gay-bait. Women are dying to see hard, yummy cock just for them and nobody else has done it!
Micole: Well, thanks!
Speaking of Playgirl, have you noticed that their latest cover looks suspiciously Sweet Action-y? It’s not their usual lettering or style.
Micole: Oh really? Just imagine, they consider our little 5000 copy magazine their competition--they wouldn’t be on the same pay-per-view panel as us for this discussion group once, because they said we are their competition and that wouldn’t be ok.
One of the things I love about Sweet Action is that you have so many quirky and obscure fun things in the magazine. Like the article with Cynthia Plaster Caster.
Robin: It was so great when we called her; she was like, “Hey dolls, I love your magazine” [said in smoky Chicago accent] and we said, “Well we want YOU to be in it” and she was like, “Oh, I’d be so honored.” And we’re like, “No, WE’RE so honored!”
Or like the article titled “A First Timers Guide to Eating a Mans Ass” Ha-ha! Oooh and the photo-spread on the “Merkin”, like how do you guys even know what that IS? [FYI, a Merkin is the fake bush burlesque strippers used to wear]. I love that you had the “Gherkin Merkin” with the pickles and the “Magnum PI Merkin” with the big bushy pubic stache! Or like the Squirting Testimonials--I couldn’t believe what people confessed to. How did you get people to talk?
Robin: We just have really good writers that are just natural good-idea generators; they are all great resources and interviewers. All of our photographers are women too, by the way, which insures that the photos are chick-approved before they even hit the magazine.
Micole: It’s really an endless talent pool, ha-ha.
How do you find your subjects, your boys? Did you feel weird asking guys to pose nude and hard?
Robin: Oh yes, I did feel weird at first, because we had nothing to show that we were real! We needed some credibility! Once we got the website going that helped.
Micole: We just made a lot of calls to everyone we could think of, like calling girls to ask if their boyfriends would be interested . . . but like for every hundred calls, we’d maybe get one or two that actually panned out. We tried to avoid seeming too creepy.
Is that how the hand-job article started? I loved that article; it just cracked me up to find guys to give you pointers on hand-job techniques; it was hysterical and a fucking turn-on. What gave you the impetus for that idea?
Robin: That was Kendra’s idea, one of our writers, she’s the director for this underground film festival and we were watching a movie one day at their offices and this guy in the movie was masturbating and I was like, “Wow, look at that, that’s so great!” And they all turned around and looked at me like, “Sweet little Robin is loving this?” And then like a week later Kendra says to me, “Hey, I have a great idea for an article for your magazine--Three Anonymous Hand-jobs!” She was like, “Should I just go onto Craig’s list?”
Is that how she found the guys?
Robin: No, no, no, ha-ha, me and Micole helped her find the guys--[to Micole] it took us what? Ten minutes? Ha-ha!
Micole: Yeah! Ha-ha!
Robin: The picture of the guy going like this [it looks like he’s praying] we wanted to put the caption: “Pray for a handjob, and you shall receive” ha-ha--we should have! But that guy, the first guy, he was very informative, he took it very seriously and was so helpful; while getting the hand-job he was like, “Go like this, or some people do this, and some people do this.” He was great!
Micole: And that article is going to get picked up by two European magazines too.
Wow, that’s great, you guys--Sweet Action goes international!
Micole: Yeah, and we’ve been featured in some great magazines. Check out our press link on the website--BUST magazine even featured us. That was just cool.
I can’t imagine how you guys produce this; I really think it’s gonna blow up. How are you able to dig up the money and do this every day?
Robin: I’d wake up a lot of mornings and think, “Oh my god, what am I doing, arhhhg!”
Micole: But we just don’t even think about the money. We just do it. With every issue we don’t know if we’ll be able to pull it off, financially, etc, but we just go forward.
Robin: It can be really frustrating, but we just keep going because if you stop to think about it, you wouldn’t do it. With one of the interviews we did online--in the final article they mentioned some other magazine as Sweet Action “minus the money” and we were like, “Money, what money??”
Well I think that’s probably just because the magazine looks so good and is so unique . . . as chick pornographers you just have a great aesthetic, and part of the challenge you face is to make something look effortless and great when you’re limited with materials and cash. Being the new Renaissance-woman-style pornographers you probably really quickly had to get used to wearing so many hats in order get the product out.
Micole: Well, our designer, Laura, is incredible and is responsible for a lot of that; she has really created a unique look for the magazine.
Robin: I mean in the beginning she was so nervous too, she was like, “Robin, I’ve never done a magazine before. What am I gonna do?” And I was like, “You think I have?”
Do you think you’ll take it into cyber-space? A site like Suicide Girls has been so successful, I would imagine that a Sweet Action pay site would have such a sweet niche market.
Micole: We really hope so. The plans are already in the works, so keep an eye out.
Robin: Totally off topic but--Ellen, I know you work for Mr. Skin, too, right? You know WE LOVE Mr. Skin! Tell him we want him to do an interview with us! We love Mr. Skin and we love Howard Stern too. Howard Stern is this guy who felt insecure and nerdy as a kid and now people come to him to be judged on their physical appearance, etc. We have to approve every guy for all the shoots for the magazine. I feel like the female Howard Stern!
[This conversation devolves into a discussion of the Howard Stern episode where the porn star Tabitha Stevens teaches him how she bleaches her asshole!]
I can’t believe you guys even know who Mr. Skin is, ha-ha! That’s great! You could definitely be the female Howard Sterns, I mean you guys even have a phallo-meter for girls to cut out and measure their guy’s dick with in one of the issues--now if that’s not for judging physical attributes, I don’t know what is. Plus, I mean, of course you have talent too!
Robin: Micole does “dick readings” before the guys get naked at our shoots.
You mean she can predict how well hung they are?!? How often is she right? She’s, like, psychic?
[Robin and Micole look at each other knowingly] Robin: She’s usually dead on.
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