This magazine started with two people having an innocuous conversation. They each called a friend, and, at once, we all gave birth to a nameless magazine. I’m not sure which exact words were the catalyst that eventually caused people to forfeit sleep in their names months later. But whatever they were, they resonated through several sets of ears into cerebral walls, and bounced around for a couple
of sleepless nights. From there, a three-syllable word took hold and gave us all a direction. When one hears the word “perversion,” more often than not, one thinks of negative connotations, such as the pedophiles that live in their surrounding area—whose houses they skip when trick or treating with their children on Halloween. This is neither something we fear nor hope to escape from—I mean, we don’t support pedophillia, but we do advocate embracing the etymological roots of words. And the subversive nature and volatility of the word “perversion” is a major reason for our adoration of it. People don’t usually consider its definition as meaning something that has been corrupted from its original form into something different. In our case, we are corrupting the preconceived notion of normalcy—the traditional rhetoric that is typically associated with art, literature, culture, journalism, magazines, and staffs. Perversion Magazine is lawless. “Who says?” you might ask. When I think of the work Perversion is creating, I imagine a laborer. I picture a person commissioned to make the metal poles to which stop signs are attached, and after years and years of crafting these mundane straight edged metal fixtures, they decide to make one that is bent and crooked. So one day, they pick up their hammer and start banging away, making the pole malleable and vulnerable—perverting the metal, if you will. Their finished product is crooked and awry compared to its brother and sister poles. They put the irregular sign in the same pile as the rest of the stop signs. Consequently, they are fired. Despite losing their job, they continue to make crooked poles for their own personal fulfillment. I don’t know what happens to them, but I do know that given the choice between getting rehired to make normal poles again and being unemployed and making fixtures of different shapes, they would opt for the latter. And I also know that we, at Perversion, would hire this person. Our goal at Perversion Magazine is to create content that we would want to read. It is our hope that when we publish something, even after hours of editing, it is still so exciting that we can’t wait to read it, or watch it, or cry to it, or ma******te to it. Hopefully you take pleasure in it, too. My promise to you, our dear readers, is that Perversion won’t publish something we’re not proud of. We won’t sacrifice quality for deadlines, and we certainly won’t censor ourselves for anyone.1 We are a motley group of ambitious and, at times, semi-starved people, willing to sacrifice sleep and every other bodily function to produce the highest quality of content. Follow us online, follow us in print, follow us down the aisles at the local grocery story, follow us into dark alleys, especially if you’re fearful of what you may find. And if you do end up liking what you find, if you end up liking us—hypothetically, if Perversion Magazine was a person, and you would want to have s*x with it—then do what you can to support us. We have a ton of different ways for you to do so, but each one begins with you immersing yourself in Perversion by watching weird videos, observing what people call “art,” and reading stories that don’t have to make sense. This editorial is dumb. I’m force feeding you the idea of Perversion, which is composed of so many different mediums and methodologies. Our content does the talking for us, this memo is just a metal rail to help you up the stairs, especially because these stairs don’t simply go just up or down, or left or right. So tell your friends, tell your dermatologist, and tell your milkman about us. But please don’t tell your parents.
“Love”
Carl Rosen
Co-founder
