In the name of science, I ventured this week into the nether regions of the Students’ Union Shop’s magazine racks. Could I make some good rationalist sense out of men’s rags? Though I’ll admit to getting in a good chuckle at one or two choice rips on Russell Crowe in my research, the whole exercise made me feel, in addition to all-round uncomfortable, a bit empty-headed. These magazines seem to regard their readership as a mass of uncritical consumptive drones with an insatiable appetite for breasts, beer and buying things. Disappointingly, the heady fulminating of an FHM-waving public at last week’s UGM did little to discredit this.
For those not in the know, the hoopla came in response to a proposed boycott to two infamous “lads’ mags”, The Sun and FHM, in the Students’ Union Shop. The motion was brought forth on the grounds, among others, that “any industry that promotes such an objectification of women inevitably has an impact on the sexist attitudes which underpin violence and sexual abuse and as such cannot be said to be “harmless fun”.
Indeed, everybody seemed to be talking past each other, taking aim with catcalls, projectiles and careless claims on “rights” instead. The sale of controversial items in a student-subsidized establishment is a salient topic, one that merits further elaboration and discussion. To make sure we are all on the same page, we’ll talk about it in terms of economics – a vernacular we assumedly all speak at the London School of it.
The over-the-top nastiness of men’s magazines has something of the economic in it – this is a textbook tale of market competition. The advent of the lads’ weekly in 2004 had a deep impact on men’s mags: theretofore, but a few had cornered the market for bar room jokes, vinegary advice and dallying interviews with models. They could be divided into two categories: the more popinjay – with the slick, aspirational Esquire, GQ and Arena as exemplars – and the more brusque, like the swashbuckling, oversexed FHM.
Then enter the weeklies. Titles like Nuts and Zoo, with their shorter production cycles, could pump out the bad puns, pushes for gadgets, and celeb gossip glazed with “bro-vetousness” at a breakneck pace. The women, though, were their selling point. These were not the digitally-enhanced Hollywood it-girls like the ones demanding hefty sums of Esquire for their images; they were rather the Page 3 set, reality show alumni, even female readers posing as raunchily as was permitted.
The massive commercial success of the ultra-lewd lads’ mag saw the relatively more demure monthlies strike back. For one thing, they jacked up their own X-chromosome counts, some similarly recruiting ‘real’ women to appear on their pages. For another, a crass irony became common currency within the industry. Beginning with the low-brow Loaded, it reverberated up to the upmarket titles: even Arena has gimmicked with a pack of nudie playing cards. Borrowing from and reinventing these magazines’ visual and verbal economies, “boy’s mags” converged on low-cost production and laddish irony.
I perused a selection of men’s magazines in order to formulate a Unified Theory of Consumption as per men’s mags. I here present my model. As far as I can glean, within this economy there are three goods: beer, gadgets, and girls. All can be bought and sold on the open market – including women. The FHM article “How much are you paying for sex?”, for instance, invites the reader to calculate their ‘pay-per-lay’ – for a given courtship, his total expenses in terms of tickets, treats, vodka coolers, are divided by number of sexual encounters. Less than five pounds per is “too cheap – she’s about the same price as a Cambodian whore”; while from £11 to £20 is “about the going rate of a Cypriot tart … each shag now needs to be a better purchase than a new CD.” For more than that, supposedly, a man should reasonably expect the kind of acrobatics betokened by the Beijing Opera.
So a woman is price inelastic in that one’s preference for her actually increases as a direct function of her price instead of decreasing as stated by the law of demand. One can get an “upgrade girlfriend”, according to FHM’s similarly-titled monthly feature, as if she were an iPhone application or an operating system. Girls and beer are independent goods, whilst she is substitutable with gadgets for the purposes of diversion. Can’t afford a contortionist? Get yourself a post-apocalyptic shooting game for PS3 to while away those solitary Saturday evenings. Or maybe that “new CD” – I’d suggest a collection of Barry Manilow’s weepy ballads to listen to as you cry comfortlessly night after night into your Budweiser.
The proof is in the cellophane packaging – these publications look at women as objects, as pneumatic jolly-dolls up for purchase. Not just the burnished and buffed models plucked from the red carpet for remunerative photo shoots, but also the women who send in their snapshots for nothing. At last week’s UGM, it was said their defense that the the images in men’s mags represent “a fantasy” and that men know that women in reality “don’t look like that”. The truth is, they do, and increasingly so; that’s one thing that makes this so discomfiting. “Lads’ mags” have become skilled in transmitting the message that real women are to be compared to the “fantasy” and found lacking. That is not to say, of course, that it is any more acceptable to denigrate an airbrushed woman that it is one whose image appears naturally bespeckled and asymmetrical.
These magazines unquestionably objectify women and insult indiscriminately, and consciously so. It is “all in good fun”, we are told, and to object to that is to self-style a humourless fun-hating miser. Whatever economic imperatives, stale platitudes, or psychoanalytic antecedents one might whip out to rationalize it are not really all that important. What is important is that, whether you think these publications are hilarious or repugnant, we are paying for them to appear on campus. Issues like this are a testament to how important it is to productively engage the powers-that-be at LSE. Because caveat emptor – you get what you pay for.
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