Genevieve.
The editor, writer and Nerve.com co-founder on sexism in the publishing industry, "literate smut," and why she doesn't see herself as a sexual trailblazer.
Writer and editor Genevieve Field has always been a media hero of mine, having co-founded the very influential, very Gen X magazine Nerve, a trailblazing, online sex-and-culture publication that eventually — and very successfully — branched out into the dating/personals space. A few weeks ago, I jumped on a Zoom with Genevieve to talk about Nerve, contemporary discussions about sex and relationships, and her work on, among other things, Juliette LaMontagne’s newsletter Touch Me There. What follows has been condensed and edited for clarity.
NAOMI: Ok, so let’s first talk about Nerve. I think I met two boyfriends on there. I must have gone off it when I met the man that I would marry, although I met him in real life. But I remember that it was sophisticated, elevated and sexy.
GENEVIEVE: I have not talked about Nerve in a while but it was a formative thing in my life and career. It changed everything for me, but people still think I'm going to be an expert on cybersex culture, and I'm totally not.
I was 27 when we started it, and I left when I was about 31, I think. And it kept going. The story of my co-founder, Rufus and me—our relationship was a big part of the company’s public face. We actually broke up not that long after we started it. And then we both met, right after that, the people we would marry.
So I never got the chance to use Nerve Personals, but I cannot tell you how many people over the years have told me, I met my husband, or I met my wife, on Nerve.com. And that to me is hugely gratifying.
NAOMI: How would you describe the Nerve demographic? Were they mostly Gen Xers? What was your understanding of the breakdown?
GENEVIEVE: It was big in the early aughts, so mostly Gen Xers and older millennials. The same people who were reading Nerve magazine, so they were liberal, very openminded, and probably into books and art. So Nerve started out a magazine that looked at sex and gender from every possible angle: female, male, trans, intersex, polyamorous, straight, gay, bi... I think the reason we got a lot of attention is we had these very established writers, a few who’d won Pulitzer Prizes, writing what we called “literate smut.” Early on, we published work by Lucy Grealy, Rick Moody, Catherine Texier, Robert Olen Butler, Norman Mailer, Sally Tisdale, and all these people who legitimized what we were doing and set it apart from anything else.
At first Rufus wanted it to be about sex and death, but that was maybe too much to wrap our hands around! So we narrowed it down to just being about sex from all points of view. Photography was a big part of it. We had weekly new galleries of fine art. We had Andres Serrano and Sylvia Plachy and Wolfgang Tillmans all these incredible fine art photographers. We were also trying to grow and we needed advertising. The advertisers would be okay with the photos of nude women, but our whole premise was to represent all bodies. We have to have everybody. It’s never going to be about “men looking at women.” So we had a really hard time finding our footing with advertisers—walking that line between being commercial and being progressive.
We were trying everything. We tried a print magazine and we published a bunch of books and we did an HBO special, and the Personals were the first chance we had to actually make some money.
NAOMI: I don't remember being particularly prudish about sex, but I also wasn't totally open about it when I was younger. And so there was something about Nerve that felt a little transgressive or naughty. I'm curious how you approached the topic of sex, how you and your co-founder approached it. Did you grow up feeling totally open about sex or were you also working against a kind of history of being…
GENEVIEVE: Silenced? Yes, absolutely. I grew up with an English mother and a father from a Scandinavian background. They were very liberal, but especially with my mom, messy things were not to be spoken of. She was okay that I had a boyfriend in high school and okay with me having sex as long as we didn’t have to talk about it.
NAOMI: Well, starting Nerve definitely meant that you had to talk about it.