Get Some Nuts

After reading this article and its spectacularly po-faced wankfest of comments (have a scroll through them when you’ve got a minute – you’ll think you’re reading a vicious parody of all things Guardianesque) I found myself musing on the pros and cons of lads’ mags.

Now, I really can’t get that bothered about lad’s mags. For a start, I read and enjoy a couple of primarily male-oriented titles myself. From my last post, you already know about my Bizarre habit, and I’ve got an even more embarrassing fondness for Viz - a magazine that has more genuine wit in its scruffy little finger than Private Eye has in its whole pompously waddling Paul Smith-clad body.

And when I once came across a copy of Zoo – or it may have been Nuts - on the train, I read it with some curiosity. And I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. From where I was sitting, the genuine venom, sadism, bitterness, hatred and all-round misogynistic creepiness that characterise sundry MRA sites of this world were quite notable by their absence in this chirpy little magazine.

In its general attitude to sex and women – breathtakingly crass, shamelessly shallow, a bit naïve, fundamentally harmless – the magazine in question reminded me of nothing so much as the Inbetweeners. And I like the Inbetweeners.

Admittedly, its readers and writers clearly aren’t particularly interested in their models’ three-dimensional humanity. And it would be nice if their admiration for Juicy Jeni’s physical charms could be matched with a mature and considered respect for her as an individual and autonomous human being worthy of respect and equality.

But for fuck’s sake. We’re talking about lads here. Lads’ Mags. The clue’s in the name.

You don’t need to be some sort of marketing genius to realise that a lad’s mag that launched with a cover image of a fully dressed Zadie Smith, its brash cover come-on lines promising more explicit fare within (Gender Equality! Sexual Respect! Non Intimidating Aesthetic Appreciation Of Our Social and Intellectual Equals!) would have the life expectancy of a cheese and pickle sandwich.

And I actually liked the page of sick jokes about paedos, and the photos of five-legged mutant lambs, and the stories about guys who’ve had their dicks chopped off by vengeful yazuka. What can I say? I’m young at heart. About eight.

Naked women aside, it was a considerably better read than the blandly vapid, neutered crap us girls are stuck with – the Cosmos and Glamours of this world are just as stupid and shallow as any lad’s mag in the world, without the entertainment value. All the glossy women’s mags on the market resound with the ruthlessly upbeat and formulaic joylessness of an American self-help bestseller – and, like the Godawful Sex and the City, play right into the hands of men who claim women are stupid shallow bitches with no sense of humour.

It reminds me of a time when an ex of mine said women just weren’t funny and female stand ups were crap.

My immediate impulse was to argue furiously, but then I started thinking and fell silent.

There’s Victoria Wood, who I find as amusing as 9/11. Jenny Eclair, who I find less amusing than 9/11. Shazia Mirza, by comparison to whom, 9/11 was a work of comic genius.

After about five minutes of increasingly alarmed searching through the pockets of my mind, the absolute best I could come up with was Jo Brand.

And credit where due, Jo Brand’s a funny woman and I think she’s great.

But expecting her to single-handedly take on the advancing hordes of Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Bill Hicks, Jerry Sadovitz, Bill Bailey, Peter Kay, Russell Brand, Ricky Gervais, Michael McIntyre et alia is, I feel, asking a little too much of the lady.

Fuck it, when the misogynists are right, they’re right.

Yet I found the fabled misogyny of lad’s mags to be elusive to the point of nonexistence. I was even un-bothered by the notorious Danny Dyer advice column, which caused a firestorm of controversy at the time – as he advised a heartbroken male reader to get over his traumatic break-up by cutting his ex-girlfriend’s face ‘so no one else will want her.’

Now, I didn’t read it in context, and his remarks were certainly unpleasant, sick and tasteless to say the least. Yet every time I came across another Daily Mail columnist calling for Dyer’s head on a stick, I wanted to bash my own head against the wall.

JESUS CHRIST YOU NIT, IT WASN’T MEANT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

From everything I’ve read, it sounds like Danny Dyer’s advice column might as well have been entitled ASK A FAKE COCKNEY HARDMAN. Where a complaint about your unreasonable boss might be answered by advice to invite said boss for a pint at the Blind Beggar, then shoot him through the head and get some of the lads to bury him under a motorway flyover.

Anyone who’s going to slash their ex-girlfriend’s face up because they read it in an obviously-fake advice column was a very serious danger to society in the first place - and a disaster waiting to happen from the day they were born.

Luckily., such a person would likely already be serving life for sticking a coffee table up their mother’s arse, following some confusion helping a friend move into a new flat.

‘Well, I asked Darren where he wanted me to put it. I didn’t know he was joking, did I?‘

As for the ‘think of the children’ criticism of lads’ mags - whereby the fairy-like innocence of childhood will be irreversibly corrupted by glimpsing half-naked ladies on the lower shelves of WH Smith – I hate to break it to you, but you’re shutting the stable door after the horse has run off, lived a long happy life, dropped dead of old age and been sold for glue.

Putting paper bags over the copies of Nuts and Zoo on the shelves, so the kids won’t see them?

Well, it’s a start.

Now, all you need to do is get a really big paper bag and stick it over that giant billboard for Spearmint Rhino you drive them past on the way to school every morning. The one with the half-naked blonde, cleavage exploding from a school uniform white shirt, suggestively licking a lollipop alongside the headline NAUGHTY GIRLS.

And more paper bags over the suggestively-writhing female dancers on telly that you see every Saturday night hours before the watershed, and which are a regular feature of every family-entertainment show from Strictly to the X Factor.

And a paper bag over the TV when the incredibly explicit pop song that’s been number one for three weeks comes on. And one over the radio. And one over the sound system broadcasting the same song across the shopping mall on Saturday afternoon.

And paper bags over those girls in the playground, who’ve copied all the song’s sexual-as-a-porn-movie dance moves off the video, learned them off by heart, and are practicing them over and over again at lunchtime (when I was a little kid, the dance we all learned was from the video of Touch Me (I Want Your Body) by Sam Fox. Ah, those innocent Eighties.)

And then you can put a paper bag over your kid’s mate. The one whose folks have yet to master the arcane mysteries of Net Nanny, and in whose bedroom your little angel and his pals can stare wide eyed at pop-ups promising everything from Donkey Fuckers to Piss Drinking Whores.

To paraphrase Jaws, we’re going to need a bigger bag.

As far as I can see, the only possible way of protecting your kids from this kind of thing is to raise them on a remote desert island with no other children, no other adults and no warm-blooded mammals who might start shagging in front of your rug rat and make them ask awkward questions.

Even then, they’d probably go on your single-link-to-the-outside-world computer while you were off fishing for the evening meal, and be looking at hentai porn five minutes later.

Plain fact. By the time they hit six, your kids are going to see a shitload of sexually explicit material whether you want them to or not. Don’t like it, don’t have ‘em.

Anyway, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get particularly hot under the collar about lad’s mags. I can think of a fair few mass-market titles far more in need of culling than Nuts and Zoo. Personally, if I could wipe any single magazine off the face of the earth, it would be Tatler - that expensively produced and highly effective recruitment brochure for Al Qaeda. Hell, it makes me want to go to some Pakistan-based boot camp and emerge as a fully fledged suicide bomber with a pilot’s licence - if only in the hope that the building I fly the plane into might contain their April cover girl, It-girl-turned-model-turned-fashion designer Lady Araminta Titwank.

And if I’m really lucky, maybe I’ll also manage to bag that world-class cockwomble on page 32, who’s snootily droning on about the importance of buying a £40K watch in the middle of a fucking recession.

Compared to this sort of thing, lads’ mags are comparatively harmless.

Nuts to the haters.

J x