Why the war isn’t won against lads mags

British lads mag Nuts ceased publication last month after several years of declining circulation and campaigns to limit the sale of publications pushing female flesh.

WITH the closure of the lad mag Nuts, despite its campaign demanding that its critics Keep Your Hands Off Our Nuts, it would be satisfying to think that this was yet another milestone for the fourth wave of feminism.

Here is a magazine that at its height had a weekly circulation in Britain of 300,000 — this had fallen to 53,000 for the July to December period last year, before its publishers IPC decided to pull the plug.

A source at Nuts, speaking to the Huffington Post, said that staff were “not surprised” that the magazine was folding, but that it had been “an amazing 10 years keeping British men amused”.

Nuts, as you will be aware, used sexualised female body parts to create this male amusement; like the Blur and Oasis rivalry of the Britpop era, Nuts and its main competitor Zoo promoted the idea that they had a rival ‘nipple count’.

These mags avoided being categorised as top shelf pornography by including stuff about football, booze, and gross-out jokes — but their main emphasis was always sexualised female body parts, luridly presented. 100 Very Booby Babes. That kind of thing. At their peak, the popularity of their bargain-basement hedonism forced other more expensive lad mags like Loaded and FHM to go further downmarket in response.

But is the closure of Nuts really another victory for equality, or is it just that you can get a far wider and more hardcore variety of sexualised female body parts online for free? Probably the latter.

Nuts’ circulation was at its peak a decade ago, when it was launched in 2004; by 2007, thanks to the mass migration of male consumers of sexualised female body parts towards the internet, sales were already starting to decline.

Lose The Lad Mags campaign was the probably the nail in Nuts coffin. Started this time last year, the campaign was backed by UK Feminista, Object, End Violence Against Women, and significantly, some of the UK’s top lawyers.

The campaign urged retailers to remove lad mags from shop shelves because they are “sexist, harmful, and breach equality law”. This campaign was initially reported in The Sun under the headline ‘Writs Out For The Lads’, who described how “a gaggle of crusty lady lawyers” were out to ruin everyone’s fun; probably the same harridans who supported No More Page Three.

Lose The Lad Mags suggested that selling publications covered in sexualised female body parts resulted in shops being “an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for both staff and customers. This is where the breach of equality law comes in — women workers should not have to handle products that undermine their equality.

Nor should women customers have to cop an eyeful every time they enter a newsagent or supermarket. Nor should their kids. A nameless Loaded and FHM writer, speaking to the BBC, called the campaign “a deeply sinister and disturbing attempt by a group of fundamentalist, fanatical feminists...to bully supermarkets into removing lads’ mags from the shelves”.

Nuts and Zoo (which is still going, because it is German owned and big in Australia, despite having a small UK circulation — at 29,500, it’s not even in the Top 100 magazine list, despite its 256,000 followers on Twitter) saw their sales fall by a third earlier this year when one chain of retailers, The Co-op, insisted they use ‘modesty bags’ to cover the naked body parts on their covers.

The magazines refused, and sales slumped further. The campaign has also targeted Tesco (one protest used a banner in the style of the Tesco logo which read ‘Sexism: Every Lad Mag Helps’) which resulted, so far, in age restriction on sales of lad mags.

That there is far more violently misogynist content available online is not entirely relevant to the Lose The Lads Mags campaign – the point was to remove sexualised female body parts from mainstream public environments.

Having tits and bums in your face in the corner shop means that it normalises the dissection and presentation of 50% of the population as body parts. This is not polite. Go online in private, but get it out of our faces in public.

Meanwhile, Mens Health remains the top selling men’s magazine in Britain with a healthy weekly print circulation of 203,050. GQ follows at 114,487 a week, with Esquire lagging behind at 55,011.

But when it comes to magazine consumption, women are the main market — the weekly print circulation in Britain of Glamour is 410,480, followed by Good Housekeeping, New, Woman and Home, Chat, OK and Hello.

Not that women’s magazines are bastions of equality. Not at all. We may not have sexualised content about booby babes, but instead have equally damaging content about how our body parts are the wrong size, shape, texture, age, whatever.

Maybe we need another campaign to Lose The Lady Mags — or at least the content within them which encourages body hatred from within ourselves. This is the real Trojan horse of media misogyny.