A lament for the lads' mags

Spectator

a day ago

Do you remember the lads' mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously disreputable titles. I helped dream up the captions, the gags, the gonzo reportage, the phwoar-heavy covers.
I also remember how they were reviled. Condemned by broadsheets, feminists, academics. Accused of objectifying girls, toxifying masculinity and encouraging men to enjoy cold lager, bare breasts and football gossip.
Yet here's the thing. When I contrast the world of lads' mags with today's bleak digital landscape, of AI smut and OnlyFans subscriptions, of performers mechanically coupling with a thousand men, cheered on by Insta-bots, the old magazines, even if sometimes crude or clumsy, seem almost noble. Paragons of playfulness and wit. Of joyful, communal, slightly sozzled eroticism.
They were printed on paper, for one thing. You had to buy them, take them to a till, perhaps even smuggle them past a disapproving girlfriend. Then you'd read them on the bus or in the pub, or pass them round your mates, chuckling over absurd sex-advice columns – especially Grub Smith's 'Laboratory of Love'.
And they were funny. In the early years, before the suits turned everything into clickbait, we made sure we amused. We borrowed from Private Eye, from Viz, from Monty Python. The best mags also had proper journalists doing proper journalism: gun-runners in Guangdong, acid casualties in Ibiza. Put it another way – the lads' mags had a kind of courage, even an intellectual curiosity. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they got you to invent a ridiculous phrase that would last forever. Or at least they did for me.
It was the late 1990s and FHM was peaking. At its best, the magazine sold nearly a million copies a month. We were carefully producing the first-ever list of The 100 Sexiest Women in the World (which became an annual standard). My job was to write the captions. One hundred pithy, smutty, funny lines beneath a hundred photos of impossibly attractive women.
Sounds easy? You try it – without using ChatGPT. Try writing a hundred unique ways of saying 'she's hot' without repeating yourself or getting sacked. Around no. 34, I was delirious. Around no. 50, the editor physically locked me in his office and refused to let me out until the job was done.
Then, somewhere around no. 73, I hit a wall. I was staring at a Danish starlet with smoky eyes and a definite air of sexual availability, of 'come hither' and 'I'm ready'. Falteringly, I typed: 'You can tell she's wetter than…' And there I stopped. Wetter than what? Heavy rain? Dublin in December?
Then came the lightning bolt: 'Wetter than an otter's pocket.' There it was: a perfect smutty phrase. Rude, but somehow innocent. Suggestive, but oddly poetic. It had internal rhyme and a ribald hint of biology. What does an otter keep in his pocket? His lunch. Work it out.
Then, years later, something odd happened. I started hearing my phrase. From a football pundit describing an Anfield pitch. Then a weather girl. Some bloke on local radio. Then it cropped up on pub signs, in band names, in poems. Even, to my alarm, in the title of a Penguin children's book (er, guys).
Curious, I contacted the editors of Viz's Profanisaurus, keepers of the English language's smuttiest corners. Had I pinched it unconsciously? 'We can find no earlier usage,' they graciously replied. 'Looks like it's yours.'
It's not much of a literary legacy, I'll admit. But it proves my point: however daft, however filthy, that kind of writing came from somewhere real. From a shared humour, shared culture, shared sense of sly British mischief. It was a Carry On wink, not a deracinated leer.
Compare that with today. Porn is infinite and industrial. AI generates fake nudes of real women and OnlyFans monetises isolation. Meanwhile bedrooms grow quieter, intimacy becomes a memory. And incels slowly lose their minds, in darkness.
It sounds odd to write this, but I believe that the lads' mag era – so often dismissed as crass and sexist – was a kind of funny, smutty Golden Age. And now we are in the Age of Loneliness.