Feminists everywhere can celebrate now as lads mag Nuts announced that it would be closing.
Feminists everywhere can celebrate now as lads mag Nuts announced that it would be closing. The real question is whether or not the closure of the magazine, often the bitter end of contempt from its critics, is a positive step in the right direction or a stark reminder that everything bad it stands for is just a few clicks away into Google.
A step in the right direction
Of course campaigners have long protested against the placement of lads mags and it’s almost commonly agreed that the degrading images of women shouldn’t be openly paraded at eye level in our shops, supermarkets and newsagents. Nuts is of course just a drop into this ocean, and their arch-nemesis Zoo is still managing to parade themselves around our super markets.
The initial hit to the dwindling sales of the lads mag culture was when the Co-op decided in 2013 that the publications would be forced to cover up – unsurprisingly the lads mags weren’t too keen on covering up—shocker.
Following the Co-op announcement supermarket Tesco announced that they would only sell the magazines to over-18s meaning that people had to go through even more effort and possibly get ID’d if they wanted to look at the print publications. Of course this was a good step since the fairly X-rated magazines were to be less thrust in our face.
So we can at least all celebrate that the sexual objectification of women won’t be gallivanting around the shelves of our supermarkets. Well one magazine won’t.
Nuts vs The Web
Of course this is where the celebrations really come to rapid halt. It’s a massive step in the right direction to see a magazine with scantily clad females slapped across it close down, and I’m sure everyone will rejoice when the Sun swaps its philosophical page three girls for the local year six class – just how the local papers do it.
The main issue seems to be that the things everyone grew to dislike about Nuts, Zoo, and their equally smutty counterparts seem to have merely moved platform. Maybe they have even become more prevalent online.
The culture seems to have shifted from merely a series of glamour shots in a dodgy magazine to a shameful slither of the internet. It seems as though the web’s dominance has made the sexual objectification of women more in-your-face. You can’t click on some on the national news websites without seeing some poor young female being evaluated in written word and then cruelly picked away by commenting vultures deciding which feature they dislike most about the apparently imperfect human.
It gets worse
The closure adds even more despair when you realise that primary thing Nuts offered its readers, the sexual objectification of women, is massively available online, and it’s even worse. It in fact turns out that Nuts is relatively tame compared to what is out there. Of course that’s not a justification of the magazine.
Whilst there may not be a great deal of statistics about it, it was estimated in 2010 that more than 37 per cent of the internet was pornography, this figure will no doubt be much, much larger now in 2014.
Here’s one of the real stingers, definitely one to lower the tone, Nuts was the well-known enemy. Much the same as the Page 3 it was awful, but it was there, everyone was paid, and no one was hurt.
The internet is now the stomping ground of the pornography industry, a fairly unregulated industry across the globe. We often don’t know who is behind what and how people are treated. There’s been numerous high-profile ex-porn stars talking about the mistreatment of people in their industry.
The silver lining
So whilst the internet may still be a dark world where the sexual objectification of women grows the closure of Nuts, is still a positive step for campaigners. It’s less physically in your face and people have to more actively search through the internet, it’s not as visible and open to the general public.
