The Cafe

Are lads' mags the cheap rags we deserve?
Table 1: Mairi Clare Rodgers

Last week Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, attacked lads' mags as undoing the very fabric of civilised society. Nuts and Zoo, Mr Gove explained, painted a picture of women as 'permanently, lasciviously, uncomplicatedly available' and linked these publications to relationship breakdown and fatherless children. Most of the newspapers – and most of us – enjoyed a good chuckle at the return of the sexually repressed Tories and their obsession with the nation's sexual predilections. So far, so same old. However, it's possible the shadow schools secretary is onto something – but maybe it is just that this is less about sex, the act, than it is about sex, as gender.
     For all that Michael Gove has been written off as 'daft and hypocritical' by one columnist and 'an out-of-touch misogynist' by another, he is not the first to raise concerns about the new breed of mens' magazines that have cropped up in recent years. And it's not just the usual suspects – significantly, the ex-editor of Nuts magazine has recently been questioning his participation with lad culture, describing his time there as 'not a satanic pact but...a satanic loose arrangement'. Now the editorial director for the much more respectable Shortlist magazine, he describes his feelings about his time as editor as 'mixed' and questions whether he betrayed his liberal values through his involvement with the weekly.
     The lads mags mark II seem to have attracted much more criticism than their forerunners of Loaded and FHM; they're crasser, there's more nudity, the tone is more unpleasant, they are priced for the schoolboy's pocket...but none of this seems to ring quite true. What's our real problem with the likes of Nuts and company? Are we really so affronted by their content? We are more sexually liberated, nudity is everywhere from the boardroom to the bus shelter and there is more stigma in being a virgin than a slut. Perhaps the idea of these magazines as a corrupting influence is a red herring that we prefer to use as a distraction from the real problem: that it isn't what these publications do to us, but what they say about us that makes us so uncomfortable.
     These magazines weren't created in a vacuum. After nearly 15 years of gorging ourselves on tanned, waxed, airbrushed creations of femininity, we find the reflection looking back at us isn't one of urbane and worldly liberation but rather something more tawdry and alienating; splitting us very cleanly into two genders with nothing more in common than how our sexual organs fit together. Perhaps it's time to accept responsibility that magazines like Nuts and Zoo are products of our culture, not creators of it – and perhaps it's also time to accept that it's our responsibility, not some distasteful cheap rag's, to try and change it.

Table 1 Mairi Clare Rodgers: Are lads' mags the cheap rags we deserve? [click here]	Table 2 Walter Humes: Yes, I did go on holiday to Dunoon [click here]	Table 3 R D Kernohan: Confessions of a free-loader [click here]
Table 4 Andrew Hook: The BBC fiddles while Georgia burns [click here]	Table 5 Tessa Ransford: An evening with Adam Smith [click here]	Table 6 Douglas Wood: An own goal by the banks [click here]