TESCO AND THE LADS’ MAGS

There’s currently a lot of foodie fuss about harmful additives which could be doing us far more damage than we guess, when we do the weekly shop. Yet there’s another addition to supermarket shopping which some people think just as bad as the nasty loud colourings which spice up certain foods. So two cheers to Tesco for deciding to move the so-called ‘lad’ magazines to where their lurid covers can’t so easily be seen  by children. There are  many women who’d have given three cheers if  Tesco  had chucked them out altogether - on the grounds that Nuts  and Zoo and the rest are as cheap and common as turkey twizzlers and just as good for you.

Far be it from me to begrudge that spotty youth his sad little taste-thrills. After all, he can’t be doing any harm noshing on nuggets of Abi Titmuss, can he? If his idea of a balanced diet is Loaded  in one hand and Ice  in the other, then it’s only his own pitiful quota of brain cells he is diminishing. To look at the covers of FHM  and Front  is to know that for certain young men there is little difference between the

consumption of burgers and boobs, although the more discerning gourmets vary the menu with a ‘bum bonanza’.  But when seeing this stuff near the fresh fruit and veg is enough to give a normal woman indigestion -  well, we just have to put up with it. 

The other day I was in the buffet at Bath station, waiting for my coffee, when I glanced to my right at the row of so-called lad magazines. There it all was, next to the danish pastries - the ancient obsession with tits and bums. I said to the lady serving me, ‘Aren’t men weird?’  Instead of asking why, she just followed my gaze and said, ‘Tell me about it! You see them, even well-dressed and in their thirties, buying that stuff without the slightest embarrassment.’ ‘But why is it we  don’t need it? I asked - but as she shrugged, my train arrived so I’ll never know if she had an answer.

What was left hanging in the air was - why are men so infantile? I bought a selection of these magazines, to see if I could find out. Sitting down at my kitchen table to read through Nuts, Zoo, FHM, Front, Maxim and Ice was an experience of terrible  tedium, but I can’t honestly say the magazines shocked me. No - because I have seen real, vile pornography, and these do not come close. Zoo has five provocative girls on the cover, Nuts nods at lesbianism,  and Front...oh, must I go on?  Knowing what young children can access easily and freely on the Internet worries me far more that what I see in these maagzines, because after all, no little boy is going to fork out £3.30 for Maxim.

When I tell you that the free gift with Front  is a Whoopee cushion (yes, really!) you will start to get the picture - this is schoolboy smut and silliness (leavened by football and fashion) for guys grownup enough have the vote.  You couldn’t begin to count the number of semi-naked girls ( I started, but honestly, life is too short)  because there are pages and pages - with some of the pictures sent in by the girls themslves: narcissistic amateurs who get a kick from showing themselves off to strangers. Well, nobody forces them to do that, just as nobody forces the models...and so, although these magazines are stupid, crude, pathetic, repetitive, ignorant, immature, tacky and vulgar, they are not worth genuine indignation. They just made me rather depressed.

Still, one must ask why is it that a twenty-something male who’s had a decent education has still not evolved beyond his helpless breast fixation, and that even older men i can be reduced to jelly babies by the promise of ‘Readers’ girlfriends - in thongs!’  The proliferation of the lad mags is in reponse (we must assume) to a need where the lowest common denominator reigns supreme. Of course young women nudge each other and mimic their boyfriends on the ‘Phwoar’ front when they see a good looking guy walk by - since admiring the opposite sex is one oft he things that makes the world go round. But surely women are don’t have the same obsession?

The mystery is ancient. The earliest representations of the human form, dating back 20,000 years ago, are crude but powerful statuettes of females with enormous breasts, bellies and buttocks. These were potent symbols of fertility, since sex and the reproductive process went together to guarantee the survival of the tribe, the species. Ancient belief all around the world worshipped the great Goddess in many forms, and she of the fertile heaviness looked like she had men for breakfast - the eternal queen of the hive who would make the wee lads run screaming for their mummies. This is what those little statues represented: female power.  Make no mistake, humanity’s first image of life was of the mother. It’s a thought I want to return to.

Nobody could call those representations erotic, although I suppose that depends who you are. But of course, the history of art is littered with representations of the naked form, male as well as female - although it is true to say that nude women outnumber naked men in painting and photography from the Renaissance until now. The historian of photography Jorge Lewinski writes, ‘The main reason for this is the very special position women occupied, and ...still occupy in our society. The story starts in Genesis, when the unfortunate pair, after a breakfast of forbidden fruit, are ousted from paradise... Henceforth woman was given the role of chattel, provider of descendants, a source if desire and pleasure for a man but not allowed an individual role for herself.’ So there was a message in the medium of art. The people with money and power to commission were usually men, and men (unless gay) like looking at naked women. The 18th century versions of Nuts  and Zoo  probably went down a storm in the coffee houses. But under the counter of course.

Which brings me back to Tesco, and Britain’s most successful supermarket’s decision to reduce its display space for raunchy magazines, cramming them in to higher shelves so that only the mastheads (titles) are visible and not the titillating covers. In Bath W.H.Smith yesterday the titles were displayed at waist height, but from next week Tesco will make sure they are not in the sight line of children. And why? ‘A group of our customers is shocked by the front covers of these magazines’ said the senior buying manager of this ’family-based’ chain. He added that some customers thought them ‘outrageous and pornographic’ and wanted them to cease being stocked at all. My own response, on the basis of buying the mags, is that Tesco is right.  Tacky as the magazines are, I wouldn’t ask for a total ban. Still, at its core the attititude towards women expressed in all those glossy pages is pretty nasty. What they call ‘harmless fun’ is never quite without its dangers.

I can hear the superannunated schoolboys who edit the offending magazines falling off their desks with laughter at this point,  before cracking open cans of the finest lager to toast the rest of us - prudish women pushing trollies, killjoy crones with crying kids in tow, envious losers who’ve forgotten what it is like to be lusted over. Any suggestion that we might just have a point is greeted with howls of derision (mocking what they dismiss as ‘moral outrage) or indignation (crying freedom of sexpression).

But there is a serious question here. Would they freely show their wares to a six year old kid brother or son?  Or a ten year old? Because on the open shelves of a supermarket they can be seen, will certainly be looked at, by children coming shopping with their parents, and there is actually no choice about that, since a magazine shelf cannot be switched off. And what effect does the exposure to pictures of women shown as mere objects with breasts and buttocks have on very young boys? We are all too aware that in this country’s primary  schools the explicit language used by young children shocks teachers, and I once witnessed two boys of about ten taunting a frightened-looking younger girl in the street, ‘You’ve got no tits’.

Equally, when eight year old girls see women bending over provocatively, touching each other in mock-lesbian display, offering themselves (in effect) for consumption like so many plump chickens - then what conclusions do they draw about their own function in life, when they reach the age of the models? I suggest that it adds to the burden of their conditioning, when they value themselves according to how well they conform to stereotypical images of sexinesss. And let nobody try to tell me there is no evidence that the visual image has such power - because why else does the multi-million pound advertising industry exist?  Our culture is hot-wired for sex, which has even permeated the supermarket shelves where it has no place.

The first universal images which awed men were of the Earth Mother, yet the images which fill the pages of ‘Nuts’ and ‘Zoo’ are far removed from reverence. On the contrary. Inviting readers to send photographs of their girlfriends wearing thongs is one step towards the truly gross, gynaecological shots of ‘Readers’ Wives’ which are a staple of the flesh magazines which have made Mr Richard Desmond’s fortune.  Although you may think the men are the fools for still dragging their knuckles on the ground and buying this unreconstructed smut, it is still women who are put on display. At the same time, the girls who write in with the most explicit accounts of their sex lives make themselves ripe for exploitation.  It occurs to me that Nuts and Zoo sum up so much of our culture - where promiscuity and drunkenness has made young Brits the shame of the world.  For all the vaunted ‘fun’ of the laddish magazines, they have at their core an attitude towards the opposite sex - their mothers and sisters, let us not forget - which is totally demeaning. It reduces relationships to ‘pulling’ and life to beer and bonking, and this says very little for the evolution of mankind.