Lads' mags are back to help men 'ogle women' - phew!
Don't panic ladies, now there's even more opportunity to be sexualised in plain sight
I know the Nineties are back in fashion - I’m not immune to an Adidas tracksuit myself - but isn’t this taking things a bit far? I’m talking about the return of Loaded magazine, which folded in 2015, the same year The Sun stopped publishing pictures of topless women on Page 3. Since then, I thought we’d all agreed that the world had moved on and that objectifying women in the mainstream media was caveman stuff. Right?
Wrong. Apparently. Loaded is back and doubling down. The new executive editor, Danni Levy, is PR-ing the magazine with the sort of unenlightened and toxic messaging that makes me cringe like it’s 1999.
Or as she puts it: “We are targeting the original Loaded audience who are now living happily at home with their wife and kids but still reminisce about their nights spent clubbing until 3am, drinking £1 shots, with a bedroom covered in posters of half-naked women.”
All together now: lads, lads, lads! Anyone got a traffic cone I can stick on my head?
Talk about retrograde. For starters, I resent the idea that women - living happily at home with their husband and kids - don’t also reminisce about nights spent clubbing and drinking £1 shots (though I’m sure they were 50p). I often feel just as nostalgic about those carefree times, as a student and in my early twenties, when all I had to worry about was my next night out.
But what I also recall from those days is the barely disguised misogyny that ran through them - a Nineties ladette hangover - but which we were too naive to recognise. At university, I lived in halls with a group of lads who took great pleasure in doing just what Levy says - plastering their bedroom walls with the pages of magazines like Loaded, Zoo and Nuts. These were lovely, kind boys who cared about their female friends. But they’d also been sent a clear message that leering at semi-naked women was a totally normal and necessary part of male bonding.
Hours were devoted to ranking FHM’s ‘High Street Honeys’ and deciding who they’d shag, given the chance. And - guess what? - the chance actually arose, after one of the lads admitted that his younger sister was best friends with a particularly popular honey, who was then persuaded to join us on a night out.
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