Stand by Your Manhood by Peter Lloyd Read Free Book Online Page B

made.
    Plus, I’ve always been treated with respect on shoots. Many of them are women-led too. I’ve had several jobs with female photographers and female-dominated crews. This is a very big part of what objectors choose to ignore because it weakens their case. It’s not a black-and-white issue of one gender versus another – there are women who photograph, market, manage, produce, edit and promote these products. There’s no oppressive force making them do this, it’s their career. They’re knowingly, happily making money from it.
    To get a greater sense of this reality, I catch up with Martin Daubney, former editor of
Loaded
magazine and now a journalist at Sky News and
The Sun.
We meet at the Royal Institute of British Architects, just around the corner from the BBC’s Broadcasting House – where, co-incidentally, he’s just been cross-examined on air as part of
Woman’s Hour
, which – in the 200-yard dash to meet me – has evolved into Twitter trolling. Nice. Thankfully, a quick drink and he’s back on form, happy to chat about the halcyon days and the ‘good place’ it all came from.
    ‘A lot of people don’t believe me, but we were all attracted to
Loaded
for its gonzo journalism and live-for-today attitude, rather than the women,’ he tells me.

    I was always accused of being sexist for not having more women on the team, but there weren’t many men on
Marie Claire
either.
Loaded
was born into a vacuum of men being told how to behave. Back then it was all about the New Man, the north London-living, touchy-feely man who wasn’t afraid to cry. The type of man who surrendered his masculinity to fit into a new world order.
Loaded
was a two-fingered gesture to men becoming more asexual.
    A father of two, Daubney is an articulate and considered force, not to mention an ideal ambassador for the genre. Anything but the Neanderthal his haters might expect, he’s actually a cool, calm, everyman figure – even in the epicentre of an online assault which sees his phone ping with updates of endless, unwelcome alerts.
    Back then it was desperately unfashionable to fight, drink and take drugs – even just to be a man – but then Oasis and the Happy Mondays emerged. Suddenly, footie fans who used to beat each other up would be hugging on dance floors. Ecstasy and music brought men together, but so did lads’ mags. Of course, the liberal media said we should be at home doing domestic chores and raising children full-time, but
Loaded
rejected all that – and represented how men felt. It wasa private club – or it certainly felt like that back in the day. It was a space to be male without apology, where it was acceptable to be a bloke. It even celebrated the downsides – flatulence, getting drunk, being unfaithful and getting VD. It accepted that men were flawed and didn’t patronise them for it. At the same time, it also didn’t listen to all the criticisms, of which there were many.
    Specifically,
Loaded
was even debated in Parliament, but the more readers got called sexist and reprobate, the more it reinforced their view that what they were buying was valid. Intolerance pushed men into the arms of it all. It was that Millwall attitude of: ‘If you don’t like it, we don’t care. In fact, we like the fact you hate us, so fuck off.’
    Originally, he tells me, women weren’t the main shop window of the store. In the beginning, it was all about us guys.
    Scan through old issues and you’ll see that all the biggest football, movie and rock stars were speaking with us. Men like Jerry Springer and Michael Caine were on the cover, not women. Sure, they were part of it too, but they weren’t the main part. They featured more as retro glamour models from the ’80s, reinvented for bits of acceptable titillation between ground-breaking, quality journalism.
    The big change only came later, thanks to Liz Hurley. She fronted an issue the same week she wore
that
infamous Versace safety-pin dress at the
Four