Name: Loaded.
Age: 30.
Appearance: A reanimated mag for reanimated lads.
Wow, Loaded is 30. Well, yes, on and off. Since its heyday in the 90s, Loaded was sold to several increasingly small publishers, before it eventually folded as a print publication for good in 2015, although a website lived on.
So the message is that there hasn’t been an appetite for this sort of magazine for well over a decade. Oh, well, this is awkward. The message was supposed to be that Loaded is back with Elizabeth Hurley as the cover star.
Sorry, Loaded is back? Yes! The Dubai-based businessman Stewart Lochrie has backed a new relaunch. Its executive editor is a woman named Danni Levy.
A woman?! Yes, but don’t worry, lads: Levy won’t fill the magazine with feminist tutting or knitting patterns. She’s a fitness influencer, possibly best known for appearing in the 2015 ITVBe reality show Life on Marbs. Luckily for Loaded readers, she also seems to think the world has “gone PC mad”.
Does she? “Our goal is to bring back all those things that 35- to 55-year-old men are being cheated out of by society,” she has said of the launch.
Ooh, like what? Affordable energy bills? No, not quite. They’re actually being cheated out of “being able to ogle beautiful women like Liz Hurley, Melinda Messenger or Pamela Anderson”.
Men are being cheated out of looking at pictures of women who were known for being sex symbols 25 years ago? Yes! In fact, men who enjoy that are the key Loaded relaunch demographic. Levy has said that its audience will be “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”.
I think that might be the most depressing sentence I’ve ever read. Grim, isn’t it? Loaded: the magazine for middle-aged men who can’t face up to the reality that they’re expected to function as adults in society.
This sounds like a disaster in the making. In fairness, Levy also made a better argument about Loaded hoping to occupy a “safe space” between the “attitude that no one can say or do anything” and the torrent of online pornography that is “giving youngsters a warped idea of sexual normality”.
A safe space?! This is PC gone mad! Well, yes. Also, Levy went on This Morning in 2016 to argue that cat-calling should be reclassified as a hate crime, so maybe her anti-woke credentials aren’t as strong as she’d have us believe.
Who cares? Men finally have a place where they can look at boobs again! Listen, have you heard of a little thing called the internet?
Do say: “Loaded is back!”
Don’t say: “For six months, tops.”