Lad mag

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Lad mag was a term principally used in the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s to describe a then-popular type of lifestyle magazine for younger, heterosexual men, focusing on, "Sex, sport, gadgets and grooming tips."[1] The lad mag was a component of lad culture which gained a profile (and circulation) in this period; previously, lifestyle magazines had been almost entirely bought by women. The decline of the lad mag in the late 1990s/early 2000s was equally sudden and is generally associated with the rise of the internet which provided much of the same content, particularly pornography, for free.[2][3]

Emergence of Lad mags[]

Through the 1980s efforts were made to create a market for lifestyle magazines for younger men, without success: magazines such as Cosmo Man and The Hit were short lived failures.[4] In 1994, linked to the wider development of lad culture, two new magazines found a formula that worked: IPC's Loaded and EMAP Metro's FHM. Both magazines were selling hundreds of thousands of copies shortly after launch/relaunch.[4]

The Lad mag was at the time seen as distinct from magazines targeted at "new men." Contrasting the two gender constructs, Tim Edwards, a sociologist at the University of Leicester, describes the new man as pro-feminist, albeit narcissistic, and the new lad as pre-feminist, and a reaction to second-wave feminism.[5][6] The new man image failed to appeal to a wide readership whereas the more adolescent Lad culture appeals more to the ordinary man, says Edwards.[5] Edwards also points out that lad culture men's magazines of the 21st century contain little that is actually new. Referring to a study of the history of Esquire magazine, he observed that there is little substantially different between the new man Arena and GQ and the new lad Loaded. Both address assumed men's interests of cars, alcohol, sport, and women, and differ largely in that the latter have a more visual style. From this he infers that "the New Man and the New Lad are niches in the market more than anything else, often defined according to an array of lifestyle accessories", and concludes that the new lad image dominates the new man image simply because of its greater success at garnering advertising revenue for men's magazines.

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ "Sex doesn't sell as lads mags suffer". BBC News. 16 August 1999. Retrieved 19 December 2021.
  2. ^ Hand, Dinah (2013). Design for media : a handbook for students and professionals in journalism, PR, and advertising. Harlow: Pearson. p. 8. ISBN 978-1-317-86402-8 – via Google Books.
  3. ^ Nazaryan, Alexander (9 July 2013). "Nobody Wants to Buy Maxim: How the Lad Mags Met Their End". The Wire. Retrieved 19 December 2021 – via The Atlantic.
  4. ^ a b Growse, Nick (15 November 2012). "The Reluctant Patriarch: The Emergence of Lads and Lad Mags in the 1990s". InMedia. OpenEdition (2). doi:10.4000/inmedia.428.
  5. ^ a b Edwards, Tim (2006). Cultures of Masculinity. Routledge. pp. 39–42. ISBN 0-415-28480-5.
  6. ^ Pamela Abbott; Claire Wallace; Melissa Tyler. An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives.
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