News that kids could soon be doing GSSEs in lads mags has predictably got the Daily Mail’s “lefty liberal government corrupting our children” radar going like the clappars.
Here they wheel out one of those “liberal types” to tell their readers that he’s a liberal kind of guy but he thinks this kind of evil corrupting society destroying filth must be banned NOW!
From the Daily Mail:
A GCSE in lads’ mags? The fantasies they peddle give young men a distorted and dangerous view of women
By William Leith
17th April 2009
On the cover of this month’s issue of Loaded, a magazine aimed at teenage boys and young men, is something I never expected to see. It’s an image of a young girl, and it makes me despair - in fact, it makes me fear for the next generation.
This girl looks to be in her late teens. By any standards, she is attractive. She is almost naked. She is slim and toned. She has the look of contemporary female celebrity - glossy hair, a pretty face, shapely eyes and sharp cheekbones.
But if you look a little bit closer, you’ll see why we should be very, very worried.
The pictures and ‘interviews’ in these magazines seem to be a representation of how teenage boys feel about sex
First, I must make one thing clear - I’m not a prude, by any stretch of the imagination.
I’m a pretty average heterosexual man. I appreciate photographs that celebrate female sexuality as much as the next guy.
I rather like the work of fashion photographers such as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin - they celebrated the realm of the erotic, and I’m fine with that.
I’m not keen on Playboy magazine and its ilk, but they don’t totally offend me. Yes, Playboy models appear passive, but you can always tell they value themselves - or at least their appearance - even if it’s just because they look good. Shallow? Yes. Appalling? No, not really.
But let’s look at the Loaded girl again. The girl on the front cover is seated. Between her legs, just covering her sexual organs, is what looks like a pot of honey. The lid of the pot is open. One of the girl’s hands appears to be clutching the pot to her crotch; the other hand is at her mouth.
She is pulling at her lower lip with her index finger. All she’s wearing, by the way, is a pair of hold-up stockings.
One of her nipples is obscured by her forearm; the other is covered up with a label which says ’sweet’. Oh, and the cover line, which ends with a phallic exclamation mark, is: ‘Get in!’
If you open the magazine, there are more pictures. In one of these pictures, she is on her knees, with her bottom in the air and her skirt hitched up. In the piece, the girl is interviewed. She says: ‘If I was asked to dress like a schoolgirl, I wouldn’t argue.’
And: ‘I am very submissive. You just have to tell me what you want to do and I’ll do it. I love to be told I’m being naughty and then get a good hard spanking.’
And: ‘There’s something inside of me that believes I need to be taken in hand and punished.’
And: ‘I used to fantasise about being strangled - not hard or anything, just light pressure around my throat when having sex. It was a pretty mind-blowing experience.’
A dangerous fantasy
Now, this is not an accurate representation of the sexuality of a teenage girl, is it? No - it’s a dangerous fantasy. And it’s not just Loaded. Several other magazines contain similar images.
On the cover of a recent issue of Nuts magazine is a picture of a topless young girl with her thumbs hooked into the waistband of her G-string, apparently ready to whip it off. She is smiling flirtatiously. The message: she wants you to see she’s happy that you’re looking at her in the act of getting naked.
There’s also a picture of another girl, completely naked this time. And this, let me stress, is what’s on the cover.
This month, it was announced that teenagers will be allowed to study lads’ mags, just like these, as part of their media studies GCSE - and their exams will ask them to compare and contrast the ’style and tone’ of publications such as this.
In other words, teenage boys are going to be sitting in classrooms looking at pictures of naked teenage girls and then making comments about the style and tone of the pictures.
And I wonder - how will the teenage girls in the class feel about this? And not only that, what message will it be sending out to a generation of impressionable young boys?
A quick glance inside these magazines and you are bombarded with smutty images. The recent edition of Nuts magazine features five very young models - who look barely out of their teens - showing off their breasts.
‘I once flashed at a boat full of tourists!’ boasts one of them. Another one explains the value of having big breasts: ‘If you’re in a pub or a club and you’re about to get chucked out, you can always use them to get the bouncers to see things from your point of view! Ha Ha!’
A third girl, who also looks very young, poses topless. The magazine asks her what she likes to have ‘on her boobs’. ‘Chocolate is always good,’ she says.
And in last week’s Zoo magazine, the cover model Kelly, who is 18, poses for the camera with a look of stunned confusion. She wears a G-string and high heels. ‘If I see a lad in a bar that I like,’ she says, ‘I’ll go over and ask for his number. I’m not shy like that. Or when it comes to getting naked!’
She also talks about having lesbian tendencies - a favourite subject in these magazines. (It’s a signal the girls are charged up sexually and not just doing it for the boys.) Anyway, Kelly goes into some detail about this sapphic inclination.
Not an accurate representation
And how does this make me feel? It makes me feel queasy. These magazines don’t, I’m sure, offer an accurate representation of how teenage girls feel about sex.
These pictures and ‘interviews’ sound much more like a representation of how teenage boys feel about sex. And we all know what we mean when we talk of the sexuality of teenage boys, don’t we?
I can tell you, because I was one myself. The teenage boy does not have a complex sexuality. It’s simple - he wants sex. If he gets any sex, he wants more sex. He thinks about sex all the time. He fantasises about having sex a lot. Female beauty drives him crazy. In a way, he is very vulnerable.
Of course, one can see an opportunity here. A good teacher might encourage the class to look at these magazines and think about why they exist.
First of all, the class could be encouraged to study them from an evolutionary point of view.
Young men, the teacher could explain, create billions of sperms. This means that they can pass their genes on very efficiently by having sex with lots and lots of people.
Teenage boys, then, are the end of a long line of philanderers, going back thousands of years. No wonder they have very powerful, and very simple, sexual urges.
But is this really the tangent the lessons are going to take in a room full of hormonal teenage boys staring at pictures of naked women? And what about the girls in the class? What would they learn?
Taking that evolution perspective again, sex is a very different matter for women.
Getting pregnant (a natural consequence of ‘mating’) if it’s by a man who might not stay around and help with the child-rearing is a huge genetic risk.
Being impregnated without a protective partner might just ruin a girl’s life - or, if you go back a century or two, even end it.
So men are programmed to have sex at the drop of a hat. Women, on the other hand, are programmed to be cautious. Unlike male sexuality, which is simple, female sexuality is complex.
Sure, women are full of sex hormones. And sure, these hormones are looking for sexual contact with the opposite sex. But for women, the messages are mixed. Look at him, the message says - he’s gorgeous. But be careful! It’s dangerous out there! Maybe get to know him more. Find out if he wants to stick around.
What this means is that, over hundreds of centuries, men and women have developed a subtle system of rituals and trade-offs when it comes to sex. If men demand sex, women demand commitment.
When the two sexes arrive at a point of equilibrium, that’s what we call civilisation. And this is what culture should teach us, particularly as we enter adulthood.
But - and I ask this in all seriousness - can anybody really learn that from reading Nuts? Nuts and Zoo are representative of male sexuality in that the images and text are simple and urgent - much like male desire.
Female sexuality is complex and cautious. This is something that men absolutely need to know; it’s a lesson they must learn before they grow up.
In an ideal world, a good class teacher would be able to explain that this is exactly why these magazines are so dangerous - they are teaching teenage boys exactly the wrong lesson. They are telling these vulnerable, hormone-soaked boys what they want to hear, rather than the truth.
At this point, our good teacher might also turn the attention of the class to what teenage girls like to read. Recently, the most popular reading material among this group has been the vampire novel Twilight, which significantly is about how complex and difficult it is to deal with being a teenage girl.
Twilight, a film about a young girl who falls in love with a vampire, deals with the complexities of being a teenager (pictured are Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson as Bella and Edward)
Bella, the heroine, falls in love with Edward and wants to sleep with him. But Edward is a vampire - he knows that if they sleep together she will be ruined.
And, as the critic Caitlin Flanagan has pointed out, if Bella sleeps with Edward, nothing will change for him, but her life will never be the same again because her old self will, in an important sense, die.
Talk about a powerful metaphor! The book is all about the complexities of being a girl.
A concept, I have to say, completely absent from Loaded, Zoo and Nuts. A concept, I imagine, rather beyond the scope of a GCSE media studies course.
I’d like to stress, again, that I make a distinction between erotica, which can have some legitimacy, and the dangerous smut peddled in these magazines.
Erotic photographs of women are fine, as long as the women show some signs of actually thinking like women.
For instance, I opened this month’s Maxim magazine expecting to see yet more smut.
And, sure, there is a photoshoot featuring a scantily-clad woman. But she’s not acting the part of a dribbling sex-zombie - she at least looks as if she values herself, as if you’d have to do something pretty fabulous to impress her.
And then there’s FHM, which features scantily-clad shots of TV stars Konnie Huq and Zoe Salmon - mildly juvenile, to be sure.
But this is not what I’m talking about. And neither am I talking about Playboy or Penthouse, or the Home Secretary’s husband and his relationship with porn films.
Loaded, Zoo and Nuts are not aimed at men like Richard Timney, who have been around the block a few times, who are old enough to understand what women are actually like, and whose hormones are seeping away even as they reach for the remote.
No, these are magazines aimed at boys who don’t yet know anything about women.
And that’s much more worrying. Such magazines portray a girl who, when someone gropes her at a party, tells a lads’ magazine, aimed at teenage boys, that she thinks it’s: ‘Bloody brilliant!’
Does that sound like a sentiment coming from the complex sexuality of a young woman? Or does it sound like the sort of dangerous fantasy an inexperienced teenage boy might have about what young women are like?
Well, I think these fantasies and the magazines that peddle them cannot but cause trouble. They are preying on the vulnerabilities of young men; these young men will, in turn, prey on the young women around them.
Young women will be distressed, and this will not help the cause of young men, either.
Will teachers really be able to analyse the market for teenage porn in a classroom full of teenage boys and girls?
Frankly, I doubt it. I never thought I - a pretty liberated kind of guy - would say anything like this. But, in truth, it makes me despair.
“I rather like the work of fashion photographers such as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin - they celebrated the realm of the erotic, and I’m fine with that. “
Oh yeah! Poncy art house erotica is fine because the intellectual upper middle classes can take it for what it is and won’t be corrupted by it so it’s ok.
But low rent tits and sex in lads mags will corrupt the dumb lower class masses so it must be banned right now!
“I’d like to stress, again, that I make a distinction between erotica, which can have some legitimacy, and the dangerous smut peddled in these magazines. “
Translation…. I’d like to stress that I make a distinction between erotica in classy magazines for the intelligent middle classes and the dangerous smut peddles in magazines for the scummy lower classes who will want and go and rape someone or something the moment they see a woman’s bare ankle!
The underlying message of this article seems to be that the sexual fantasies of teenage boys are dangerous and a threat to women. And probably such fantasies really need to be stopped.
There’s a fair bit of man bashing in this article. The underlying message is that young men can go around having lots of sex and then leaving poor young women to deal with pregnancy and other consequences.
“So men are programmed to have sex at the drop of a hat. Women, on the other hand, are programmed to be cautious. Unlike male sexuality, which is simple, female sexuality is complex.”
Sounds like…men are rampaging sex crazed beasts who will bonk women left right and centre and leave those women to pick up the piecies. Women are more cautious because they are their victims.
Mediasnoops wonders if this guy is one of those pussywhipped right-on men who’ve been browbeaten by man hating feminists into believing that he is responsible for all the evils in the world simply because he has a cock!
And he should feel terrible about his sexuality and make all other men feel terrible about theirs too.
“Well, I think these fantasies and the magazines that peddle them cannot but cause trouble. “
And he probably thinks that these magazines should be banned then.
“They are preying on the vulnerabilities of young men; these young men will, in turn, prey on the young women around them. “
In other words young men that look at these magazines will rape women and leave them pregnant.
Better get them some arty farty arthouse erotica to correct their corrupted minds quick!
Whatever!
