Filament: Up With This Sort Of Thing.

Recently launched in London by Suraya Singh in London, Filament magazine is aimed at female readers and offers "stimulating reading, saucy fiction and beautiful men". And it does this well: it presents pictures and writing that are genuinely both hot and diverse, without dumbing things down.

It was predictably dogged by controversy from the start. My favourite was the Daily Mail author who all but dabbed at her forehead with a lace handkerchief and reached for the smelling salts, whilst protesting that Filament's images couldn't possibly be sexy. She apparently thought Filament's readers incapable of deciding for themselves – a position shared by distributors.

The most common reason given for not distributing Filament is that you can't have a women's magazine with a man on the cover. Another popular one is that there simply isn't a market for women's erotica. This is, of course, a surprise to many of us.

Filament's original printers were concerned that if images of erections appeared in the second issue, their clients from the religious and women's sectors would mind. As a result, the Erotica Cover Watch blog set up a campaign calling for people to buy enough copies of the first issue so that Filament could afford to switch printers. The campaign was successful. "It's a hard business model to sell entirely through the Internet," says Suraya, "but demand exists - we just need to convince the people in power." As a consumer, I’m already convinced by the sneak preview on the website.