Loaded is back — I pray ladette culture isn’t too

I admired Loaded when it first came out for its anarchic take on journalism and its reckless, rebellious and entertaining writing.

It had a broad church of male interests: football, girls, crisps, garage snacks, jokes, sex, masturbation, cars, rock, rave, boxing, suits, watches, literature and the arts. Playboy and Penthouse had previously expertly mined this seam, which mixed the highest aspirations with the most primal. The content was good but let’s not pretend Loaded was The Paris Review.

It looked like the Loaded lifestyle offered a middle way for women who should have known better. We could be one of them. Emancipation was pints, baggy jeans, middle finger salutes, drugs, fags, football, effing and blinding, quick humour, saggy Parkas and biting comebacks. Yes, believe it or not, Loaded made the grunting, arse-scratching, bollock-sniffing version of masculinity look like an ironic and fun new lifestyle. I bought it.

Initially the cover stars were mostly men: Dennis Hopper, David Letterman and the snooker player Jimmy White. Peachy bums and milky breasts were some, not all, of its allure. Not every woman was expected to fanny about in suspender belts. Kathy Burke (October 1997) was smoking.

But as lad mag culture seized the zeitgeist, a sort of mutant feminism took hold that didn’t serve us well. We weren’t just trying to match them pint for pint, bellowing like drunken elephants and playing darts. Which looked fun and, yes, it was a pretty basic form of it.

While I’m not saying women should cross their legs at the ankle and sip a sweet sherry, it’s true those bloated nights out have likely knocked a decade off my lifespan. Don’t let anyone tell you heavy drinking = emancipation. Neither does sleeping around or knowing the offside rule.

We still had that epic pay gap but now we wore baggy jeans and went to the football, so that’s OK. It would get worse, though. How did we morph from honorary blokes to taking all our clothes off? I was a journalist in my early twenties just as Loaded was gripping the zeitgeist and I had to make a call. Tits or not.

Fearne Cotton in the early 00s

ALAMY/DOUG PETERS/ALLACTION.CO.UK

Writing a sex column for GQ magazine, I had to have a themed photograph taken every month, the racier the better. This did not feel good. There was a royal kerfuffle once or twice when I freaked out about having to, for example, pose on my hands and knees while getting my bottom spanked.

I was under no illusion that I was Martha Gellhorn but did being a young journalist really entail taking your kit off to make the rent? Did I have to do that to be noticed, to be good, to be worthy? Thankfully, when I said this, the editor at that time, Michael VerMeulen expressed his disappointment but was decent enough to reshoot the picture.

Post #MeToo, that kind of pressure to be hyper-sexualised so as to be interesting can be more easily challenged, though it still goes on, everywhere. Look at any teenage girl’s social media posts. We aren’t through those trees yet.

Loaded’s new (female) editor Danni Levy says nor should we be — that men can “ogle’’ women. But she can promise no more than a shoot with Katie Price, a middle-aged glamour model showing off a body ravaged by cosmetic surgery. It’s some distance from the days when serious women including Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson and Charlize Theron would strip off for these magazines.

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When I meet musicians, actresses, and TV and radio presenters of my generation and look back on those years, I’ve yet to meet one who doesn’t cringe — sometimes angrily, sometimes with feelings of shame and sadness — at what they were expected to do to be interesting in those mags.

I remember in peak lads’ mag times, about 1999, talking to a male journalist who had just interviewed the (now) BBC Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox. The interview might have been for Loaded, Sky, Maxim, FHM, any of the increasing number of blokey glossies all selling hundreds of thousands of copies a month.

Whoever it was for, I’m 99.9 per cent certain she would have had to wear a bikini for it. He’d liked her, was volubly delighted by her banter. I will never forget him saying, “She’s really funny, you know. She’s actually as funny as some of my friends. And my friends are funny.”

The world’s changed. If men want it, good luck, but I doubt you’ll find any intelligent women thrilling over the Loaded shtick in 2024.