2. So guys, you both make a living out of porn. What's the attraction, (beside the obvious), and do you ever get tired of looking at wet sticky bits?
DANN: It's doing a job I love, and getting paid to do it. I'm helping to fulfil a need for our audience while making lots of money for my company (Hello, Mr Packer). Basically, I'm also a horny bastard who enjoys looking at naked women. And no, I never get tired of looking at tits and pussy.
HELEN: It's funny. We laugh so much every day, either at photos of naked men, attempts at erotic fiction, or weird letters, like the guy who wrote to us with his theory that eating bananas would make his penis grow. And it's interesting. Most people like to talk about sex, but not many people get paid to write about it every day. As for wet sticky bits, I don't see a lot of them. I do see a lot of hard male bodies, and they do get boring, but I've never really been into hard male bodies anyway. That's not to say I don't get turned on at work - it's just that it's rarely from looking at photos.

3. HELEN- Helen, your mag Australian Women's Forum, unlike a lot of other 'women's magazines', comes across as very female affirmative. All others seem preoccupied with breeding a dependence to keep on selling their mags. Why are you different?
AWF was started in an attempt to offer women something different because there is so much wrong with traditional women's magazines. The way most mags work is to make women want things (the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect boyfriend), to promise women they can get these things if they read the mag, then fail to deliver. Women are left wanting those things and will buy the mag the following month, hoping that the secret formula to turn them into Gwyneth Paltrow will be revealed. This approach makes enormous amounts of money for publishers, not just in magazine sales but also in advertising, mainly from cosmetics, perfume and fashion companies. AWF only has about one-tenth of the readers of Cleo or Cosmo, and very few advertisers. This doesn't make us sound good, but it gives us a huge amount of freedom to say what we want to say. The viewpoint we're coming from is: hey, you're sexy as you are (have you ever-heard guys moan "I just don't know any attractive women"?), so don't waste time counting calories and searching for the ideal moisturiser. Recognise your own sexual desires and go out there and fulfil them. And being a supermodel isn't the only legitimate occupation for a woman.

4. DANN- Given that you have been involved in the production of many quality and high class magazines, as well as a zine, (which a lot of people still seem unable to grasp the concept of - zines in general I mean, not yours in particular), what freedoms/restrictions have you encountered in each?
No restrictions when it comes to zines except obvious ones like expense - I'd love to run more pages in my zine, have it professionally printed instead of photocopied, full colour, glossy pages etc etc. I lose a couple of thousand on BP each year, but I can manage that. I'd be loath to lose even more, so I try to keep my overheads down. Other than that, there are no restrictions - no censorship, no libel laws (who's gonna sue a shitty little zine like mine?), no copyright laws to worry about. Obviously, doing mainstream porn mags have many restrictions imposed on them by our fascistic Federal Government, administered by the Office of Film & Literature Classification (OFLC). We produce two types of mags at ACP Extra: unrestricted titles like PEOPLE and THE PICTURE and Category 1 titles such as RED HOT, PICTURE PREMIUM and 100% HOMIES. Some Cat 1 titles have to produce unrestricted versions (which are much, much tamer) for the lucrative Queensland market as Cat 1 titles are banned in Qld. All mags must be submitted to the OFLC for classification. The laws governing what we can and can't print are quite vague and subjective - a particular pose or a phrase (or the combination of a picture with certain words) can cause an unrestricted mag to be made Cat 1 (which means it has to be corrected by us, otherwise we have to put the mag in a plastic bag) or a Cat 1 mag downgraded to Cat 2 (can only be sold in sex shops) or Refused Classification (an outright ban). This can lead to massive drops in sales. I could go on for ages - suffice to say, censorship laws in this country suck and have major effects on my day-to-day business. Ack!

5. What does wrestling mean to you?
DANN: It's the greatest sport/soap opera in the world - athletic, violent, outrageous and dumb fun. I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with wrestling...um, let's just say it's the most important thing to me after Helen, the dogs and BP - wrestling makes me very, very happy.
HELEN: It's that loud thing on the TV when I'm in the computer room with the door closed and the CD player turned up full volume.

6. DANN- Betty Paginated is such a good zine, why are you and Helen so great?
Years of practice.

7. HELEN- Tell us about censorship in Australian Women's Forum. Why can't you have erections, (pictures of them I mean, what you do at the office is none of my business)? Why do you have to edit some of the letters you receive in order to print them?
Because we want AWF to be able to be sold openly in newsagencies around Australia (it's hard enough getting women to buy AWF as it is - it would be impossible if the mag was in a plastic bag or could only be bought in sex shops), we have to meet the OFLC guidelines for "unrestricted" publications. That means we can't show "sexual excitement" - ie, erections. We used to apply the 45-degree rule (if the penis is at an angle of less than 45 degrees, it's OK) but the latest word from the OFLC is that "half-mongrels" aren't acceptable - if it looks like it's on the way up, we can't use it. Experienced photographers will make sure models' penises are looking as big as possible while still pointing downwards, preferably in a "semi-engorged" state. This can involve the use of anything from warmed oven mitts to fluffers (helpful women or men, depending on the sexual orientation of the model). But basically, limp penises aren't very exciting to women, and I think that's one of the reasons many women will say they don't get turned on by looking at photos of naked men.
With the letters, OFLC guidelines say that in unrestricted publications, descriptions of sex involving consenting adults must not be "very detailed", and fetishes are not permitted. As for "revolting and abhorrent phenomena", that's not allowed even in Cat 2 publications. Basically, it's all very vague and subjective. What's permitted and what's not permitted can change from month to month. All we can do is try to read the minds of the people at the OFLC. We know they don't like a lot of adjectives, so we try to limit ourselves to one adjective per noun ("juicy cunt" rather than "hot juicy cunt"). We know they don't like to hear a lot about bodily fluids. We know they don't like words like "mercilessly", "forced" and "rammed" (they once knocked us back on the line "I'm going to ram the fuck out of you with my blue-veined yoghurt pumper", even though it was in a discussion on language). And we know they don't like anal sex and bondage. This is where a lot of problems arise, because many of our readers - or at least the ones who write in to us - are fans of both of these practices. A lot of people consider anal sex and bondage to be part of a normal, healthy sex life. The OFLC consider them to be sick and perverted. So we have to cut them out of our readers' letters. This frustrates me, because people are going to keep drilling each other up the bum and tying each other up, despite the OFLC's best efforts. They just won't realise that lots of other people are doing it and they won't read about more imaginative and possibly better ways to do it.

8. DANN and HELEN- What is your favourite jelly flavour?
DANN: Spermicidal.
HELEN: For wrestling in or eating?

9. DANN and HELEN- Give us five must haves for when writing an article in People/Picture and AWF?
DANN: Intelligence (don't laugh, you've gotta be smart to write dumb), humour, humour, humour and humour.
HELEN: Intelligence, originality, reality, humour and sexiness.
Hope these are of use, James.