Stand by Your Manhood (5 page)
Read Stand by Your Manhood Online
Authors: Peter Lloyd
Tags: #Reference, #Personal & Practical Guides, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Men's Studies
The old feminism used choice as their mantra – that summed up the movement in the ’60s and ’70s: choice to have an abortion; choice to sleep with whoever you want; choice to use contraception. Now, modern feminists focus on buzzwords such as ‘objectification’, which might sound good, but actually just hide the fact they’re attacking other peoples’ choices. There’s no logic behind it. It’s simply women attacking other women.
Quite frankly, if feminism is about making choices, why are feminists the only ones trying to take choice
away from me? I’m not brainwashed – this is a decision I made.
Plus, I’ve always been treated with respect on shoots. Many of them are women-led too. I’ve had several jobs with female photographers and female-dominated crews. This is a very big part of what objectors choose to ignore because it weakens their case. It’s not a black-and-white issue of one gender versus another – there are women who photograph, market, manage, produce, edit and promote these products. There’s no oppressive force making them do this, it’s their career. They’re knowingly, happily making money from it.
To get a greater sense of this reality, I catch up with Martin Daubney, former editor of
Loaded
magazine and now a journalist at Sky News and
The Sun.
We meet at the Royal Institute of British Architects, just around the corner from the BBC’s Broadcasting House – where, co-incidentally, he’s just been cross-examined on air as part of
Woman’s Hour
, which – in the 200-yard dash to meet me – has evolved into Twitter trolling. Nice. Thankfully, a quick drink and he’s back on form, happy to chat about the halcyon days and the ‘good place’ it all came from.
‘A lot of people don’t believe me, but we were all attracted to
Loaded
for its gonzo journalism and live-for-today attitude, rather than the women,’ he tells me.
I was always accused of being sexist for not having more women on the team, but there weren’t many men on
Marie Claire
either.
Loaded
was born into a vacuum of men being told how to behave. Back then it was all about the New Man, the north London-living, touchy-feely man who wasn’t afraid to cry. The type of man who surrendered his masculinity to fit into a new world order.
Loaded
was a two-fingered gesture to men becoming more asexual.
A father of two, Daubney is an articulate and considered force, not to mention an ideal ambassador for the genre. Anything but the Neanderthal his haters might expect, he’s actually a cool, calm, everyman figure – even in the epicentre of an online assault which sees his phone ping with updates of endless, unwelcome alerts.
Back then it was desperately unfashionable to fight, drink and take drugs – even just to be a man – but then Oasis and the Happy Mondays emerged. Suddenly, footie fans who used to beat each other up would be hugging on dance floors. Ecstasy and music brought men together, but so did lads’ mags. Of course, the liberal media said we should be at home doing domestic chores and raising children full-time, but
Loaded
rejected all that – and represented how men felt. It was
a private club – or it certainly felt like that back in the day. It was a space to be male without apology, where it was acceptable to be a bloke. It even celebrated the downsides – flatulence, getting drunk, being unfaithful and getting VD. It accepted that men were flawed and didn’t patronise them for it. At the same time, it also didn’t listen to all the criticisms, of which there were many.
Specifically,
Loaded
was even debated in Parliament, but the more readers got called sexist and reprobate, the more it reinforced their view that what they were buying was valid. Intolerance pushed men into the arms of it all. It was that Millwall attitude of: ‘If you don’t like it, we don’t care. In fact, we like the fact you hate us, so fuck off.’
Originally, he tells me, women weren’t the main shop window of the store. In the beginning, it was all about us guys.
Scan through old issues and you’ll see that all the biggest football, movie and rock stars were speaking with us. Men like Jerry Springer and Michael Caine were on the cover, not women. Sure, they were part of it too, but they weren’t the main part. They featured more as retro glamour models from the ’80s, reinvented for bits of acceptable titillation between ground-breaking, quality journalism.
The big change only came later, thanks to Liz Hurley. She fronted an issue the same week she wore
that
infamous Versace safety-pin dress at the
Four Weddings and a Funeral
premiere with Hugh Grant, sending sales stratospheric.
That success created pressure from upstairs. We needed more women, so the next change was our Readers’ Girlfriends feature; a take on Readers’ Wives, but without the net curtains and women who looked like Steve Davis. This tapped into the girl-next-door community, which men loved because they were real. It was very British and very celebratory, but also of an era where women were totally and utterly complicit. Then, the girls on the telly got involved. Donna Air, Kelly Brook and Sara Cox all used this enormous media platform to further their careers.
Which is precisely where the objectification argument fails. If you look at it commercially, it’s men – not women – who are (quite happily) being ‘taken advantage of ’ in the lads’ mag exchange. Look at it like a business model, rather than a glamour model, for a moment: these titles are a device by publishers to make money. To do this they get journalists and creatives to sit in a room and think of ways to convince a particular audience – in
this case, men – to part with their money in exchange for some nice pictures of attractive women and a few sparse, auxiliary words such as ‘Cor!’ or ‘Fit!’. The models themselves get paid a wheelbarrow full of cash, whilst female celebs ride the coat tails of its success.
It’s the mag buyers who are out of pocket, nervously picking the damn thing up off the shelves, looking at it waiting for something to happen. With every turn of a page they are subtly, very cleverly, being manipulated by marketeers. And they know this. They’re in on it too, which is why it’s a fair transaction. Nobody is being ripped off. On the contrary, people are making a fortune – from us. Which begs the question: shouldn’t men be calling for a brand of men’s magazine that addresses real men’s issues, alongside the joy of sex, rather than something that takes their money and fobs them off with a few pictures they can get for free on the internet? PEOPLE AT THE TOP, GET ON IT.
FHM
was making £17 million annual profit for EMAP, which was as much as the rest of the business combined. Everybody in the media looked at it as the template for success. Then, the weekly titles like
Zoo
and
Nuts
came in and commercially finessed the offering. The outside world will always think it was made by pornographers, but actually the opposite is true. It was produced by
some of the most highly skilled magazine brains ever. It was owned by Time Warner: the biggest magazine corporation in the world.
Interestingly,
Nuts
didn’t start off as a controversy – initially it was a relatively tame title, which failed to connect with its market.
People later accused it of dumbing down, but – despite being bankrolled by £6 million – the original launch [owned by the man who now runs
Shortlist
magazine] was taken to market research after seven weeks because it wasn’t working. Guess what the feedback was? More women.
It’s an over-simplification to say the men’s market is just a load of cavemen or perverts.
Loaded
was a real-time exercise in product-finessing. Yes, it was a magazine produced by 100 people in a slightly haphazard way, but we also reported to shareholders in the world’s biggest media conglomerate. We were the bastard child who did well. Ask any man from the team what his favourite bit of the job was and none of them will say the girls – it was always the creative, journalistic side.
Indeed. But when I ask if he’s ever tried explaining this to Kat Banyard, the campaign director for Lose the Lads’
Mags, it appears Israel and Palestine might have a better chance of peace talks. ‘I’ve debated with her several times but it goes in one ear and out the other,’ he says. ‘I’ve asked for solid proof that lads’ mags cause harm, but she can’t present it – because it doesn’t exist. Then again, they use the same lawyer who defends serial killer Ian Brady, which says it all.’
So what exactly is their motivation? What’s in it for them?
‘It’s all about money and control – of which there’s a wealth of both in censorship,’ adds Jerry Barnett.
The BBFC [which puts age certificates on films] was a voluntary body until 1984. Then, they created the moral panic around video nasties – and got statutory power to make selling videos without a BBFC rating illegal. Last year they turned over something like £6 million, so persuading the government to give you a monopoly is a nice little earner. They’re a business.
OBJECT are very good at creating one campaign after another, which is all designed to give the impression that things are getting worse. Why? Because there’s money in it. They already have several full-time employees, so it’s clearly not doing too badly. And don’t forget there are grants for groups who call themselves women’s human rights organisations.
When I submit a freedom of information request to OBJECT, asking for details of how much they get – if anything – in grants and how many paying members they have, they once again fail to respond. But, then again, they don’t really need to: on their site they encourage people to become paid members, stating: ‘Membership is one of our key sources of income and every member’s contribution makes a difference: just ten members can bring £600 of income per year, every year, meaning that we can continue to plan and run our groundbreaking campaigns in the future.’
Suddenly, it all becomes clear. These people won’t mind their own business because it
is
their business. Literally.
That said, this doesn’t mean similar arguments against page three, for example, aren’t sound – do we really need naked breasts in a national newspaper? The last time I checked, cleavage hadn’t affected the national debt or affected UN relations. It’s in the wrong context. But, at the same time, allowing men to autonomously enjoy lads’ mags is not a luxury to be grateful for. We do not need permission to consume something legal. Women do not own sex.
People forget this. They also forget that men enjoy these publications on a much wider spectrum of content alongside newspapers, biographies, sports pages, text books and style mags. Erotic pictures are also not the
only representation of women they’ll ever see. They will have real-time interactions with them in their families, workplaces and circle of friends, where I’m assuming the women don’t spend every hour on the point of orgasm in a sultry pose. Well, unless they know Helen Flanagan, of course.
This is because these men, like all men, have rounded lives, which is why it’s so utterly patronising to say they can’t appreciate adult content for what it is – something sexual, in a moment, to meet or enhance a need.
To our credit, most of us already know this – even if the messages we receive about it are, at best, contradictory and, at worst, unfair. See, whilst one side are trying to ban boobs, others are trying to liberate them. Across the Atlantic there’s a campaign called Free the Nipple, which – as the name suggests – is asking the world’s media to stop pixelating women’s breasts because, in doing so, they’re censoring them. This, they claim, keeps women in a perpetual loop of cultural repression. Cara Delevingne, Liv Tyler and Rumer Willis are already supporters.
To learn more I speak with Lina Esco, the 29-year-old rudder steering the movement from LA. She tells me it’s still illegal for a woman to be topless in thirty-seven US states – even if they’re breast-feeding – and, before I know it, we’re bonding over mammary glands. Bosom buddies, indeed. Who’d have thought it?
‘What America needs is a full blast of boobies everywhere until everybody just calms down,’ she jokes. ‘In Louisiana you can get three years in prison for getting them out – it’s insane, no?’
I agree, but – apparently – many others don’t. In particular, the response from women has been a mixed bag, she admits. ‘We’ve had some really great support and some real hate, but we’re trying to educate them. It’s like John Lennon said: don’t hate what you don’t understand.’
Sounds like something we can relate to. Then again, if she’s encouraging toplessness in cities around the world, doesn’t she worry about men constantly ‘perving’ on them when they’re shopping at Walmart or on the school run?
No, not at all – you can’t change the way men see boobs and we wouldn’t want to. If they view it as a sexual thing, great, that’s up to them. Naturally, just because boobs are out doesn’t mean they can be touched, but men already know this. In fact, men first fought for the right to go topless in the early 1900s, so we’re just following your lead.
‘Really?’ I say, surprised.
Yeah. It was illegal for men to be topless in the US for a long time. They had to wear one-piece suits constantly,
even in the summer. Thousands of them were getting arrested because they refused to comply. It wasn’t until 1934 when four men from Coney Island fought back with topless protests and changed the legislation, so actually you guys did it first.
See, I told you we were brilliant.
But what about all this fuss with our lads’ mags then?
Live and let live, that’s what I say. If men want something that turns them on and the models want to pose for them, that’s their choice – there’s no reason for anybody to shut them down. Women enjoy
Cosmopolitan
, men enjoy
FHM.
That’s the way we are. If people don’t like it, read something else – or start another magazine with a different approach, but don’t censor. We need to protect freedom of expression and freedom of press.
This is something British journalist Lulu Le Vay agrees with. She started out as deputy editor of fanzine
Sleazenation
in the mid-1990s, later becoming a music and lifestyle writer for
The Face, i-D, The Independent
and
The Observer.
She was also a militant feminist who loathed lads’ mags with a passion – that is, until she worked on one and wrote about the experience for major left-wing title the
New Statesman.
