The dating app Feeld has revolutionised the, well, field over the last few years by catering to a generation of open-minded people who want to explore the full gamut of sex and sexuality rather than keep it hidden away in a closet somewhere.
Known as a dating app ‘for the curious’, it was founded in 2014 by Ana Kirova and Dimo Trifonov, a couple who wanted to explore the boundaries of their own relationship and were inspired to question the larger conventions around sex and dating in the form of this app. It’s all about making connections with like-minded people, a progressive attitude to pleasure and a championing of fluid identities.
While in the early days it might have been considered to be the kink app, it has garnered mainstream acceptance in recent years and one sign of this is its glossy print magazine, which has just released its second issue.
The magazine is called AFM - or A Fucking Magazine - and essentially brings the Feeld community together in the form of something you could keep on your coffee table, while being a beautiful and thoughtful publication in its own right. Co-editors of the magazine, Maria Dimitrova and Haley Mlotek, are delighted by the results and see it as logical extension of where Feeld and the wider dating scene, has been going.
“Feeld did a rebrand and a lot of research a few years ago, and one of the main recommendations that came out of that was the platform really lends itself to editorial content,” says Dimitrova, “And this really came out of the people on the platform being creatively minded. So the magazine was born conceptually as something made with Feeld members. When Haley and I started actually putting it together, our intention was to make sure that some of our contributors are Feeld members, but at the same time to create a magazine editorial object that also speaks to someone who might not know what Feeld is, might not necessarily care about it, but can actually encounter those conversations about dating, romance, and relationships.”
They both came from magazine backgrounds and found that going classic with AFM was the route they wanted, encouraged by the burgeoning independent magazine sector, where different communities are catered to. In short, print is not dead.
Says Mlotek, “We were both very excited to work in print again and while the company has had a digital editorial platform for years, they had I an understanding of the value of a tactile object, that kind of warmth that comes with analogue, and that being a very different connection.”
“Something that Maria and I both really agreed on when we started talking, is that there's so much wonderful writing about sex, intimacy, dating and relationships in what are considered more traditional or conventional literary magazines, but they're always treated as a subject that the writer is participating in rather than the actual culture. They’re doing cultural critique that doesn't involve personal relationships, but of course personal relationships are culture.”
So while literary magazines were an inspiration in form, they were going further back to times when sex was incorporated into lifestyle within magazines.
“One of my favorite books ever is The Hearts of Men by Barbara Ehrenreich, which includes the history of the men's magazines that are considered the ideal overlap between sex magazines and literary magazines. It’s a flawed example, but Playboy, Esquire, Tina Brown's New Yorker, Vanity Fair, they all had these decades in which they were really looking at sex and sexuality in the same way that they were looking at literature, and film and poetry and sports, and I think that's really the driving inspiration for AFM.”
The latest issue itself features photography legend Nan Goldin shooting musician Kelsey Lu for the cover, in a spectacular shoot, accompanied by music journalist Puja Patel talking to her about creativity, performance, control, and desire.
There are also essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and visual pieces from contributors such as Jamie Hood, Hannah Black, Jamieson Webster, Carl Phillips, Sarah Miller, Torbjorn Rodland, James Ivory - yes the 97 year old Oscar-winning filmmaker - along with an agony aunt column by pop star Kesha.
Dimitrova says this diverse range of contributors goes to the heart of the medium: “Magazines have historically been, been kind of tools for organising communities, and bringing them together. We are very much building on that tradition, and trying to bring people in conversation that you wouldn't usually expect to find in conversations in the on the pages of the same magazine.”
With a third issue of the magazine already in the works, this is building into quite a bold new community, a valuable part of a new era of intelligent and adult conversations around sex. It’s fun too.
Says Dimitrova, “I want it to be something that people spend a lot of time with and also share. I really hope that each issue there's something that really resonates, that feels familiar and what maybe someone expects, but then there's also something that is unexpected and surprising and maybe challenges you a little bit. That's what I keep hoping of every issue.”
