THEY spit, shag (blondes, naturally), drink `til they fall over (lager, naturally), have fistfights in public and keep telling us about how they f.... ing hate each other. Of course they do. Because, as Liam explained in that lovably puerile way of his "What people have got to understand is that we're lads". You know, lads - beer-guzzling, babe-ogling, ballgame-loving yobbos.
Oasis's Gallagher brothers are not just two more men behaving sadly, but the living embodiment of their generation's obsession with masculinity run amok. Liam and Noel play frontmen for the boorish, sexist and loud-mouthed and they just revel in the role.
There's nothing new in all this of course? though 1990s lad likes to think there is. He may look, behave, sound and smell much like his father and grandfather before him but he insists he's not the same. Oh no. You mustn't think that. He's not really a lad, he's a new lad, see.
The difference is, he knows the difference. "For Men Who Should Know Better" declares the masthead of the new-lads' bible, Loaded magazine. This noxious concoction of beer, birds and brainlessness is the British publishing phenomenon of recent years. It sells more than 300,000 copies a month. with circulation still rising, and is the top-selling men's magazine in Ireland. It has spawned a rash of competitors, and its brash attitude has permeated all corners of male magazines, newspapers (tabloid and broadsheet) and TV programming. This sad creation has been the predominant influence in cultural representations of masculinity in recent years.
If you're sickened by its get-yer-tits-out-but-not-while-the-football's-on approach to life, those lovable lads have you sorted. You are obviously a humourless harridan stuck in a politically-correct time warp and you need to lighten-up and come into the 1990s.
This is the defence pleaded by In Dublin's editor John Ryan, who admits to having made a conscious decision to bring his listings magazine "a bit down the Loaded road". On the front cover of the current issue is Victoria Silvstedt, known to the hormonally charged hacks of In Dublin as Playmate Victoria, since she was flown into Dublin last month to jolly along the celebrations of Playboy's first anniversary in Ireland. The coverline scrawled across Ms Silvstedt's breasts reads: "I've got big things ahead of me
Inside, as well as a mock interview with a pseudonymous Eileen Rashers, "the world's first proto-pre-post-feminist", there's a mock quote from Silvstedt on the Whitbread Book Prize. A babe like Victoria with an opinion on a literature prize, that's a good one, eh? So good they cracked it twice. On page 39, Pat O'Mahony rejoices that the "December `96 playmate and a rose among tulips was on, ahem, hand to deliver her stunning rebuttal to Einstein's theory of relativity".
Despite the blatant blokiness of his magazine, John Ryan rejects the lads label. "We're not lads," he says, "we're chaps. That means that among the beer cans you'll find an occasional bottle of chianti and we don't just watch United, we'll also take in an Italian game. We're more knowing than Loaded, more subtle.
"To say that what we've done with this issue is demeaning to women is to take a very old-fashioned line. Victoria's got a real siren's look on her face, a saucy knowingness. The whole thing is meant to be funny. We faxed a copy to Playboy and they thought it was hilarious. It's heavily ironic."
Ah yes, irony - the intellectual escape clause for those who don't want to be called to account. Take a boorish, sexist stance, show that you know it's boorish and sexist and - voila! - you're not a Neanderthal, you're one hip dude. That's how Loaded strives to get away with it, too. For Men Who Should Know Better - we know we're being sad geezers so we're not really sad geezers at all. Don't you geddit?
"This distancing himself from responsibility for what he's saying is the defining quality of laddishness," says Harry Ferguson, senior lecturer in social studies at University College Cork. "It's very clever and its cleverness and playfulness makes it attractive, as does the way it taps into male. fantasies. I don't think all young men fall for this constructed fantasy, but without doubt lad culture has become the collective form of masculinity which twentysomething men now play out in the public arena.
Lads generally come in pairs. Liam and Noel. Baddeil and Skinner. Beavis and Butthead. Gary and Tony in Men Behaving Badly. Carrey and Daniels in Dumb And Dumber. That's because laddism celebrates a form of male solidarity that excludes the female except in one form: the babe. The babe is what used to be called a pin-up girl. Not so long ago, her use in mainstream publishing was beginning to look decidedly passe. Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the tabloid which started it all with the "Sun Stunnas", admitted. in 1994: "It's getting a bit old-fashioned. One day soon it will come out." But then Loaded and its imitators with their clever, semi-ironic Sun speak, resuscitated the stunna as the babe and relegitimised ogling.
And not just ogling. Boozing, football yobbery, stag party excesses, rugby songs and misogyny in its forms are enjoying a revival, with a new devil-may-care, two-fingers-to-PC gusto. Even supposedly grown-up boys who really should know better are happy to get in on the act. Witness a recent cover of Phoenix magazine which depicted Michael Noonan whispering in Ivan Yates's ear: "What about these mad cows?". Yates replies: "The nurses are your problem."
Harry Ferguson believes laddishness has a particular appeal for Irish men. "That sort of playfulness is very much part of our tradition of Irishness," he says. And the lad's up-front, no-apologies celebration of sex can also appeal to an Irish youth rebelling against the lingering remains of sexually repressive, conservative forces in Irish. society.
"We have no agenda to sneak misogyny in the back door," says John Ryan. "If we're about anything, it's showing a mild irreverence towards the Irish establishment."
For those in reaction against an Ireland which is still vulnerable to a censorship mentality and still very wary of sexual representation in any form, plastering a playmate on your cover or draping semi-naked women across your pages might feel like an iconoclastic gesture. In fact, it's completely retro. The ultra-modern in-jokiness plays off the same old cliched sexual stereotypes which have long helped to maintain a traditional, conservative social order. And while the editors may have their tongues firmly in cheek, the same may not be true of readers. Remember how Alf Garnett became the favourite viewing of racists who didn't get the joke?
At the back of In Dublin magazine there are pages and pages of sex ads for agencies which offer rascals, dolls, honeys and, yes, playmates for sale. A woman who worked for this type of agency was murdered in Dublin over. Christmas. Her killer - either a pimp or a client, say Garda sources - is still on the loose.
There are those who believe that there is a continuum between the new lads' knowing irony as represented at the front of this magazine and the sordid underworld advertised at the back. To the lads, such a suggestion might sound laughable. But when it comes to sexual politics, somehow it all seems far from funny.