Arena - Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem

What was it like in the politically incorrect 90s, daddy?

I remember the 90s! Whew, what a time! When everyone was drunk all day and out all night! When lads were real lads who knew that too much is not enough, and girls were real girls who were a good laugh and didn't take the hump at silly little things - blimey, it's a compliment love! Good times, good times.

Oh no, wait, that's not what it was like. As this entertaining documentary shows, a few immature idiots lucked into the fact that behaving like clowns and writing about it would sell magazines and newspapers, and so the amoral money men funded them. They legitimised loutishness and tried to sell a lifestyle, but it was fundamentally a lie. And if you take "lie" out of "lifestyle" then you're left with "festyl" which sounds a bit like "fester". Which is what the ideas they promoted did to our culture. Yeah, that's right. Cower before my scathing rhetoric.

It's odd how some moments in social history - like the swinging 60s - are used as shorthand for some big cultural reset when it's obvious that despite being widely reported, they are not widely experienced. As Dominic Sandbrook points out in White Heat, his masterful account of the 60s, the majority of people then were too busy trying to get on with their lives to indulge in whatever modern silliness was going on amongst a few over-privileged boys and girls.

And so it is with the new lad era of the mid-90s; I was there, I was exactly the right age and target market, and I duly bought a couple of issues of Loaded (and FHM and Maxim iirc), but even at the time, it was clear that they were hyping up something that was restricted to a relatively small number of people.

What actually happens - in my entirely unqualified opinion - is that these kind of ideas seep gradually into the social consciousness. Despite the tabloids' hypocritical shock horror headlines, they're not actually revealing widespread moral corruption but, ironically, they are normalising behaviours for the future. So did Loaded contribute to the lad culture or just highlight it? Well, both, kind of, in the end. So if it's a bit unfair to blame the writers for subsequent sexism in the media then we also can't excuse them for it either. James Brown, in particular, sounds fed up of being asked about it, because in his mind, that wasn't the main feature of the magazine. But it was present regardless and as Miranda Sawyer points out, it was quite obviously sexist at the time. Trying to excuse it as "of an era" like it was the 16th century or something ("I'm nearly 60," he whines at one point) is disingenuous, at the very least.

Watching this was nostalgic for me and it was nice in a way to be taken back to the days of my twenties, but it can't quite decide whether it's just documenting what happened or exposing the dark underside of the lads' mags. As a result I felt like it kind of fudged any point it was trying to make. But perhaps the producers just wanted us to make our own minds up.