Paint It Blue

God, aren’t we getting very modern altogether? Only 47 years since Playboy was first published (and 15 years since the ban on selling it in Ireland was lifted), Ireland’s first indigenous skin mag has hit the top shelf of a corner-shop near you.

It’s probably a sign of just how far Ireland trails behind the rest of the western world when it comes to sex, that we’re getting our first gawk at Naughty Niamh from Kildare just as Playboy, Loaded, and the rest begin to die out.
The outlook is bleak – like, post-apocalyptic-wasteland bleak – for Hugh Hefner’s famous creation, with circulation plummeting 34% in the first six months of this year. Playboy is now attempting to shift 1.6 million copies of each issue; that’s down from 2.45 million last year, and six million in the pre-internet golden era for commercial, soft-core porn that was the 1970s.
Thing is, you can find pretty much anything on the internet. At this stage there must be more people who know how to use Google than know how to boil an egg – so isn’t the practice of buying a nudey magazine in Centra wildly anachronistic in 2010?
“Well, first of all, we’re a publishing house, so magazines are what we know,” says Andrew Booth (26), the polite, slightly posh young man behind Blue Ireland and its illustrious sister publication, Cityads Weekly (for readers outside Dublin, this is a free-sheet along Buy and Sell lines). “Besides, the internet doesn’t have any Irish stuff, or if there is, there’s no way of knowing that it is Irish.”
“A magazine isn’t a laptop. You can fold a magazine up and bring it to the bathroom, or go upstairs, or hide it between the sheets of the newspaper on a plane. So it’s something that might be easier to use… in the way that you wish to use it. Does that make sense?”
Eh, yes, I see.
Booth gives a dazzling display of the art of dodging a question when it comes to his circulation figures. But he passionately insists that Blue Ireland has a market. Which begs the question: what’s wrong with the perfectly serviceable English birds in the 46 (and possibly more) other adult magazines distributed in Ireland?
Booth accepts that the appeal of The Girl Next Door, In Your Store, as the front-page slogan goes, is something which some people won’t ‘get’.
“It’s the person you see in the street, the girl behind the counter in Londis; it’s someone you know, and that’s a big thing,” he offers. “I’ve had people ring me up going, ‘Your one from Waterford, is she actually from Waterford? Does she live there now?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not telling you’, and they say, ‘Well, I’m walking around Waterford until I see her’.
“It does matter to some people. To some people it doesn’t, and they’re happy to use the internet or, indeed, use their own imagination. We’re not force-feeding people, it’s a personal choice.”
The magazine has come under fire from one prominent Irish BDSM website over the fact that it caters exclusively for the tastes of the Average White Man. Unsurprisingly, Booth dismisses this criticism. He also dismisses my suggestion that the magazine objectifies women.
“By doing the magazine that we do, we’re catering for as wide a possible demographic who buy these magazines already,” he shrugs. “It’s not a particularly offensive thing to objectify. It’s no more offensive to look at someone’s sexuality and say ‘this is what we’re looking at’, than to celebrate someone’s intellectual ability.”

DOUBLE STANDARD
A Girl Next Door kindly agrees to meet Hot Press in the coffee-shop where she works. Maggie Paige (that’s her modelling name) used to work for an extremely well-known Irish brand, which shall remain nameless, and which took a dim view of her modelling work.
“My former employers had me under disciplinary investigation for bringing down the reputation of their company, that’s why I left,” says Paige.
“If it was affecting my job, that would be fair enough. If I was missing work, or I was coming into work late, that would be fair enough. But the fact is, I didn’t even use my own name, and I never came into work late.”
The 24-year-old model, who has since become the poster girl for Dublin fetish and bondage club-night Nimhneach, also received a hostile response from her family, when, in the days before Blue Ireland was first published, she told them she had done a photo shoot for an adult magazine.
“I decided it was better for me to tell them than for somebody else to come along and turn it into something that it wasn’t. I wanted my dad to know because I get on really, really well with my dad.
“He still looks at me like I’m a kid and, to be honest, he was quite hurt. My brothers were quite shocked by it as well, my two older brothers, they were not happy at all. I basically felt like I was disowned because people stopped talking to me. That’s how bad it was. I was sent letters from one of my brothers, saying how much I had hurt his family and I should be so ashamed, and never ever do this again.
“I’m sorry that everybody feels bad about it – I wish they didn’t, but I’m aware that not everyone’s going to like it. But at least give me credit that I owned up and told you what I did. I made no attempts to cover it up. I didn’t do it to shock or hurt anyone.”
Paige is hot, obviously. She’s also nice, funny, intelligent, educated (B.A. and B.Mus from UCD), down-to-earth and, generally speaking, not at all fucked-up. So why did she do it?
“Why not? You’re only young once. I’m not going to be sorry when I’m 40 or 50 years old. When I’m 40 or 50 years old I can look back at things I’ve done like Blue Ireland or Nimhneach or other photo shoots and say, ‘When I was 24, that’s what I was able to do, that’s what I looked like. I had fun, I did what I wanted to do, I didn’t make apologies to anybody’. I’m not going to be sorry for that.”
Paige doesn’t consider adult magazines to be anti-feminist (“this might sound cheesy, but it’s a celebration”) and she doesn’t call herself a feminist. But she is infuriated by the common assumption that she must have been manipulated into stripping off for the magazine.
“People don’t tend to look at women like they have their own minds. That’s what I found, after I did that. People sort of assumed that I needed coercion and I was either a ‘very, very bad girl’ or a ‘poor, sorry girl, she’s taking her top off because she has daddy issues or something’. I’m not doing this because I have problems! I’m doing this because I want to,” explains Paige.
By way of contrast, in a spectacular illustration of the age-old, slut-vs-stud double standard, Booth has gotten away almost scot free, when it comes to soap-box morality lessons from friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family regarding his foray into the world of adult publishing.
“I’ve had to encounter little bits but nothing like Maggie has had to encounter. My mother and father don’t particularly mind, it’s not something that has impacted on them or should impact on them. My wider family don’t care. My girlfriend is fine with it and she would be a fairly ardent feminist.”
And while for Booth, the fact that the magazine contains pictures of Irish girls is a good thing, its major (possibly only) selling point, this is essentially the basis of the virulent criticism Paige has had to put up with.
“You look in any newsagents or Easons or anywhere, you find Playboy and Penthouse and Nuts – they’ve been out there for years and people don’t seem to have a problem with it. But as soon as it was somebody who is potentially your next-door neighbour, or somebody you work with, it was a problem and it was horrific and it was horribly degrading – that’s what people tried to make it out to be,” says Paige.
“People slated me for the fact that I did this. I thought Ireland was more open. But after I did Blue Ireland, I realised Ireland isn’t that open at all.”