Time to Liberate Women - Again

30 Jun 2006

I believe in freedom of the printed word. But I also believe that to change attitudes and achieve gender equality something has to be done to regulate the way sexually explicit materials are displayed in shops and newsagents. This month I sponsored a Bill in parliament to ensure exactly this.

The Bill was read our in the Commons by one of my colleagues but she had been asked by the Speaker of the House to omit quotes from certain tabloid papers and so-called ‘lads mags’ because they had been deemed “too obscene to be spoken in the Chamber”. Yet they are deemed appropriate for children to be exposed to whenever they pop into the local newsagent for sweets or a comic. Publications carrying explicit and denigrating material are currently sold in a non-age restricted manner on the bottom shelf masquerading as ‘life style magazines’ or ‘newspapers’.

The Sport calls itself “Britain’s funniest paper”. Trust me, there is absolutely nothing funny about it, and to call it a newspaper is frankly bizarre. The content is almost exclusively sexual and it contains literally hundreds of adverts for hard core pornography, sex chat lines, national directories of sex shops and every other form of adult ‘entertainment’.

So-called lads mags are virtually indistinguishable from recognised ‘top shelf’ pornography yet parade as mainstream ‘life style’ magazines. The imagery, language and culture of some of these publications is shocking. One prominent lads mag, for example, asks men “how much are you paying for sex?”. A form helps the reader calculate their outgoings on cinema tickets, meals, drinks. He then divides the total by the number of times he’s had sex that month calculating his “pay per lay”. Women are then ranked according to prostitutes. Under a fiver per shag is “too cheap – she’s about the same price as a Cambodian whore”; £11 to £20 is “about the going rate of a Cypriot tart”. Lads Mags are clearly sexually explicit and totally unsuitable for children. And they denigrate women.

Yet there is currently no meaningful regulation in place to ensure that they are sold out of reach and sight of children. Many retailers sell them at the counter, next to comics and gardening titles on the lower shelves. Not of course our local Hamdy’s Newsagent. Hamdy has been campaigning to change things for years and insists he does not want adult material in his shop. He has stood up to the commercial pressure from publishers. But he is the exception.

We already have in place film classifications and a 9 pm television watershed. Why should we not have similar protection in place with regards to print media? We need to put an end to the normalisation of sexual inequality not only for the sake of our children but for the sake of gender equality generally. We should not allow the editors of a few lads mags and tabloid papers to undo the work of the women’s liberation movement by normalising and mainstreaming, in the minds of our children, the sexual exploitation of women.



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