FabSwingers.com > Forums > Swingers Chat > Do any of you remember Contact Magazines?
Do any of you remember Contact Magazines?
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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It's a peculiar thing, but the older one gets the more one thinks about the past. Perhaps it's a preparation for death or something?
Anyway, I've been thinking lately about the swinging lifestyle, how I got into it and my swinging career. I think my very first awareness of the lifestyle dates to the late 60's, when I was working in an office in London during the three months between finishing school and going to University - so I would have been 18. The office manager was a swinger, and he and his wife used to have parties at their house. I overheard him telling his closest friend in the office about the events of one particular Saturday night and I was gobsmacked! - I never thought that kind of thing went on! So that was how I became aware of the contact magazine scene - this was in the days before the internet, of course!
Contact mags were small booklets - about the size of a folded A4 sheet - called names like "Rendezvous". The idea was you wrote an advert - "Hunk wants to meet sexy lady, etc", and if any other reader was interested they wrote you a letter saying so, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope for your reply. Needless to say the ladies advertising must have received hundreds of such letters - and it usually turned out that they were "working girls". Buying stamps and envelopes and writing letters was a real chore every month! Funnily enough, though, I did meet a couple of nice ladies through this system - although the party scene eluded me.
And then came the internet!!! Younger readers will have no idea just how ground-breaking this was - just how quickly and how widely the opportunities opened out! I discovered AFF and FabSwingers - and while it's still difficult for a single fella, it's a lot easier than it was! |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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Was 'Forum' a contact mag ? As I remember I think it was full of photos and PO box numbers to which you had to reply by MAIL ?? lol
How times have changed, sometimes not for the better ...
Maybe that's what Edwin Starr was singing about in his song 'Contact' !  |
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By *ardybumsCouple
over a year ago
peekin under duvet is it safe? |
yes we remember them very well indeed lol 
introduced us to our very first couple to swing with and havent looked back since,was a long winded affair back then to arrange a date with letters back and forth but somehow added to the whole erotic build-up, and the two couples we did meet were so very genuine back then unlike nowadays on the t'internet lol,theres a lot to be said for the old contact mags 
god feel so old now tho reminiscing  |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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It could take two weeks to make first contact. It certainly built up the anticipation. Also, very much fewer people had a pic, and never more than one. One good thing though, no page-long profiles IN CAPITALS moaning about timewasters and nothing about Sydney bloody Uni |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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"its facinating how swinging has changed over the years!
Very interesting hearing how it was done pre internet
x"
My mums peer group were at it all of the time in the sixties. They just called it 'knocking on' I love her telling the tales of the scandalous neighbours and what went on at house parties. |
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I have to say I have a contact mag and the forum (best ov) at the side of bed. we got it from a grotty little sex shop but there years old I think and the pictures are very old.
I love the forum though and would like the updated one although someone said yesterday that it is now called fourplay or something |
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We were talking about this with some swinging friends last Saturday. Rose and her ex, and our friends had used contact mags in the days before computers, and all agreed that it was a lot more difficult to get meets with genuine couples by post - thank heavens for Fab!
Nothing changes though - in those days there were plenty of single men pretending to be couples, just like today. |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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Yep
Been on the swinging scene since the tender age of 17 (got dragged kicking and screaming into it through my bi side)
And although i never actually used contact mags i did read em lol
Thank god fa the Internet xx  |
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remember them well, used to use the one the OP mentioned a lot, its still going i think, but teh original owner sold it on, its not the same now, mainly full of escort adverts (although a lot of contact mags back in teh 1980s were just that as well) |
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By *utumnWoman
over a year ago
leeds |
Good old days! I used to pose for those contact mags before I even heard of swinging! It was only after marrying the photographer he confessed what he did with my photos and showed me the mags!! There would be picures of me with a black bit over my eyes or my body with a different head or bits of my body....all with a different PO Box no!!!
I often wondered why the trades description act came in!
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Ah, the Rendezvous, Bargain Pages, (etc). Funny how in those days, you had to pay for the magazine, you had to pay for the stationery and the postage, and in some cases for an anonymous PO Box somewhere so that your activities remained private.
Now, with the internet, you get it all for free, and the result is...more time wasters and more please to Sydney University (lol) and yet the reluctance to pay is still there...
Mind you having done a few months on AFF as a payer, and found what a waste of time that is, free ain't so bad after all. You go into this with your eyes open and you know what to expect, so no grounds for bleating on about it.
The main difference is the fact that back then you couldn't copy and paste your messages. If you got a written letter, it was meant to be written. As someone said, it was a slow process too, so with slow came deliberate. I think back then, if a comparison was made to today, the "hit rate" between letters sent and received would have been higher than what is had today...well as a single guy anyway. I dare say ladies and couples get too many to count for a meaningful comparison to be made lol. Be interesting to hear some real life comparisons on that score.
No-one has mentioned the ground-breakers of web-swinging...Dean & Matty, Dirty David, etc. How a man in a bedroom can give the swinging game a great big kick in the ass with his first DIY web site lol.
Still life goes on. Then we had paper "dating", now we have PC "dating" soon these web sites will become phone apps that will take over and we'll look back on this site and others with the same rose tinted spectacles as we look back on Rendezvous now. |
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I remember the contact mag days, in some ways they where a better way to meet folks. People put more effort into selecting someone and actually writing to them because it cost time and money and could be come expensive. I just fished out an old copy of Rendezvous from 2005 it's priced at £6 and is a monthly so thats £72 a year before you even contact anyone, they had a £2 handling charge for each batch of letters and you needed also to include a stamp for each envelope. So when I discovered the free sites that for me was the end of the contact mags
I do remember some of the early internet sites, I believe Dean and Matty's site is still going, Dirty Davids been bought by a commercial site that operates a hub with "nieche sites" |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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Brings back good memories when I was in my early 20's probably influenced by the Dustin Hoffman film 'graduate', I desired a mature lady.
From memory it was a lot of effort PO boxes and so forth but eventually met a married mature lady and had a very educational time, which today remains long in the memory !! |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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Ah the good old days post a pic then wait on replies , who remembers new direction it had a good contact section , there were another couple of mags which had the same ads in them can,t remeber what they were called , they all were part of the same group |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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My first introduction to swinging was through a porn mag called New Direction, which had a colour section of contact ads. I was a horny 17 year old, intrigued by this, and so I sought out similar publications.
Journal of Love and Rendezvous come to mind.
I think over about three years I must have hand written and posted off about 30 letters, got about 6 replies, and had two successful meets from them - probably the same ratio as a single guy would get today!
Then, at the age of 20 or so, I moved to London, and I discovered the small ads in Loot. Being a far livelier area than south Wales, lets just say Loot proved far more succesful for me and the early to mid nineties proved a happy hunting ground!!! |
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used contract magazine in mid 90s mainly
Journal of Love with my ex wife never had anytime time wasters if you had gone to trouble of replying to box no then writing again to swap pics any couple we swapped pics with always turned out to be great and several stayed as friends |
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Yeah, the internet is one of the most important inventions of the 20th century imo. It's opened up so many possibilities for people and brought so much information to peoples fingertips.
Back in those days it must have taken months to build up a rapport with someone to get as far as arranging a meet and the swing scene was probably out of most people reach unless they were in with a group of people who did it.
I remember doing my degree when the internet was just taking off and even at that time, most of my study was done at a library or through buying books and reading. It was a slow time consuming process, now everything is available within seconds. Knowledge is power! |
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"It could take two weeks to make first contact. It certainly built up the anticipation. Also, very much fewer people had a pic, and never more than one. One good thing though, no page-long profiles IN CAPITALS moaning about timewasters and nothing about Sydney bloody Uni "
Yup! i miss the contact mags |
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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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" I remember doing my degree when the internet was just taking off and even at that time, most of my study was done at a library or through buying books and reading. It was a slow time consuming process, now everything is available within seconds. Knowledge is power!"
I did three of my degrees (sorry - honest - I'm wildly over-educated) in the pen, paper and book days - yes, it was slow, but one learnt to be more discriminatory and to focus upon the essential facts in a matter. Now I think there is a permanent risk of over-information along with an inevitable decline in overall quality.
There again, I thought the wheel was a crazy invention too... |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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i had my first meets out of contact mags and i learned the hard way about misleading profiles or more to the point, by meeting a couple who`s advert was 10 years old and yes they looked 10 years older than the pic they had in the magazine |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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Yeh remember them also - remember sending face pics (and rude ones....)taken by polaroid camera via Royal Mail to peeps we were interested in ... omg pmsl  |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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I use to buy the newspaper Loot to scowl the contacts. It was a real eye opener how frank and candid they were.
We don't know how spoilt we are to be part of the internet generation. One wonders what technology has next to bring to us. |
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