Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously disreputable titles. I helped dream up the captions, the gags, the gonzo reportage, the phwoar-heavy covers.
I also remember how they were reviled. Condemned by broadsheets, feminists, academics. Accused of objectifying girls, toxifying masculinity and encouraging men to enjoy cold lager, bare breasts and football gossip.
Yet here’s the thing. When I contrast the world of lads’ mags with today’s bleak digital landscape, of AI smut and OnlyFans subscriptions, of performers mechanically coupling with a thousand men, cheered on by Insta-bots, the old magazines, even if sometimes crude or clumsy, seem almost noble. Paragons of playfulness and wit. Of joyful, communal, slightly sozzled eroticism.
They were printed on paper, for one thing. You had to buy them, take them to a till, perhaps even smuggle them past a disapproving girlfriend. Then you’d read them on the bus or in the pub, or pass them round your mates, chuckling over absurd sex-advice columns – especially Grub Smith’s ‘Laboratory of Love’.
And they were funny. In the early years, before the suits turned everything into clickbait, we made sure we amused. We borrowed from Private Eye, from Viz, from Monty Python. The best mags also had proper journalists doing proper journalism: gun-runners in Guangdong, acid casualties in Ibiza. Put it another way – the lads’ mags had a kind of courage, even an intellectual curiosity. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they got you to invent a ridiculous phrase that would last forever. Or at least they did for me.
It was the late 1990s and FHM was peaking.
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