ninme

Here’s an old column of Janice Turner’s, which she’s linked to again in her Twitter feed today:

Guardian – Dirty young men
Pornographic poses, the going rate for sex, jokes about ’stupid tarts’: the misogyny of the new breed of lads’ mags is breathtaking. So why do the editors swear to Janice Turner that it’s all just harmless fun? And is this the kind of life they lead themselves?

First, a hideousness inequality:

But the weeklies appeal to very young men. The average age of a Nuts reader, for example, may be 24, but many are far below that. At only £1.20, and regularly discounted to 60p, the weeklies are easily within the reach of teenage boys. Indeed, Mike Soutar, editorial director of IPC, says his own 14-year-old son loves Nuts: “He gets tons out of it.”

Strict guidelines govern the sexual content of all girls’ titles that have 25% of their readers under the age of 16: under-age intercourse is heavily discouraged and every mention of sex comes with joyless advice about STDs and abortion. The Teenage Magazine Advisory Panel was set up to enforce this code. No such rules apply to boys’ magazines, and while weekly men’s magazine publishers would deny that their titles are aimed at young teens, young teens undeniably buy them.

So boys are taught to objectify women, making the girls not only sacrifice their dignity but also their self-respect. That’s gotta be great for a girl’s psychological health. They’re taught that it’s bad but learn that they have to do it anyway. And of course the worse lesson is being taught to the stronger sex. Really wonderful.

This next one is a quote in two paragraphs, which I’m just going to present to you in opposite order:

Naked women, he claims, are simply a means of attracting men to the magazine’s broader content – football, facts and statistics, gadgets, and the gags, of which he is most proud.

Naked women are simply a means of attracting men to football stats. Gotcha.

‘What I find offensive,’ Merrill says, ‘is racism or homophobia or extreme rightwing views. There is more that’s offensive in the Spectator than in Zoo.’

Gotcha.

A similar theme is touched on in Mark Steyn’s column about Anne Coulter’s visit to Canada (I hate to put Janice in the same post as a Mark Steyn/Anne Coulter tie in, really I do):

[M]ost of the diversity-peddling faculty are old enough to have some residual acquaintanceship with the inheritance they affect to revile. Whatever bollocks they spout in class, they have no wish to live anywhere other than an advanced Western society: for one thing, it’s the only place you can make a living selling fatuous pap about diversity; in that and many other ways, multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon. In some deep unacknowledged sense, they understand they’re engaged in a pantomime.

But their students are another matter. If you’re born circa 1990, you have been raised entirely in a François Houle world: this is all you know; it’s the air that you breathe. It’s like the difference between the first generation of rock ’n’ rollers and those nineties gangsta rappers. Elvis sang, “If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right place / If you’re looking for trouble, look right in my face.” But when you did, as the novelist Tony Parsons noted, you couldn’t help noticing he was wearing a little too much mascara. Whereas when you looked into Snoop Dogg’s or the Notorious B.I.G.’s face, you really were looking for trouble. Asinine ham-fisted clods like Houle are play revolutionaries; I’m not so sure about his young charges. When he threatened criminal charges against Miss Coulter, it was a cheap rhetorical sneer. To his students, it was a call to arms.

Sad.