Cheri

Cheri is the single best hardcore men's magazine available today. These people know what porn should be.

The women...good God, I don't know how they find these women. The girls in some other magazines look like people you'd see on the street, but so many of the Cheri women are like nothing I've ever seen. They radiate pure lust--they almost glow!--but somehow they rarely look fake or old or overly made up.

Then there are the pictorials. Cheri starts out slow with a solo set of a gorgeous young woman (who is often Asian, for whatever reason). It proceeds through some sexy poses--few of which are awkward--and ends with a few good old close-up spread shots, often with a few fingers or a dildo deep inside.

And we haven't even gotten to the good penetration yet. Let's start with the guy-girl sets. The clothes come off quickly, as they should, and by the first or second page, you're seeing a few oral sex shots, often with a nice shot of the woman delicately holding the head of her partner's penis between her lips. Soon you get down and dirty with several nice insertion shots--no implied or hidden penetration here! Usually by the end there's a crystal-clear close-up of the woman's luscious shaved lips stretching and folding themselves around the long straight penis of her partner.

The lesbian pictorials are just as good. Most magazines' lesbian sets involve two women spreading each other open or waving their tongues in the general vicinity of her partner's genitalia. Cheri doesn't much bother with such fakery--instead it clearly shows women burying their tongues deep inside their partners' nether regions, slipping fingers in to the second knuckle, and, in a recent issue, crouching rear-to-rear with a double-headed dildo going from one woman to the other.

Now for the group scenes. Take the lesbian and guy/girl pictorials, double them, and mix them together. Three-ways are common, but so are four-ways and five-ways; one recent pictorial ended with an incredibly clear shot of a woman taking one man vaginally, one anally, and one orally (I can only imagine how long it took them to work out the geometry of such a shot.)

Its only flaw in my eyes: cumshots. I don't like cumshots. They shake my suspension of disbelief, sometimes fatally. I can envision a woman enjoying lesbian sex, a threesome, or just a good screwing, and I can envision a woman getting a kick out of being photographed while she does it. I've met women who enjoy the aforementioned things. But I have never met a woman who thought she might enjoy a cumshot. I usually try to convince myself that it's faked, that it's just shampoo or hand soap or something.

• Pictorials: 6-8
• Girls: usually gorgeous; some occasionally have too much makeup
• Penetration: lots and LOTS
• Lesbian: 1-2 pictorials/issue
• Guy/Girl: 1-2 pictorials per issue
• Group: 0-1 per issue
• Fetish: rare fisting, mild leather
• Stories/Articles: letters, sometimes one story