Why Do Men's Magazines Sound Like Rapists?

“You do not want to be caught red-handed...go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick.” (-- from a lads', or young men's, mag)

“You know girls in general are all right. But some of them are bitches....The bitches are the type that...need to have it stuffed to them hard and heavy.” (-- from convicted rapist)

Do these descriptions sound too close for comfort?

Descriptions of women from convicted rapists and from magazines targeting young men in Britain – “lads’ mags” – are indistinguishable, according to a new study slated for publication in the British Journal of Psychology. Researchers from the University of Surrey and Middlesex University name this as the magazines’ dangerous normalization of “extreme sexist views by presenting those views in a mainstream context.”

Magazines like Zoo, FHM, Nuts, and Loaded are low-budget UK counterparts to Maxim, Stuff, GQ, and Esquire: their angle on the world is told through high-gloss “sexy girls, news, and men’s fashion,” to borrow FHM’s tagline. Not classified as pornography since the images feature partial clothing, these kinds of magazines are widely available in Europe, the U.S. and Australia. The four British magazines were parsed for their language in describing women, alongside quotations taken from The Rapist File: Interviews With Convicted Rapists by Les Sussman and Sally Bordwell. (All quotes in the study were from men convicted of raping women.)

The study also found that most male participants (92 men, ages 18-46) identified themselves with the language expressed by the men convicted of raping women, so long as the quotations were attributed to lads’ mags, rather than rapists. They changed their minds once the source of the quote was revealed. In another portion of the study, researchers asked a group of 20 women and 20 men, ages 19-30, to rank a set of quotes on how derogatory the quotes were, and to try to identify their source. Both men and women rated the quotes from lads’ mags as more derogatory than those of the convicted rapists, and they couldn't do better than guess about the source of the quotes; the accuracy rate was a little more than 50 percent.

When trying to attribute quotes to either lads’ mags or rapists, the study’s participants “voiced theories about what is normal and what is extreme.” Their high error rate indicates that there is not actually much difference. And the finding that men are more likely to identify with quotes attributed to lads’ mags, whether the source of the quote was indeed a magazine or a convicted rapist, reveals that lads’ mags do serve a legitimizing role for dangerous attitudes.

“[This] signifies that degree to which the lads’ mags media reflect the darkest and most unhealthy aspects of contemporary masculinity,” said Hugo Schwyzer, a history and gender studies professor at Pasadena City College.

Schwyzer suggested that the study provokes a debate about whether the likes of Zoo and FHM are initiating these degrading views of women in men, or if they are merely reflecting what’s already there. But, he says, even the act of mirroring “gives permission to these views. It normalizes them.”

Which certainly doesn’t mean that most men are rapists.

“This isn’t about attacking individual men,” Schwyzer said. “Most men are good guys. But most men also marinate in a toxic soup of misogyny.”