Men are poorly served in terms of publications, role models and spaces designed especially for them
May 28, 2024 2:53 pm(Updated 3:04 pm)
I’m very rarely right in any of my predictions, but one thing I can be smug about is the death of the lads’ mag. Years ago, when I was a baby feminist commentator barely in my 20s, FHM and Zoo magazine both went bust. Many of my contemporaries were delighted. These publications made money by putting women in bikinis and writing about how to get women to want to shag you. They might have been reductive and sexist and puerile, but they were also an essential service. They provided advice, support, information and, yes, pretty women with their boobs out.
Those magazines (which went bust because of the death of print, not because PC culture shut them down) were a genuine loss to men because what replaced them was deeply, darkly worse. Reading a tongue-in-cheek piece about the best way to ask your girlfriend for oral sex might have seemed a bit off-colour two decades ago, but compared to the Andrew Tates of the world telling boys that women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted and that loving your girlfriend makes you a “simp”, it’s positively wholesome.
Given my enthusiasm for these publications, you’d think I’d be pleased to see today’s announcement that Loaded magazine was back. But I assure you, I’m not. While bringing back a men’s publication which celebrates masculinity is a great idea, everything about the Loaded relaunch is tired, predictable and depressing.
Let’s start with the commentary from the woman (yes, woman) bringing it back. Danni Levy, former editor of Muscle and Fitness magazine, said: “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.”
She then went on to make some unsubstantiated assertions about political correctness, saying: “Nowadays we have all been subjected to a severe safety net which is actually really boring. The world has gone PC mad but nothing seems to be politically correct.”
She goes on to say that men need to know that it’s OK to ogle naked women. “Why is that not OK?” she says. “Men need to be men and there should be no shame in them being able to ogle beautiful women like Liz Hurley, Melinda Messenger or Pamela Anderson.”
It’s hard to know where to start – whether to focus on the fact that Pamela Anderson hasn’t posed for a men’s magazine since 2016, or the fact that men clearly know they’re allowed to ogle naked women because 76 per cent of them admit that they watch porn.
Even if you park her comments about the relaunch, the editorial vision for the publication is inexplicable. Their cover star is Liz Hurley, who many men in their 30s will probably be unfamiliar with, but the lead feature is about a fight between Iron Mike and Jake Paul, the latter of which is a social media influencer people over the age of 30 have barely heard of.
Looking at this version of the once iconic magazine, I can’t help wondering if perhaps (and it kills me to say this) a men’s magazine needs a male editor. Just as it would be bonkers to see Glamour or Stylist edited by a man, maybe a space for men needs the kind of insight into the male psyche which a woman just couldn’t reasonably be expected to provide?
In short, it’s a mess. It feels like someone wanted to throw a lot of money at doing something countercultural and pro-men, but didn’t bother doing any research at all into what men want.
I admit that the relaunch of Loaded has annoyed me, which is probably the intention. Winding up the feminists is good for building attention. But it’s only annoying because it’s been done so lazily. It’s easy to imagine the editorial team giggling about how provocative they’re being, but there is nothing provocative about a picture of Hurley in a white shirt, alongside a list of fairly banal articles.
But more than being annoying, it’s just plain sad. There was such an enormous opportunity here to do something fresh and clever, which could have been very sexy and fun, and good for men. But instead the energy is being wasted on a confused editorial message and a half-hearted stab at joining the culture wars.
The Loaded relaunch could have been a chance to engage with the discussion about what it means to be a man in 2024, to explore how men can enjoy the very natural desire to look at semi-naked women without perpetuating slut-shaming. In their heyday, lads’ mags mixed sex tips with chat about mental health, sports writing with cultural criticism, and naked women with awareness about testicular cancer. They were funny, witty and wry. But Danni Levy’s version of Loaded has none of that.
Men are currently enormously poorly served in terms of publications, role models and spaces designed especially for them. But there’s a reason they went bust in the first place, and half-hearted provocation, hackneyed covers and the confused editorial vision isn’t going to work any better now than it did a decade ago. So please, bring back the lads’ mags. Just not like this.