Roy Stuart

The Female Pleasure Principle. Volume Two in the Embrace Your Fantasies series focuses on orgasmic empowerment. Between 1987 and 2001, Dian Hanson, then editor of Leg Show magazine, and photographer Roy Stuart collaborated on over 100 fetish photo shoots. It was critical to Stuart’s taboo-busting philosophy that any sex portrayed in these photos be authentic, and he often included female masturbation, always to climax. To Stuart it seemed absurd that so many young women didn’t know how to reliably give themselves orgasms. It smacked of male/female inequality. He therefore kept a number of high-powered vibrators in his studio and encouraged prospective models, during the often weeks-long educational process leading up to a photo shoot, to experiment with these machines to learn what pleased them best. When he and Hanson would confer on a shoot he might ask if masturbation would be appropriate; she came to understand this meant the model had acquired the necessary skill and wanted to demonstrate it. The answer, therefore, was always “yes”.

The volume Getting Off, second in the Embrace Your Fantasies series, represents the best of these photo sessions, accompanied by original Leg Show text by Hanson. All images are from the original transparencies, rescued from the Leg Show archives before the magazine ceased publishing in 2012. Join us once again for an exploration of 1990s sexual freedom, and a unique celebration of female empowerment.