No to ‘modesty bags’ for lads’ mags

Submitted by Mastodon on Thu, 2013-08-01 01:29

Article here. Excerpt:

It’s more than a little confusing. One minute feminists are taking to the streets in their hundreds, on so-called slutwalks, to defend their right to be scantily clad. The next they are insisting that lads’ mags’ covers, featuring, er, scantily clad women, should be covered up in pre-sealed ‘modesty bags’ when sold in supermarkets.

Predictably, the first supermarket to cave in to the anti-lads’ mags campaign has been the holier-than-thou Co-op, which yesterday declared that titles such as Zoo and FHM had six weeks to start concealing their products in burqa-style black plastic. In the meantime, the Co-op has already put these ‘lewd’ magazines in hard-to-reach positions, and concealed them with opaque shelving.

But surely this is a violation of press freedom, an attempt to dictate the content of particular publications? ‘Think of the children’, feminists respond. Apparently, the nation’s young are being damaged by the presence of lads’ mags ‘next to the sweets at children’s eye-level’.

Yet, as the Telegraph’s Toby Young has pointed out, even the UK government’s official report into the ‘sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood’, published in 2011, found little evidence of lads’ mags harming children (although it did recommend bagging-up the mags anyway, on the spurious grounds that ‘insufficient evidence to prove conclusively there is harm to children does not mean that no harm exists’).'

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Comments

Really, the bags aren't such a bad thing in and of themselves-- provided the standard is implemented uniformly for all magazines and both genders. If scantily-clad women (or men) represent a bad thing for kids to see, then every magazine with scantily-clad ppl on the cover ought to be "modesty-bagged".

But they're not. Just the "lads' mags". Therein lies the problem.

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2013-08-01 02:55

Why is the focus purely on (female) nudity. There are plenty of sexually explicit front covers of women's magazines where there is no nudity, but there is plenty of sexually graphic content that is alluded to inside. References to "sex position of the month or "top10 tips to a better orgasm" may not be pornographic in the traditional sense, but are still enough to make some people feel uncomfortable all the same. And what about children? If a young child sees the "top 10 orgasm positions" cover on Cosmo and asks their parent that can be deeply embarrassing too. If this is about protecting children's innocence and general modesty why stop at nudity on front covers...

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Submitted by sirprince on Thu, 2013-08-01 11:02

Feminists are always curiously silent when the knife cuts the other way. But this isn't news.

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2013-08-01 16:53