I wrote an essay last term about sexuality and lads magazines and how they warp male and female sexuality, present women as objects, and present male sexuality as something that is the most important thing in the world. Apparently I will go and get the marks for last terms work tomorrow (fingers crossed, my first assignment as a women’s studies student, erk)!

So I thought I would actually post the essay here on my blog, because I think much of the points that I brought up are relevant. Although, I missed out much of the problems surrounding lads mags as my essay is a discussion of the problems arising from their ‘representations’ of men’s and women’s sexuality.

Ever the perfectionist, looking back on it now I feel that there is so much I could have added to it, but I had to keep chopping and changing in order to stick to the word limit. I had to buy – the horror! – four lads mags in order to find out what was REALLY going on in them, and it just made me even angrier. It was also quite depressing as I felt that the type of sexuality presented in these magazines are so narrowminded and have very little room for women to be sexually satisfied or to find their own personal sexuality that hasn’t got anything to do with what their partner expects from them (there were a lot of references to how to ‘get’ their wives or girlfriends to do something – from porn films or whatever). Something to consider for researchers in the future is to find out how these magazines actually influence men’s perception of sexuality and masculinity.

It was quite a bizarre experience to read the magazines and see all these pictures of naked/half naked models all throughout the magazine. There were NO dressed women. There were many pictures of dressed men. I found this staggering because although I knew what to expect, it is still very difficult to actually see this in front of you. After a while of going through the magazines and trying to analyse them, I started to sort of become “immune” to the images, if that makes any sense? It became almost a normal thing to see women in submissive or sexual poses wearing next to nothing. I wonder what this does to someone if they are consuming these images everyday and come to see it as ‘normal’. Do lads mags and porn make men think its normal that women pose like that, look like that (airbrushed, quite skinny or extreme curviness with no ounce of fat) or should be like that (always sexually ‘up for it’).

The sexuality in the magazines was so underdeveloped, involved very little respect and lots of words like ’shagging’, ‘getting a bit’ and so on. Do these concepts carry on into relationships? Do young men really think that they have to ‘do’ things to their girlfriends rather than having a mutual experience?

The link to my essay is here if you want to read it: be warned, some of the language may be triggering as I have included quotes from the magazines.