In the eye of the beholder

Bernard D. McDonald is the ageing face of controversial youth magazine 'Pavement'. Picture / Chris Skelton

It's a bit boring to take the mickey out of Barney McDonald simply because he's fast approaching 40, his hairline is escaping him and he is still running New Zealand's premier youth culture magazine.

True, eyebrows have been raised about the Pavement editor's choice of very young, very thin models, and the fact that he is frequently seen surrounded by a bevy of youthful lovelies.

But a receding hairline and a few years on the clock do not make a perv.

After a week of being accused of sexualising children in his latest issue, McDonald is fiercely articulate in defending his magazine - preparing, if necessary, to go to jail for it.

He is all fired up, well thought-out, and positively brimming with righteous zeal about Pavement's good works.

Those who call it soft porn just don't get it. Those who say he is some kind of Hugh-Hefneresque Svengali, prowling Auckland's nightlife, well, he "doesn't give a shit" what they have to say.

"There's nothing I do, or have done that I feel I need to be apologetic about or to explain to people so they can think what they like. I don't judge them. They perhaps should not judge me."

And so we find Bernard D. McDonald, newly famous to Middle New Zealand (humbly) revelling in surging magazine sales and again at the centre of controversy over Pavement.

The nub of it this time is the 13th birthday "Lost Youth" celebration issue.

On the cover is a 14-year-old girl wearing an oversized T-shirt which just manages to cover her knickers and drapes off one shoulder barely avoiding exposing her nipple. But that's not the problem.

It's the feature inside, which includes a series of photos and essays starting with the "age of innocence", as depicted by 10-year-old Jessica, leading to the "old enough" section featuring models who appear to be about 13 to 15 in skimpy clothes, and on to "metamorphosis" - several pages of topless 19-year-old Megan in sexually explicit poses.

Anti-child exploitation group Ecpat has complained to the censor about Jessica's inclusion because of the context of the series, (even though the photos, on their own, appear relatively benign), and over what it says is the impression that Megan is much younger.

McDonald says the critics just don't get it. Jessica is not sexualised just as Anna Paquin was not sexualised when she appeared in the very adult film The Piano, he reckons.

"[The whole issue] is a celebration of teenagers. Most of this issue is written by teenagers. Does that frighten adults so much that they're having a significant reaction to this issue? Very few people are making any effort to highlight that aspect of the issue."

And he's right. The rest of the issue is packed with intelligently written essays and short histories of and by young New Zealanders.

Sure, there are skimpily dressed models throughout, but also portraits of real people: teenagers with pimples, geeky haircuts and real stories of love, agony, rape, loneliness and joy.

My 17-year-old babysitter loved it. She pored over it, mentioning similarities to her life. Finally, she said, she was reading her story. Teenagers were being taken seriously.

"What I don't get," she said unprompted, "was why they put that naked stuff at the end. It's a bit disturbing, really."

The idea, McDonald reckons, was to reference 70s Playboy and Penthouse magazines - which he argues are relatively innocent compared with today's porn mags. When McDonald was growing up, those mags taught a lot of kids about sex. They pictures are not designed simply to titillate readers, he says.

But won't people buy the magazine to perv at the semi-naked models?

He laughs. "Some might now thanks to Maureen [of Ecpat] drawing attention to this issue."

So he'll go to jail rather than pay a fine, if the censor says he's done something wrong.

"I would want to cancel my citizenship as a New Zealander if it came to that point. There is nothing in this issue that I can't defend. If it came to the choice I would go to jail in order to a) mark myself as someone who has been wronged by the system and b) really make a stand for freedom of expression."

High ideals. But for a while now, Pavement's fascination with teenage sexuality has been going down less well with a growing number of people in its target demographic (intelligent, young, cultured consumers aged 15ish to 35ish).

Otago student magazine music writer Aaron Hawkins last month summed up the feeling: "I am reading a pop-culture magazine, and a 10-year-old child is making eyes at me! Aside from the usual cries of 'Where are the parents?' Pavement has to be held accountable sooner or later. Naked teenagers preening on all fours and 10-year-old It Girls. Don't even bother to masquerade this as art."

Pavement has been here before. It was the subject of a complaint in 1999 after running in its Sex issue a photograph of a Japanese prostitute lying on a bed in a school uniform, naked from the waist down.

The censor slapped it with an R16 rating.

The truth is Pavement's always been interested in sex. Its first issue, 13 years ago, featured a spread on the fetish scene and a model in a silver rubber dress on the cover.

That 48-page tabloid newsprint issue was the realisation of McDonald's life-long fascination with popular culture. And it set him on a path that would eventually carve out for him a remarkably powerful position in New Zealand's youth scene.

He'd grown up an "army brat", the son of a soldier who took the family with him from Waiouru, to Linton army camp, then on to Papakura. When he was about 12 his parents split.

The details are murky (and painful, going by the look on his face) but McDonald chose to "divorce" his father then and he hasn't seen or spoken to him in more than 20 years.

"I just decided I didn't want to," he says. "He wasn't a positive influence in my life or my brother's life or my mother's life. I have a wonderful mother who I adore and I decided to focus on her rather than have a relationship with my father.

"It is sad," he says, as if he's only recently allowed himself to feel that. "I actually feel for him these days. I'll probably be the one to make contact with him, to be honest. I don't want, when I've got children, to have them ask me what granddad was like and for me not to be able to say.

"When I saw What Becomes of the Broken Hearted ... it wasn't the greatest film I've ever seen, but it was interesting to see someone grappling with the concept of redemption. Can you actually be redeemed if you've been a bad father and a bad husband?

"And that got me thinking, for the first time, I wonder what it's like for my father? I wonder how he feels now? Whether he feels he has missed out on getting to know these two extraordinary sons of his."

He grew up in the cultural vacuum of suburban Papakura, unable to tune in to his beloved bFM, and devouring expensive overseas magazines such as The Face.

"Magazines were my lifeline. They really opened my eyes to the world. They expanded my horizons, shifted my paradigm and that's exactly what I do with Pavement."

He became a fanatical devotee of Joy Division and New Order, earning his nickname Barney from friends, who compared him with New Order's singer.

Years later he interviewed New Order several times for Pavement and met the real Barney at a barbecue a few years ago.

Did he introduce himself as Barney? McDonald cracks up.

"No! I had a moment when I said 'Hi Barney I'm ... ' and at that moment I realised how ridiculous it was that I had this name and how weird he would have thought I was to know that."

McDonald got into journalism after leaving school, halfway through the sixth form, taking on a cadetship at Auckland suburban paper the Manukau Courier. He lasted a year-and-a-half, then spent time overseas, before completing a BA and teaching briefly at university. In the early 1990s he was freelancing for other lifestyle and youth culture magazines and dreamed up the idea of Pavement.

The first run of about 5000 was printed on newsprint, largely in black and white and entirely on credit.

"Nobody had done anything like Pavement before. There were some magazines that were vaguely similar. Like Planet and Stamp. But they were all rather tame and rather boring and, I don't know, in some ways just lacking in initiative, really."

These days Pavement is read by more than 80,000 people and comprises more than 100 luxurious, glossy pages filled with advertising. New Zealand's only enduring youth culture magazine, it has made the careers of models, make-up artists and photographers.

That's a powerful position for the editor to be in, McDonald concedes.

"A bit like being a rock star, because I'm at the epicentre of something. A really wonderful phenomenon. Right now there are so many really cool young bands emerging. It's a really exciting scene at the moment and Pavement's a part of that."

Does he get girls throwing themselves at him like rock stars do?

McDonald is coy. He smiles. "Not all the time." So some of the time? "From time to time." Because they want to be in the magazine? He says such girls would never get in, because he can see through them.

"It means a lot to me that people are genuine and straight-up and honest and have integrity around what they do - and that includes any hot-looking girl who may approach me at a party or a gig. I'm old enough now not to fall over myself when a girl shows me some interest."

He's old enough for a lot of things now. But in Pavement's world, age is a vague construction at the best of times.

As he writes in the editorial of his latest issue, "Pavement's 13th birthday issue is entirely populated by people who are in their teens and produced by a collective of people who think they are".