Thank Goodness. Finally.
Over at Radar, they’ve charted the decline of lad mags from their late nineties heyday to their present day online-only incarnations. I say good riddance to bad rubbish. It wasn’t that I never glanced at my roommates’ lowest-common denominator FHM, Stuff, or Maxim magazines. I did. It’s that the men’s magazines I did buy and enjoy, and that spoke to my version of masculinity, such as Toro Magazine, GQ, and Esquire, so enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon of filling pages with tits-and-ass, and articles written at a grade-seven reading level (and with about as much depth).
I’d like to think that their demise of lad mags isn’t just the internet’s fault. Or a victory for feminism. Or a result of Girls Gone Wild raising the stakes in sleazy content. Or even just a change in demographics from lads to dads, as the article’s author suggests. I’d like to believe that it’s the result of a societal rethinking of masculinity. That we’re shifting to a culture in which men can read, think, and appreciate beauty with a bit of class and without demeaning the female subject of a magazine profile. I’d like to believe that, but I know better.
3 years ago