New Man is dead and Loaded Lad has re-emerged as the dominant male species - judging by two new men's weekly magazines, writes Kevin Courtney.
It's a jungle out there in the men's magazine market, and two new titles, Zoo and Nuts, have joined the stampede for our hearts, minds and other, unmentionable, parts.
What's different about these new lads' mags is that they are the first weekly magazines aimed specifically at men, as if the plethora of monthly titles - GQ, Esquire, Arena, Maxim, Loaded, Front, T3 and Stuff - aren't already enough to keep us distracted from our work, family life and personal grooming. Publishers Emap and IPC have reportedly put £8 million each into their respective ventures, and they'll be duking it out for a potential readership of 150,000.
Emap published its launch issue of Zoo on Thursday, but IPC stole its thunder by putting out Nuts a week earlier. Both magazines are similar in design and content. They are modelled on such popular weeklies as Heat and Chat, but instead of the celebrity gossip, beauty tips and horoscopes which attract female readers, Nuts and Zoo are filled with scantily-clad women, sport, cars, guns, jokes, more women, true-life dramas, even more women, news and TV listings.
Nuts is the more upmarket of the two: the girls wear tasteful lingerie and bikinis, the jokes are fairly mild, and the writing doesn't completely insult your intelligence. Zoo, on the other hand, is dumbed-down and dirty: topless totty, gross-out pictures of corpses and nasty injuries, animals mating and lots of beery, leery innuendo. It's Loaded weekly, designed to be read quickly over a pint, and then discarded along with the chip wrapper. You wouldn't want to wrap your chips in it, though, in case they became contaminated with a virulent strain of bloke-osis.
What both mags have in common is an apparent belief that we men have never grown up, will never grow up and, what's more, don't particularly want to grow up - ever. And both are sure of one thing - that New Man is dead as a dodo, and Loaded Lad has re-emerged as the dominant male species. All pretence of political correctness seems finally to have been dropped - we are invited to gasp at the grandeur of Jordan's breasts, to marvel at massive assault rifles, to guffaw at gross images of others' misfortunes, and to drool over deadly rattlesnakes and man-eating crocodiles. OK, I know we already did all that when we were teenagers, but why stop now just 'cos we have an IT company to run? Both magazines are also convinced that we will have the attention span to keep coming back week after week.
"Blokes lead weekly lives," says Zoo editor Paul Merrill. "They watch the football on a weekly basis, they go down the pub on a weekly basis, and they probably have sex on a weekly basis."
Speak for yourself. It's true, though, that I still buy music mag NME on a weekly basis, even though I should know better, and when I was a kid, I got the Beano, the Dandy and Hotspur. But as I get older, a month seems to go by as quickly as a week, and before I've even finished reading my copy of Q magazine, the next issue is already on the news-stand. Besides, with all that laddish behaviour to keep up, who has time to read about it?
So is New Man finally extinct, and is it all right now for us to climb back down the evolutionary ladder and resume our rightful place beside the uncouth animals in Zoo? Certainly there's a sense that men no longer have to hide their vulgar sides - at last we can let all our bad habits hang out and show our true selves without fear of female retribution.
Look at the new breed of male role models: Robbie Williams, Russell Crowe, John Leslie, David Brent, Johnny Vegas, Colin Farrell - unreconstructed cads the lot of 'em, and loud 'n' proud of it.
While the rest of us - and David Beckham - try desperately to show ourselves to be sensitive, considerate, loyal, faithful and honest, there's good ol' Colin, happily buzzing like a drunken hornet from one Hollywood starlet to the next, footloose, guilt-free and not even bothering to shave. Listening to news of his sexploits while doing the (weekly) ironing, no wonder we so-called New Men feel a little envious.
But are men's mags giving us what we want, or are they just groping around in search of something that might tickle our fancies? In 1998, inspired by the success of such lads' mags as Loaded, Maxim and FHM, an Irish-style men's mag, Himself, hit the shelves. Aimed at the typical Irish guy - a bit rogueish, a bit rough around the edges, just like Colin Farrell really - it barely saw out the century, but it did provide a short-lived outlet for Irish men to explore their innate laddishness.
"The market took three or four years to catch up with how most ordinary men behave," says Daire O'Brien, former editor of Himself. "I knew blokes back in the 1980s who acted just like the lads in Loaded, but it wasn't until the mid-1990s that the various planets of marketing, advertising, publishing and popular culture became aligned. Big publishers are slaves to market research and focus groups and they're always looking for the so-called magic formula, but when James Brown published Loaded, he just put in what he and all his mates were interested in - birds, booze and dirty jokes.
"Men don't care much for men's magazines, and they find it patronising when publishers claim to know exactly what men want. Every guy likes to think he's individual, even though he may really be a sheep. I'd rather read the magazine with two elephants having sex than read the one that tries to patronise me and turn me into an aesthete."
But though the age of the lad is not over yet, O'Brien doesn't think there's room in the market for a new Irish men's monthly, let alone a weekly.
"There's more than enough British men's magazines, and more than enough semi-nude women to fill the pages - I think there's a production line near Wolverhampton turning out busty page- three girls. If you can have David Beckham on the cover and 60 naked women inside, you can't really compete with that."