A Beginner’s Guide to Love

Experience magazine was a 1970s’ digest-sized, top-shelf publication, created as a cheeky competitor to the more intellectual Forum. The latter title marketed itself as Britain’s first ‘couples-friendly’ porn magazine and boasted the rather grand strapline, ‘The International Journal of Human Relations’. Whereas Forum was an offshoot from the mighty Penthouse publishing group, and could attract contributors as highbrow as Molly Parkin, Lord Longford and Paul Tabori, Experience magazine was distinctly downmarket fare, concentrating on ‘sexy party games’, blue films and wife-swapping. The magazine also featured the infamous Girls of Experience – nude models including Maureen Flanagan, Tara Lynn, Clyda Rosen and Beryl Grant, who ‘wrote’ extensively about their sexual escapades. In fact, Tabor Publications, the publishers of Experience, used the predictably false claim that their magazines were wholly staffed by sexually-liberated females. Experience was boldly promoted as the ‘original magazine written and edited by GIRLS!’

The Experience brand was successful enough to produce several spin-off magazines, including Girls of Experience, The Good Sex Diary, The Guide to Erotic Loveplay and, in 1974, The Guide to Love Aids. The 64-page sex toy magazine featured extensive reviews of dildos, vibrators, sex creams and duo-balls and featured Mary Millington as the seductive cover girl. In the early 1970s Mary had worked extensively for Tabor Publications, starring as ‘Sally Stevens’ the letters editor in Experience‘s sister magazine Vibrations, as well as being the main model in two volumes of Beryl Grant’s saucy story magazine Around the World in 80 Lays. Although Mary sadly only appears on one single page inside the Guide to Love Aids, her uncredited cover-girl status makes it one of the most collectable, and enduring, of all her magazine appearances. Some care was taken by the designer in creating the cover too – I love the way the letter ‘A’ is subtly tucked into her knicker elastic…