.. PLAYBOY ------------------- Wyn Hilty, April 1999 A healthy, relaxed sexual ethos permeates every aspect of Corinna's site. Billed as a "journal of femmerotica," Scarlet Letters is a beautifully written and designed quarterly e-zine featuring poetry, erotic stories, stunning photography and sketches, features (including Corinna's advice column, Ask Miz Scarlet), and a Letters Lounge for subscribers (who send in voluntary contributions to help support the zine). "When I started the site, there really weren't any [erotica] outlets online that catered to women or were done by women," Corinna says. "So you'd send an erotica story to a sex-centered site, and if the words went over six letters, it was a really big problem." A former kindergarten teacher who now does a little of everything -- writing, modeling, painting, music ("I'm kind of a troubadour," she says. "If I were lucky I'd live in medieval France and be a courtesan. But then there's the plague.") -- Corinna rounded up a group of friends and launched the site. Six people work the labor of love (or lust, as the case may be); contributors and staffers all pitch in for free. They're contemplating putting out a print edition. And all their labor is appreciated. Corinna says they're getting up to 2200 visits a day (stats: February 1999) from people who like sensuality spiced with intelligence. "Our readership is pretty evenly divided between men and women," Corinna says. "We get a lot of letters from couples, which is nice because I have a serious problem with the cultural conditioning that pornography is bad. That contributes to a lot of cultural and sexual problems -- having to hide pornography from your partner isn't going to help your relationship any. "The biggest thing I hear in letters is that we're not afraid of being funny," she adds. "We like to have fun with it. Sex is important, but like anything else, if you can't laugh about it, it turns into this ethereal thing that nobody can quite touch. And touching is really the point." © Playboy Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

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